1541 Ultimate (often abbreviated ''1541U'') is a peripheral, primarily an emulated

floppy disk A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, or a diskette) is an obsolescent type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined w ...

and cartridge emulator based on the

FPGA A field-programmable gate array (FPGA) is an integrated circuit designed to be configured by a customer or a designer after manufacturinghence the term '' field-programmable''. The FPGA configuration is generally specified using a hardware de ...

Xilinx Xilinx, Inc. ( ) was an American technology and semiconductor company that primarily supplied programmable logic devices. The company was known for inventing the first commercially viable field-programmable gate array (FPGA) and creating the fi ...

XC3S250E, for the

Commodore 64 The Commodore 64, also known as the C64, is an 8-bit home computer introduced in January 1982 by Commodore International (first shown at the Consumer Electronics Show, January 7–10, 1982, in Las Vegas). It has been listed in the Guinness ...

home computer. It became available in 2008. The unit is developed by Gideon Zweijtzer and is a cartridge that can emulate other cartridges such as the

Commodore REU Commodore's RAM Expansion Unit (REU) range of external RAM add-ons for their Commodore 64/ 128 home computers was announced at the same time as the C128. The REUs came in three models, initially the 1700 (128 KB) and 1750 (), and later the ...

, Action Replay,

The Final Cartridge III The Final Cartridge III was a popular extension cartridge which was created for the Commodore 64 and Commodore 128, produced by the Dutch company Riska B.V. Home & Personal Computers. It offered a fast loader, increasing the speeds of the disk dr ...

, Super Snapshot V5, Retro Replay or TurboAss with Codenet-support, and an almost fully compatible (including JiffyDOS support FPGA-cloned Commodore 1541 (including 1541, 1541C, and 1541 II models) floppy disk unit that can use Commodore 64-compatible files like .D64/.G64 disc images or .PRG files via a SD card reader. Additionally, the 1541 Ultimate is suitable for making archives of floppy disks. All units after the initial production have 32

megabyte The megabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. Its recommended unit symbol is MB. The unit prefix ''mega'' is a multiplier of (106) in the International System of Units (SI). Therefore, one megabyte is one million bytes o ...

s of RAM, while the original production run only had 16 megabytes. The 1541 Ultimate is capable of running both

CP/M CP/M, originally standing for Control Program/Monitor and later Control Program for Microcomputers, is a mass-market operating system created in 1974 for Intel 8080/ 85-based microcomputers by Gary Kildall of Digital Research, Inc. Initial ...

and

GEOS #REDIRECT GEOS {{redirect category shell, {{R from other capitalisation{{R from ambiguous page ...

. In 2010, the 1541 Ultimate II was developed. The Ultimate II is about 30% smaller than the 1541 Ultimate, comes in a plastic case, and adds support for dual SIDs (plus a SID/MOD player), a

USB Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an industry standard that establishes specifications for cables, connectors and protocols for connection, communication and power supply (interfacing) between computers, peripherals and other computers. A broad v ...

host controller, tape emulation via a tape adapter (though use with a Commodore 128D requires modification), a real-time clock (for accurate file date and time), and the SD card slot is replaced by a

microSD Secure Digital, officially abbreviated as SD, is a proprietary non-volatile flash memory card format developed by the SD Association (SDA) for use in portable devices. The standard was introduced in August 1999 by joint efforts between SanDis ...

card slot. In addition, all firmware and VHDL code for the Ultimate II is available under an

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

GPLv3 The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general us ...

license A license (or licence) is an official permission or permit to do, use, or own something (as well as the document of that permission or permit). A license is granted by a party (licensor) to another party (licensee) as an element of an agreeme ...

, allowing hobbyists and others to freely modify all aspects of its functionality, including the FPGA-emulated hardware. The 1541 Ultimate has an option for on-board

Ethernet Ethernet () is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 198 ...

, while the 1541 Ultimate II supports Ethernet via a compatible

to Ethernet adapter. Besides being useful to retrocomputing hobbyists, it has also found use in educational laboratory settings. In 2017 the Ultimate II+ was released with the following feature differentiation from the II: Removal of the MicroSD slot, More USB ports, Integrated Ethernet, Dual Flash, Integrated Speaker, External power supply connector with auto-switch over circuit, Improved power supply circuits, and a slightly bigger and faster FPGA, as to control the new features. The II and II+ share a firmware image and the software features are substantially similar.

References

External links

ultimate64.com - 1541 Ultimate homepage

1541 Ultimate source code repository
{{Webarchive, url=https://web.archive.org/web/20091013024650/http://svn.xp-dev.com/svn/gideonz_1541Ultimate/ , date=2009-10-13 (

Subversion Subversion () refers to a process by which the values and principles of a system in place are contradicted or reversed in an attempt to transform the established social order and its structures of power, authority, hierarchy, and social norms. Sub ...

)
Collection of official and unofficial firmware
Commodore 64 Home computer peripherals

See also

References

External links