Month: January 2016

How to connect your Xbox 360 Controller to Dolphin for Mac

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DolphinI’ve been experimenting with the marvellous Dolphin Emulator recently. It’s an open source project that allows us to play Nintendo Gamecube and Wii games on modern hardware. Dolphin is available for Windows, OS X and Linux.

I have a wireless Xbox 360 controller for Windows at my disposal, but the only Windows hardware I have is the first generation Surface Pro. While the controller connects without issues, the Surface sadly just isn’t fast enough to run Dolphin.

My more powerful hardware is Mac based, and Dolphin runs great on my Mac Mini. But I had no idea how to connect my Xbox controller to it.

Turns out it’s actually a breeze to setup: let me show you how it worked for me on OS X El Capitan.

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How to use direct block access commands in Commodore DOS

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Commodore-Logo-PaddedWe can access each sector’s raw data on Commodore disk drives with direct block access commands. Supported drives include the 1541, 1571, the VICE emulator as well as the SD2IEC card reader (for the most part).

Each single sided floppy contains 35 sectors, while a double sided 1571 formatted disk contains 70 sectors. Each track contains between 17 and 21 sectors depending on how far inside or outside they are. Each sector contains 255 bytes we can read or write.

Sectors are the same as blocks: only the directory refers to them as “blocks” and shows us how many we have available.

We’ll need to open two channels to our disk drives: a command channel and a data channel. Here’s how to do it:

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