It has been more than four years since my last post. I guess, real life issues took over my free time to such an extend that the Commodore 64 hobby was put on hold. The primary reason was because I have renovated our 1000 sqft … Read more
The video signals coming from the Commodore 64 have always been challenged by inherent ‘clock noise’ of the VIC-II graphics chip and the color bleeding of the S-video signal. The problems are easily recognized in the form of vertical lines (banding artifacts) or as a … Read more
My SixtyClone C64 Replica has a sweet looking blue printed circuit board (PCB) (link). The same is the case for the installed VIC-II² PAL/NTSC Switch (link) which enables swapping the video output of a Commodore 64 between PAL and NTSC by the flick of a … Read more
Have you ever run a Commodore 64 game or demo that sounded strange or the graphics would either move too slow or too fast? Then you might have experienced a ‘PAL/NTSC related issue’. Hardware-wise, the Commodore 64 is synchronized to its graphics output and the … Read more
Giving just the right amount of electrical power to your Commodore 64’s is vital to ensure a stable operation. Voltage drops may give rise to stability issues while too much voltage will undoubtedly fry the delicate chips on the old C64 motherboards. The latter is … Read more
I came across this very well preserved Commodore 64 keyboard and thought I would share some details. The keyboard is the third (and last) generation of keyboards originally created for the Commodore VIC-20 home computer. It has a tall, thin font similar to Helvetica Narrow … Read more
I’ve been racking my brain for quite some time, to find a solution on what to do with my MechBoard64 (link) keyboard project… The project started as I needed two new keyboards for my C64 Reloaded boards (link, link). Going into such a large project … Read more
Getting tired of using your old Competition Pro joystick with the sloppy spring and the far-from-always-working fire buttons? If so, you could clean and possibly change the worn out parts of the joystick as described here (link) or you could look for a replacement joystick. … Read more
Someone finally got too tired of waiting for Phase5 to deliver new keycaps from their 2015 campaign (link). Jim Drew, from CBMstuff.com (link) just launched another Indiegogo campaign in which he tries to reach a fixed funding (all-or-nothing) goal of 1000 keycap sets (link). If … Read more
To reduce any radio frequency (RF) interference with surroudning hardware (e.g. old tube TV’s), Commodore added shielding to their machines. In the early machines the RF shield came in the form of an aluminum covered cardboard that was wrapped around the motherboard. As carboard is … Read more