Commodore 64 restore and upgrades
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24-02-2022 9:24pm#1
Took out my childhood C64c for some attention today. I'd a cap kit here for it, a new Zylog psu, an sd2iec board, and an epyx fastloader cart to try too.
It needs a good clean, and some retrobrite treatment, but I'll get to those next time.
I found one leaky cap, cleaned with IPA. I know the screen is stretched to 16:9 too, but it's really just to test and check everything.
The sd2iec works amazingly well, made even better with the fastloader. The shell @Steve X2 printed for me is milimieter perfect, couldn't have asked for more. Quality is top notch (as always with Steve's stuff).
The fastloader originally has the reset button facing onto the pcb. I wanted it hidden and almost flush at the back of the cart, so Steve was able to accomodate this in the cart shell design. I just had to desolder the switch, and locate it to where I wanted it....a blob of hot glue then holds it in perfectly. Looked neater, and no downward pressure on the cart connector now either when pressing.
Had a quick blast of buggy boy and some others. I want to hopefully use it on one of the 14" PVM's a few of us got from Ollie recently.
Last thing will be a deep clean and a retrobrite, for another day tho. Need to do the same with the Cheetah joysticks too, man they're bad (in every way!)
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I ended up desoldering the RF modulator the following day, and doing the few caps inside that. No reason to do this whatsoever other than potential cap fluid leak prevention.
I'll say this, decent tools make jobs like these so much easier. I couldn't imagine trying to do something like this with a soldering iron and some braid like I used to try and do. Needed serious heat to flow the solder on this and remove it.
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The only joystick needed for 8bit computers - Competition Pro :)
On C64 mods, I picked up a JiffyDOS chip which gives you the Turboload features for disk drives (inc. the drive emulators) and tape (I think) as well as other features I've never looked at. Good thing, it keeps your cart port free.
Lots of 'jail bar' fixes out there if thats a problem, as well as replacement modulator units to give better video output.
I think I have a SID mod board which has both type SIDs installed, one for left channel and one for right - though I think one of those SIDs isn't 100% of health.
Interesting 8bit machine to mod, lots of projects out there
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