Commodore 64 hardware modifications.
(Well, it’s still work-in-progress but a protoype should soon be ready for testing…) During the last year or so, new Commodore 64 motherboards (link) and new Commodore 64C cases (link) have hit commercial retro market. On top of this (and hopefully very soon, Phase5!!) we’ll also … Read more
My quest for obtaining the last Commodore 64C motherboard version in my collection (Version B-3) has come to an end! I finally managed to get a copy of the Assy 250466 motherboard for a reasonable price. I got the machine from a guy in England on … Read more
Repairing broken Commodore 64’s is usually a matter of qualified guesswork and quite often substitution of chips is the only practical way to diagnose a fault. At least that is the approach I’m using when trying to resurrect broken machines. The challenge with this method is … Read more
Back in the days, Commodore 64’s were modified to accommodate other keyboard layouts with special character sets – like Spanish, Swedish or Danish. I have an Assy 250407 Rev. B breadbox (link) that was originally used at a Danish high school, so the character set has been changed to … Read more
The newly produced Commodore 64 Reloaded motherboards use a barrel connector for powering the system. The problem is that this modern type of connector does not fill the hole of the original Commodore 64C case. I have previously described a 3D printed solution called a ‘Commodore 64 Reloaded Mainboard Power Plate’ … Read more
I have wanted to do some Commodore 64 Kernal modding for quite some time and finally decided to give it a go. I did not want to do anything fancy, I just wanted to customize the text of the C64 start-up screen and modify the … Read more
The repeated pounding on the fire buttons combined with the way most platform games have the hero go towards the right side of the screen, may eventually wear down the micro-switches in most Commodore 64 joysticks. The first sign of wear is usually in the form of a sluggish response … Read more
Scrolling through a local second hand site, I came across a guy who had made his own version of the SD2IEC device. The SD2IEC is a mass storage solution which uses a SD card for data storage (i.e. games and programs) and interfaces with the IEC bus. It does … Read more
…well almost… The machine still needs some new colored keycaps (hurry up Phase5!!!), a domed sticker at the bottom and a cold reset button using an Arduino Pro Mini. But I gotta have some modding goals for 2016, right? This machine has been build from … Read more
The C64 Reloaded ROMs IC holds 2 Kernals and 2 Character sets located at specific memory locations on the EPROM. Each of the ROMs can quite easily be replaced in order to have two unique character sets (i.e. English & Danish) and two different Kernals (i.e. … Read more