Another Commodore 4040 dual floppy disk drive ended up in my hands, but only temporarily for repairs and refurbishing. This drive didn’t boot up in the beginning and had other small issues. I will show in great detail how to take these things apart and how to clean them and get them up to speed again.
Month: May 2026
New Commodore Branded C64 Power Supply
The old C64 doorstop power supplies and their successors are a bit of a liability if you continue to use them nowadays. The internal voltage regulators like to die, and in the process they can destroy the C64 or worse. There are modern power supplies to replace them, but Individual Computers are now coming out with the “Commodore C64 Smart Supply”, including official Commodore branding! And the sales pitch is that this is the best PSU you can get for your vintage C64. Let’s take it for a test drive!
Let’s Code MS DOS: 0x37 Rainbow Surf Analysis
This year’s Revision demoparty had a surprising winner in the 256 byte compo. It was Rainbow Surf by Plex/BionFX and it is only 16 bytes long. That is short, very short. In fact, here is the code: c4 04 48 ab 26 03 45 ae 26 03 05 c1 e8 02 eb f2. Let’s dissect it!
Commodore 1541 Disk Drive Differences
The 1541 was the ubiquitous floppy disk drive for the C64. The different drive revisions look very similar, but on the inside there are some significant differences. Not only did they use two different manufacturers for the mechanisms. But the mainboards also had multiple revisions, and one particularly snarky little difference in the 1541C, which was only used on some of the drives that could make swapping parts between old drives very difficult.