King of the Commodore Disk Drives: MSD SD-2
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- čas přidán 28. 05. 2024
- I was fortunate to acquire this amazing disk drive in 2022 before fully understanding its capabilities. What an incredible piece of hardware. Join me as I walk through its impressive history and features. ARTICLE with Text & Photos: www.amigalove.com/viewtopic.p...
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00:00 - 00:26 Intro Titles
00:27 - 02:06 History & Overview
02:07 - 02:47 Design
02:48 - 06:05 Internals
06:06 - 07:53 Operation & Use
07:54 - 09:42 CLD Mass Duplicator
09:43 - 10:16 Software Support
10:17 - 10:45 Outro
● Soundtrack music permission by the RIGHTEOUSLY awesome Droid Bishop, with permission [Los Angeles, CA]
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● Intro/Outro music permission by the ULTRA bad ass: Axion, with permission [Canada].
axionsynthwave.bandcamp.com/ - Věda a technologie
Since i still play the original Commodore 64 (tape/disk) and Amiga 500, i will say one thing:
COMMODORE 64 AND AMIGA 500 FOREVER 😺👍🕹️🕹️!
I'm right there with ya! And thanks for watching, Ari.
That’s almost 6.5KG for everyone else in the world, Wowzers. I thought my 1541 was heavy.
I remember my friend's dad taking us to his software "connection" in the very early 80s. The guy had one of these. We were amazed at how fast it copied the disks. I was like magic!
Man it DOES feel like magic! That's really cool you actually saw one back in the day in real life. The way you describe it, sounds like a drug deal going down. LOL!
@@AmigaLove - aka a "warez deal". lol
That's added functionality I never knew of! Great Video! -Mark.
Thanks for watching! If it wasn’t for the copy capabilities they’d not be worth having. But it’s a very cool super power :)
Very cool! I have never seen one of these in real life before but now I want one 😍
Man, I seriously got lucky with this one. Yes, it required going to the shop immediately and getting a total restoration (I know a guy in Maine if you ever find one and want an MSD pro to fix it up). But it was SO worth it. Makes me feel like I've been transported to an alternate timeline where I'm a total disk pirate and a king amongst boys. Then I wake up and realize it's really all about the history and kind of weird counter-culture that used this thing back in the day. Once you become aware of its existence, you start to see "MSD" all over the place. Sort of like when you buy a new car and only then start to see it everywhere on the road where before you were blind to it.
I think the single drives are a bit more common to find, but honestly I can't imagine why someone would want a single since they can't load most non-cracked software. It's all about that copying capability (for me).
@@AmigaLove I remember bringing over my 1541-II to my friend's house and we'd combine our two drives on his system and copy stuff incredibly slowly with Maverick. Yeah, I agree without true 1541 compatibility, it's the copying feature that's the selling point there :)
@@retrobitstv Dude - hell yeah. Just copying 1 disk took ages even with dual 41s. God forbid the copy failed! Haha!
Almost jizzed all over my keyboard and salivating at the sight of that MSD drive. lol Damn, wish I had it back in the 80's. :D
Hah!!! Hah... ew. ;)
If I had one of these back in 1986-87, I would have been king of the castle. I also might have started skipping school and become obsessed. Probably a good thing I got my disks from my best friend (who pulled games down off BBSes each night) and didn't go down that road. But it sure is cool to wonder what might have been...
@@AmigaLove- I ran a BBS at the same time on the C64 with and SFD-1001, and Amiga with a GVP 20 gig hard drive from the mid '80 till '92. Good times enjoying the latest 0-day old warez. :)
I ADORED my MSD SD-1. Except for its incompatibility with Electronic Arts copy protection, it was amazing. MSD made a great product.
It's always a good day when a new Amiga Love-video pops up. Just stellar stuff, and as usual when you drop a video I've had to update my wishlist with another piece of hardware :D
You rock Nevil!
Super cool! I have never seen one of these running before. :)
I remember seeing ads for it in magazines, but that's as close as I've got to it. I'm assuming MSD products were USA only, because I never saw anything of theirs here in Europe. A pity!
Anyway, congrats on this amazing find - really glad to have learned more about it. :)
They were made in the US - yes. If they ever were distributed internationally I have no idea. I'm going to guess not. However, they were available via mail-order. So I bet a few shipped overseas. That being said, it would have been rarer than even here in the US I'm sure.
Glad you enjoyed the video. Thanks for watching!
Man, I love that intro music!
It was made by synthlord Axion, who you can find here on Bandcamp: axionsynthwave.bandcamp.com/album/octane-rush If you ever snag any of his excellent tunes or albums, please tell him AmigaLove on CZcams sent you! That would be excellent indeed for him to know.
Pretty cool video, thanks!
Glad you liked it! Thanks for watching.
YW, @@AmigaLove.
I have two of the MSD 2 drives. The first one, I bought in the mid 80s, and it was my replacement for the tape. I later bought the 2nd one in Honolulu while on a crew layover, and brought my new prized possession back with mein the cockpit, so I can attest to the weight of the monster. I used the drive with the Commodore IEEE488 adaptor, which, if I remember correctly, also gave me Basic 4,0
I absolutely loved the drives, but they were loud.
Do you still have them? Those caps are nasty and mine were totally failing when I got the thing in 2022. Very cool that you use(d) yours with the IEEE488 port.
@@AmigaLove Yes, I still have them. It was my intention to start using the C64 again, but I don't know where the time goes. My first passion is the Amiga, and I guess I am watching to many youtubes, because although I am doing some work with them, I am not doing as much as I would like. I will take your advice, and do the caps on the MSD drives before I use them. The Commodore IEEE488 card worked flawlessly for me.
@@jjock3239 Dude, you speaka my language. What's your daily driver Amiga? Pick one.... only one.
@@AmigaLove My daily driver right now, is an A3000/40.
It has been running faithfully, since my A4000/40 developed problems because of broken Simm sockets. I bought the machine used back around 2000, and the previous owner had manhandled them. I have quite a few Amigas, and am a diehard forever Amiga fan.
The 1541's could do the same stand-alone copy trick, without a special ROM, as they are basically stand-alone computers a 6502 and 2k of RAM. There was at least one copy program back in the day that you could load to a pair of drives from a 64 then disconnect the 64 and use the two drives in stand-alone mode. We didn't use it too much though, as most things we were copying back in the day needed nibblers and most people only had two drives anyway.
Right, but I meant via the BASIC Copy command, which wasn't included on the C64's Basic 2 command set. I'm using my C128D in the video but always in C64 mode during the demos. Back in the day I used to copy disks using dual 1541 drives via copy software, but I never disconnected them. I only had the 2 drives and used them constantly. But seeing something like that would have blown me away back then. An extra advantage of the SD-2 is its ridiculous speed capability.
@@AmigaLove True. I'm from the C64 days before Basic 2. :) I had three drives (bought a couple refurbished), but constantly was re-alligning 1 or 2 because bad pirated software was always banging heads out of alignment.
Your drive's awesome and I would have loved to have that in the day.
Yes, I remember using two 1541 drives back in the 80's for pretty quick copying independently from the computer. I think it was Fast-Hack'Em software. The source disk was in drive 8 and just kept feeding drive 9 with new blanks. ;)
I still have the IEEE488 board as well. It was a Commodore device, and a direct plug-in for the back right hand side of the wedge. Commodore used a serial version of the IEEE488 standard to operate the disk drives. There was also a parallel card at extra cost, and it was a parallel connector that sped up communication between devices and the computer. Here is a very interesting youtube on the Commodore disk drives. czcams.com/video/SPqIGOATFec/video.html
"In order to examine the directory of a disk..." * *in drive 0,* "...the syntax would be like this."
Wow, when my dad bought us an Indus GT to replace our supposedly "unrepairable" 1541, which is a virtual-dual floppy drive -- drive 1 is a ROM -- I'd love playing around with that drive 1 but I don't remember that loading "$" without specifying a drive number would load both directories. I thought it was supposed to assume drive 0 only. I'll have to set my stuff back up and experience what you just said. Well, that's cool! I'm a little surprised to see the 1-drive's directory on top instead of the other way around, though.
I'm not familiar with that drive. Now I'll need to go read about it.
@@AmigaLove: Yeah, check it out; it's a pretty interesting drive!
I remember seeing a few of these come into the computer shop for resale back in the early 90s. I wish I had bought one of them now. They are probably as rare as unicorns now. lol
They are indeed rare nowadays. What kind of shop did you work in back then? Where was it?
@@AmigaLove It was mainly a used Computer software and hardware store. The store also did repairs of computers there, Commodore, Apple and PCs. It stocked new and used cables, some new software and some new hardware. I mainly did repair work while I was there and occasionally went with the owner to source bulk quantities of items at computer shows. The store was called Second Hand Software in Oklahoma City.
@@RonHelton very cool, man. Thank you for sharing that history we me.
Mine also had the ram upgrade. I need to find the auto nibbler software
James, there are a few that’ll get the job done. If you have trouble I can send you a couple. Of course, copying the copy software is often hard in its own right. But I’ve got some of them…
How would _all_ of the BASIC 4 just supposedly "magically" appear from the disk drive to the computer without loading anything into the computer, instead of only those commands that applied to disk drives, since the computer knows to send disk commands out those ports, but not the non-disk BASIC commands?
Too bad this drive isn't more compatible like Indus GT, and like the Blue Chip probably is (we had a BC also, but I don't remember its compatibility, and I quit using it because it developed the always-spin problem, so we gave or threw that one away or sold it for parts like we may have done with our "unrepairable" 1541 [I don't remember what] before buying the Indus), because it would've been a super-great drive if it could've loaded all the copy-protected and cracked stuff that the faithfully compatible drives can, and if it could've copied copy-protected disks just fine without loading stuff like Kracker Jax or Fast Hack'em -- as a legal backup, of course. 😉 Not much use if it can't load much of anything due to copy protection. That's probably what stopped most buyers from choosing it if they heard about that in time, or prompted some buyers into returning theirs if they learned that within the return period.