The Commodore 1541 is famously the floppy drive for the Commodore 64 series of 8-bit computers, and can be found with relative ease. Not so well known is its 1551 …. Emulating a Floppy Drive By Emulating The Drive Itself.
Not so well known is its 1551 sibling — the drive made for the Commodore 16 and Plus/4 machines. They’re particularly rare in 2026, so [Maciej Witkowiak] has made an emulator. But it’s not just modern silicon emulating the whole thing.
Instead it’s the same 6510 and ROM you might have found on the original, talking to a Pi Pico emulating the drive hardware. It’s a gloriously over the top solution to the problem of emulating a disk drive, the reason being that it started life as a daughter board plugged into an original drive mainboard. Complementing the Pico is a CPLD for glue logic, and an OLED for selecting disk images.
The Pico even generates the clock and IRQ timing for the venerable 8-bit part.
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