User guide

1541 Ultimate User Manual

http://www.1541ultimate.net/

The Cartridges (and custom rom replacements)

The 1541 Ultimate supports several cartridges. These are built into the firmware, and are

easily selected from The Configuration menu. Most cartridges come in two flavors,

NTSC and PAL. You should choose the appropriate emulation for the cartridge. If you

choose a NTSC rom instead of a PAL rom, you might get all sorts of problems. It is

known that using the wrong rom may cause interference with real 1541 disk drives as

well. The most common failure is that you can read a directory, but can not load anything

from the drive.

Each cartridge has an appropriate hardware design which has been built in to the 1541

Ultimate’s firmware. It is possible to use other firmware versions from the ones supplied

by the provided firmware. This means you can replace the AR4.5 rom with an AR70 rom,

since both are based on identical hardware. It won’t change the reference in the

Configuration menu, since that is hard-coded into the firmware loader. If you plan to

replace a rom with a different one there are (at least) three rules to follow:

1) The hardware design has to be identical (only different rom)

2) The rom needs to be of the same (or smaller) size than the rom you are replacing,

since the 1541 Ultimate does not have dynamic memory mapping, which

probably will result in your custom rom overwriting other parts of the firmware

(Unconfirmed)

3) If you can replace the rom in the original hardware, you should be able to do the

same with the 1541 Ultimate, keeping in mind point 2.

This guide is not intended to supply full information on each cartridge. You should either

have a manual for the cartridge, or locate a manual for it by different means. This guide

only supplies limited information to get you started with the cartridge of your choice, but

whenever possible I will try to supply you with an URL where you can read the full

manual.

Action Replay 4.5 and 6.0 (PAL/NTSC)

ROM The rom size of this cartridge’s firmware is 32 KB

MANUAL http://project64.ath.cx/hw/ar6pro12.zip

With active FastLoader you can use abbreviated commands, the @ character replaces

‘OPEN 15,x,15,”…..”:CLOSE 15’ statements which you normally would have to type in

BASIC, from Commodore’ BASIC prompt. Among these are:

@n Select the active drive to receive the commands. For example entering @9

will redirect all commands to device 9 on the IEC bus (which is by default

the IEC 2 SD I/F drive)