Time to crack the Commodore 64 open and find out what’s inside. This Commodore 64 has never been opened before if the intact warranty seal is telling me a true story. The case opens easily enough and I detach the keyboard and the power LED. Below this is the RF shield. This was an FCC requirement back in the day, purportedly to prevent the machine from interfering with other devices. Some C64s had a metal shield but many, including this…
Many people in the retro computer scene will argue that you should output these machines to the sort of displays which the designers intended, namely a good ol’ CRT. That’s not for me thanks, I don’t have one of those big heavy bastards in the house anymore and I have no desire to reacquire one. There are certain areas in which I don’t wish to revisit the past. Flaky power supplies is one such area. Outdated media: tape cassettes and…
The first Commodore VIC-20s used a simple two prong power supply which delivered 9V AC to the machine. All it was essentially was a transformer: the rectifier to convert to DC was internal to the machine. It was simple and reliable. When the C64 launched it used a very different power supply. A large and heavy box was connected to the machine by a DIN connector. This connector delivered both 9V AC and regulated 5V DC to the machine. As…
The modern retro gamer has a number of options when it comes to the Commodore 64. The emulators available are very mature. The ultimate emulation option as of now would have to be the ‘C64 Maxi’, which is basically a single board computer running an emulator inside a reproduction C64 breadbin case. There are a couple of ‘brand new machine’ options. The C64 Reloaded is essentially a modern copy of the C64 main board, needing only the custom C64 chips…
Something I wasn’t aware of at the time was that I was very much behind the curve when it came to my childhood computers. The Commodore VIC-20, my first machine, which I would guess I got my hands on around 1986/1987, was launched in 1980, a year before I was born. The VIC-20 made quite a splash on release for many reasons, not least of which was affordability, but it was already out of date by 1982 when it’s successor,…
So to recap, I have bought an A500++ PCB with the intention of making a brand new Amiga. I have been working on this project for a while, and have been motivated to document my progress on this blog, in a series of posts which due to a moment of stupidity and inadequate backup procedures, are now lost for all time. They were great, by the way: amongst humanity’s finest works of literature. The thought of immediately rewriting those posts…