PSU Battle: Commodore vs Electroware

The original power supplies of our Commodore home computers are now at least 30 years old. Many need maintenance, some got lost or are defective. There are modern replacements. But are those any good? Are they better or worse than the old supplies? In this video we will compare my original Amiga 500 supply to a modern Mean Well based PSU by Electroware. We will mostly compare the ripple that both PSUs produce, which is one of the main factors that could disrupt the functionality of a computer.

ZoomFloppy+OpenCBM+8050

The main issue with the Commodore 8050 and 8250 drives is: How do you get data onto them? The units use 100tpi floppy drives that are incompatible to the regular 48tpi and 96tpi disk drives used in the 1541 and in PC DD and HD drives. So there is no chance using those. However there is the ZoomFloppy, which is an implementation of the XUM1541 interface and it comes with an optional IEE488 plug! We can attach the 8050 to that, and use the OpenCBM tools to read and write data to and from the floppies.

The ReSeed SID Sound Card for the Plus/4 & C16

The Commodore 264 machines, which include the Plus/4 and the C16 used the TED chip for video and sound. The audio capabilities were not great: two square wave channels. The Commodore 64’s SID chip on the other hand was a proper three voice synthesizer. So back in the day people built expansion cartridges for the Plus/4 utilizing the SID and eventually games and demos using this were published. These cards are pretty rare, but now there is a homebrew clone of the card!