| Inside the C64
Like millions of other people out there, my first computer was a Commodore 64. (A C64c to be specific.) Apparently like millions of other people out there, I still think it was a great computer, and I still have one stuffed in the shed that I keep promising I'll pull out one day and use again. (It's actually one I picked up on eBay a while back. My original one exploded.) Back in college, I had replaced the bootup logo for my copy of Windows 95 with the Commodore startup screen.
**** COMMODORE 64 BASIC V2 ****
64K RAM SYSTEM 38911 BASIC BYTES FREE
READY.
PC World just posted a nice article that gives a tour of the Commodore internals. Check it out if you're feeling nostalgic.
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Nice!
As you know, I'm also a C64 fanatic, and I've made the leap of pulling this piece of 8-bit history out of the shed (er, my parents' house, anyway) and setting it up in my office.
As it happens, just yesterday I was out in Mesa, Arizona, searching for the Western Design Center -- the last surviving manufacturer of 6502-series chips. I was a little disappointed to discover that it's basically a house instead of a fab plant, heh.
For what it's worth, the most recent two posts on my blog right now happen to be C64-related. Now if I could only get my hands on one of those crazy tripped-out SID expansion cartridges you had back in high school. :)
Posted by David Simmons on November 10, 2008 at 11:46 AM PST #
<p>I still have mine, you know. I might be willing to part with it if you promise to give it a good home and I get visiting rights.</p>
Posted by Daniel Templeton on November 10, 2008 at 11:50 AM PST #
Thanks for the offer. Unfortunately, I think I blew the SID chip or something in the audio output path on this C64 at some point in my childhood, and I suspect the external SID cartridge and software is designed to complement the internal SID instead of outright replacing it. :/
I'm not sure if it was my frequent use of paper clips to reset the system by shorting out the user port's reset pin, the haphazard homemade a/v cable that my grandfather helped me solder on to the right kind of DIN plug, or any of a number of other hardware hacks I was prone to doing in those days. Maybe some day I'll open it up and see if I can diagnose the problem.
It turns out that not having a working SID also makes it hard to use those modems that rely on the SID to generate DTMF tones. :)
Posted by David Simmons on November 10, 2008 at 12:30 PM PST #
Very nostalgic! somehow I must now think of the Apple IIe and the Olympics game which ran on it :-)
Posted by Thijs Metsch on November 25, 2008 at 08:06 AM PST #