The Commodore 64 was central to many a young boys childhood, especially those older than 30! Still, the community around the computer is alive and vibrant with both ideas and new solutions for using the old computer. The old 5.25" floppies we used with them on the other hand are nearing their expected lifespan, they simply were not meant to live this long so in order to keep loading our software and even back the old disks up to newer solutions were needed.

First came the SD2IEC, a simple solution that allowed you to load some of the software you used to have and with a bit of luck and searching you can find versions of most games that'll work on it. Compatibility is not good since the 1541 disk drive in actuality was almost a complete Commodore 64 in itself, a lot of software depended upon uploading code to the drive and then have that execute it - SD2IEC simply doesn't have that ability though it does at times try to guess at it, but for compatibility you need something more exact!

Enter the Pi1541, a piece of software that runs on a Raspberry Pi 3 or 3+ offering complete emulation of the original drive with a compatibility rate of around 99% with improvements made almost on a daily basis! In order to connect the Commodore 64 up to a Raspberry Pi you'll need some simple electronics to connect the two electrically, this is where my previous Pi1541-module came into the picture. A few years later I wanted to revisit the design in order to create something that looked quite a bit less like a bunch of random components crammed onto a rather small-ish PCB, the result was the Pi1541-II module along with a selection of faceplates and backplates.

This faceplate has been designed to be used along with the Pi1541-II Module, which is where you'll find most of the electronics needed to build a functional Pi1541 disk drive replacement. The main module can be used without the faceplate, but the goal of the overall project was to hide the electronics behind it and make it all come together in way that will resemble a slightly shrunken stack of 5.25" floppies. Variant A has been designed for use with 0.96" OLED displays often described as the old/original version (it is slightly larger and primarily has a wider ribbon at the bottom), if available you should check out my shared projects to see if there is one that better matches the display you have/ordered. Variant B uses the newer OLED display types, please see Pi1541-II Faceplate (Variant B) if this is the type of display you have.

See github-page for more details and information on what components go where!