I have two dead Commodore devices here, that a user asked me to repair. A 1541 floppy disk drive and a bread bin C64. The drive’s motor spins indefinitely and the LEDs don’t come on. The C64 has a black screen. So let’s get cracking, and repair both! With the C64 I made a couple of wrong turns, but in the end all turned out well! The 1541 had some other idea in store for me, and turned out to be a bit on the spiritual side…
Tag: commodore
New SID Replacement: Kung Fu SID
The MOS SID is the sound chip of the C64. Sadly they are no longer in production, and the ones that do exist start to fail. There are several replacement solutions out there, with varying pricepoints and sound quality. Now there is a new contender, fully open source hard- and software. It goes by the name of Kung Fu SID – promising great emulation and a price that’s hard to beat. Does it deliver…?
Let’s Code Commodore PET 0x02: Snakes on a PET
In this episode we code a simple game for the PET. It is the classic snake game, where you control a snake that picks up food and grows longer. We learn how to read from the keyboard, and how to limit the speed of the game, as the PET is slow, but not THAT slow.
Commodore C16 From Hell Repair
This is another dead Commodore machine from the pile of machines that eazy brought over at the beginning of the year. This time it is a TED machine: the venerable C16. It is completely dead, shows no signs of life. But this has never stopped us. Probably a dead CPU. How bad can it be, eh?
Let’s Code Commodore PET 0x01: Hello World!
This time around we will start another, probably short lived Let’s Code series. It will center around the Commodore PET, the first personal computer made by Commodore in 1977. Even before the VIC20 and C64. It shares a lot of structural similarities, but also has many peculiarities. It does not have any proper graphics support, so we will do a bit of a fancy text based hello world program, using direct screen memory access. We will use the modern, optimizing C compiler named oscar64.
C64 Repair: Blue Screen
Another C64 was waiting for a repair. This one had a blue screen on startup, but nothing else. Seems like a good sign, at least a bit of code seems to be executing. But boy, this was not a straightforward repair. I think someone messed with this board before, and left some loose ends.
C1531 Datassette Refurb
The Commodore Datassette is a very classic and iconic piece of equipment. It had a couple of variants. Today we have a black C1531 for the Commodore 264 range of computers: C116, C16 and Plus/4. It has some mechanical issues that we will try to fix.
C64 Repair: Shimmering Color & More
I received a hand full of broken C64 machines, and am now trying to repair one machine at a time. This machine here seems to have multiple issues, but is working mostly. The color on the screen is shimmering a lot though. This might be a color RAM or PLA issue. Let’s investigate!
What if the Amiga sounded better?
Back in 1985 when the Amiga came out the Paula sound chip was not totally groundbreaking, but better than most of its competitors. It supported four channel stereo PCM playback. This could be used with sampled instruments to get a relatively natural sound. However there were many limitations, many of which due to the software not utilising the Paula to its fullest. Two years later, when the A500 came out, Roland released the MT-32. A consumer grade synthesizer module that was used relatively widely in the MS DOS gaming world, spearheaded by Sierra On-Line. It is a little known fact that you can use the MT-32 also on the Amiga with Sierra adventures such as King’s Quest, Space Quest or Larry. Does the Amiga sound better with the MT-32?
Black Amiga 500
Many a computer from the 1980s is today yellowed and brittle. The plastics age considerably over the decades. You can do some mitigation by retrobrighting with hydrogen peroxide. However for some machines you can even get replacement cases, and in some cases even brand new key caps for the keyboard. Today we will transform a beige Commodore A500 into a black beauty!