Another C64 was waiting for a repair. This one had a blue screen on startup, but nothing else. Seems like a good sign, at least a bit of code seems to be executing. But boy, this was not a straightforward repair. I think someone messed with this board before, and left some loose ends.
Tag: c64
C1531 Datassette Refurb
The Commodore Datassette is a very classic and iconic piece of equipment. It had a couple of variants. Today we have a black C1531 for the Commodore 264 range of computers: C116, C16 and Plus/4. It has some mechanical issues that we will try to fix.
C64 Repair: Shimmering Color & More
I received a hand full of broken C64 machines, and am now trying to repair one machine at a time. This machine here seems to have multiple issues, but is working mostly. The color on the screen is shimmering a lot though. This might be a color RAM or PLA issue. Let’s investigate!
Zombie Floppy: How To Revive A Broken 1541 Head
The Commodore 1541 floppy drive is a real workhorse, that was used by millions of C64 users. It came with drive mechanisms from different vendors. The Newtronics/Mitsumi drive assembly has the annoying fault to have their drive heads fail due to some wires going open inside of the read/write head. This is so far not economically repairable. However a clever user by the nickname of Ruuudi on German Forum64 has designed a little bodge PCB to make the half of the head that is still okay to all the work and thus revive an otherwise dead drive.
C64 Repair: Bad Color RAM
We already had a C64G on the channel, which was working fine, but was missing some keys and came „only“ with a SwinSID. This time we get a regular brown breadbin C64 with a fault: It’s showing flickery colors. This might be due to two things: Either the 1K color SRAM or the PLA might be broken. One way to find out: open up and replace some chips!
Pimping the C64
A good friend of the channel by the name of matze79 supplied me with a rather cheap C64G. As I didn’t own a C64 at the moment, this was an excellent opportunity. The poort little C64 came with two missing keys, which were fixed by 3D printed replacements. While this looks interesting and is impressive in its own right, I wanted a more long lasting fix. The C64 was also missing its SID chip and came with a nice little SwinSID. But again, we have some better replacement on hand! So let’s open up the machine, fix those things and enjoy the fantastic world of programs the C64 has to offer!