sf78 wrote:

And most people would need a new keyboard to go with the case.

There's another kickstarter going for repro keycaps too I think. C64 stuff is not at all rare thankfully, and with all this new stuff being developed for them there's no end in sight for "the worlds best selling home computer".

badmojo wrote:

Oh c'mon, it is and you know it 🤣 .

sliderider wrote:

The C64 is a legend among 8-bit machines partly because of the SID chip.

Oh I like SID tunes, don't get me wrong. But calling it the best...? Nah 😀

jwt27 wrote:

badmojo wrote:

Oh c'mon, it is and you know it 🤣 .

sliderider wrote:

The C64 is a legend among 8-bit machines partly because of the SID chip.

Oh I like SID tunes, don't get me wrong. But calling it the best...? Nah 😀

What other 8-bit machine comes close for the price? Atari tried and failed. Texas Instruments got forced out by Commodore. The ZX Spectrum gave Commodore a good run in Europe, but the specs were still not equal to the Commodore and they totally failed to catch on anywhere else but the Soviet Union where they were cloned in massive numbers. Tandy tried with the Color Computer 2 and 3 but failed to make waves and Dragon made a near clone of the CoCo in the UK that met with less than stellar sales. The MSX computer was a pretty big hit in Japan, but not so much anywhere else. The Apple II was too expensive for most people to easily afford in addition to coming up short in the graphics and sound departments until the IIGS came out, but that was a 16-bit machine. The PCjr. had it's own peculiarities that prevented it from catching on. Tandy had better luck than IBM with their version, but it still never sold in the numbers that the C64 did over the same time period. The BBC Micro seems like a nicely spec'ced machine for the time, with probably the most powerful BASIC language for any 8-bit machine, but was pretty much limited to the UK in distribution. I can't think of a single machine that even comes close to the C64 in terms of features, price, and popularity.

It really did kick butt thanks to some pretty aggressive pricing and being marketed well. In Australia we had the MicroBee - an 8 bit Z80 machine that did OK-ish in the education market here. The C64 was cheaper and superior, but sadly my father went with the MicroBee.

Why didn't you Americanos dig on the C64 as much as the rest of the world? What were you using instead? Apples?

EDIT: just noticed this pop up on a local new site - an effort to preserve AU-centric 80's PC memories / software: http://playitagainproject.org/

badmojo wrote:

It really did kick butt thanks to some pretty aggressive pricing and being marketed well. In Australia we had the MicroBee - an 8 bit Z80 machine that did OK-ish in the education market here. The C64 was cheaper and superior, but sadly my father went with the MicroBee.

Why didn't you Americanos dig on the C64 as much as the rest of the world? What were you using instead? Apples?

EDIT: just noticed this pop up on a local new site - an effort to preserve AU-centric 80's PC memories / software: http://playitagainproject.org/

C64 was the most popular 8-bit machine here, too.

I'm about to embark on a similar journey and would like to know what steps you took to get the circuit board so clean? Looks great!

Bladeforce wrote:

OMG! The S.I.D chip! THE best music ever!

Nope... Not the best, that were produced to date, and will be produced untill the universe explodes.
Just a great little chip, with a nice and warm sound, that I really like too.
More a thing of retro-feel and "thick black oily" nostalgia feeling to me.

simbin wrote:

I'm about to embark on a similar journey and would like to know what steps you took to get the circuit board so clean? Looks great!

Nothing more than a stiff-ish paintbrush and compressed air on this one from memory. I've also gone down the dish-washing-liquid-and-warm-water path on motherboards with hard to shift grime, and it works fine, but we have quite 'soft' water here in Melbourne and I gave those a couple of weeks to dry.

Good luck with your project - let us know how it goes!

Santa left a C64 Music Maker under the tree for me this year! Thanks Santa!

In theory I should have just been able to plonk the keyboard over the C64, load the tape, and make music, but of course nothing’s ever that simple.

After my tape drive refused to work, I realised that JiffyDOS (a ROM replacement I’m using) kills the tape functionality stone cold. I’d been using the ROM overlay functionality of my 1541UII to load JiffyDOS and that can be turned on / off reasonably easily via the 1541UII’s on screen interface, but I thought it better to do it properly. So I de-soldered the ROM chip from the C64’s motherboard, installed a socket, and dropped in a JiffyDOS replacement ROM chip, which included a switch for flipping b/w JiffyDOS and the original C64 ROM (which of course includes the Datasette functionality).

I didn’t want to drill a hole in the C64’s case for the switch, but fortunately there existed a hole which accommodates an RF channel switch in some models. Mine didn’t have that switch and there was just enough room inside the RF box to fit the JiffyDOS switch, so I snuck it in there:

While I had the soldering iron out I decided to replace the mechanical bits of my tape drive, which were looking a little worse for wear and causing tape loads to be unreliable. Years ago I stashed away another tape drive which looked pristine, but which seemed to have a dodgy head, so I combined the electronics from my drive (PCB, heads, etc) and the mechanical bits from the second drive. After tuning the heads with the very excellent ‘Azimuth Head Alignment’ software, it works like a charm:

With that all done the Music Maker installed and loaded as advertised. No-one’s doing any serious composing on this thing of course but it works well and is fun to play. I was rocking a plausible rendition of ‘When I’m sixty-four’ within 15 mins and the kids gave it their seal of approval:

badmojo: What is next ? 😀 The sound expander for the Commodore ? 😀

Yeah not sure what’s next – my love of the C64 is a recent thing so I have no nostalgic grand plan in mind. Like a twig on the back of a mighty river, I go with the flow 😀

People keep building great new stuff for the C64 so there’s never a dull moment – most recently I ordered a PLAnkton, which is a super low power and totally compatible PLA. I’m looking forward to trying that out when it shows up.

badmojo: Awesome 😁

You need a SuperCPU. 😁

I've been thinking about a SuperCPU forever and a day now. But other than GEOS, what is it really good for? I never liked GEOS back in the 80's because I was already on things like Desk Mate on one of my Tandy's and Workbench on my Amiga. However a few years ago, I started using GEOS more often, and now I really like it.

So what else can SuperCPU really help with (and of course the memory expansion)?

They ain't cheap either, those SuperCPU's - more of a collectors item than anything else it seems.

Kodai wrote:

I've been thinking about a SuperCPU forever and a day now. But other than GEOS, what is it really good for? I never liked GEOS back in the 80's because I was already on things like Desk Mate on one of my Tandy's and Workbench on my Amiga. However a few years ago, I started using GEOS more often, and now I really like it.

So what else can SuperCPU really help with (and of course the memory expansion)?

You can run GEOS without a SuperCPU. There's a C64 version of GEOS and there's also a C128/C128D version that can access the unique features of those machines.

I do run GEOS, and have been (off and on), for nearly 30 years and I don't have the SuperCPU. I was asking if there was any software other than GEOS that took advantage of the SuperCPU as it seemed rather pointless considering its cost vs limited value in applications.

GEOS, that's kind of a waste of a good C64. 😀

RoyBatty wrote:

GEOS, that's kind of a waste of a good C64. 😀

GUI's became the hot thing after Apple released the Mac, so naturally every computer that hadn't already been shaken out of the market by that time had one or more developers that released one.

Everytime I got a GEOS disk I was glad for new a floppy to format and fill with something good.