meatloaf

What Meatloaf does

Meatloaf is a small hardware board built around an ESP32 that connects to the IEC serial port of a Commodore 64, Commodore 128, VIC-20, or Plus/4 computer. Once attached, it pretends to be a disk drive, but the diskettes it serves can live on internal flash, on a microSD card, or on any server reachable over the internet. Existing software on the Commodore does not know the difference. The familiar LOAD and directory commands work exactly as they would against a real 1541. A command such as LOAD"$",8 still lists the contents of the currently mounted volume, and LOAD"",8 still loads the first program. The project documentation emphasizes that your current software keeps working because the device speaks the same IEC protocol the original drives used. Beyond acting as a single drive, Meatloaf can answer on device IDs from 4 to 30 at the same time, so up to twenty six logical drives can be present on the bus simultaneously, each with its own image mounted. The board also functions as a network adapter that lets unmodified BASIC version 2 open a URL the way it would open a file, and a JSON parser is built into the drive so REST APIs can be queried from the Commodore itself. The same cartridge also offers a printer, a clock, and a WiFi modem.

Nested URLs and supported formats

A Meatloaf path is parsed from right to left, and every component can itself be a container, which is the trick that lets deep nesting work without any intermediate copying. A disk image sitting inside a ZIP archive on a remote server is simply a longer filename. The path resolves to a chain of streams, the ZIP is decompressed on the fly, the D64 directory is read out of the decompressed bytes, and the requested PRG is streamed straight to the Commodore. No unpacking step, no temporary files, and nothing to copy to an SD card first. This composition works to any depth and over every supported protocol. On the media side, Meatloaf lists a long set of Commodore disk image formats that can be browsed with LOAD"$",8, navigated with CD, and loaded from, whether on flash, on SD, or over the network. The table includes D64 and D41 for the 1541 across 35, 40, and 42 track variants, D71 for the 1571, D81 for the 1581, D80 and D82 for the 8050 and 8250 drives, DNP for CMD native partitions, and the D1M, D2M, and D4M images used by the CMD FD2000 and FD4000. It also covers CMD HD partitions, IDE64 CFS hard disks, the D90, D60, and D96 images of the D9060 and D9090, plus M2I, D8B, and DFI formats. The N format can produce a valid image for all of D64, D71, D80, D81, D82, and DNP. Save operations, scratch, and unscratch work inside D64, D71, D81, DNP, and CMD HD partitions using real CBM block allocation, file and directory interleave, and per block BAM updates, with rollback and a 72 DISK FULL response on overflow.

Setup and the FujiNet relationship

Building a Meatloaf unit starts with the right module. The documentation states clearly that new builds should use an ESP32-S3-WROOM-1-N16R8 dev module, noting that the wiring differs slightly from earlier guides but that Deadline's video remains useful. Owners who do not want to compile firmware themselves can instead use the provided web flasher to load the software. The repository carries 117 stars and 28 forks on GitHub, which reflects steady interest from the retro computing community. Meatloaf shares some code with the Commodore port of FujiNet, and some FujiNet code is used inside Meatloaf as well. The project intends to keep Meatloaf focused on Commodore machines, while features that make sense are merged into FujiNet. A companion web application called the Meatloaf Manipulator lets a user search, browse, and swap disks from a phone or laptop while the Commodore keeps running, so changes can be made without touching the vintage hardware. The whole device fits in roughly the space of a cartridge and packs more functions onto one board than many users ever had on the entire bus. Support channels listed in the readme include a Discord server, a Facebook page, and a YouTube channel, all reached through the meatloaf.cc domain. The firmware and related sources are published openly so that owners can study, modify, and rebuild the board to suit their own collections.

Editorial conclusion

The repository is published under the GPL-3.0 license and its most recent commit was on 2026-08-26.