This page summarises my experience, in 2021, of getting a Commodore 64 up and running. My love of the Commodore 64 goes back to the Christmas of 1984 when my dad bought a breadbin for the whole family to enjoy. A great deal of pocket money was spent on games, and many hours (not always happy ones!) spent finger poking BASIC program listings from magazines into that machine where they languished on cassette tape, if I could get them to work at all.
I learnt enough to appreciate what it was capable of but other distractions meant I never fledged into a capable programmer. However, I did love that little computer. I loved the aesthetic and I loved interacting with it. I wished I had a brain for coding, but that wasn't to be back then. Eventually the C64 was retired and it found it's way into the attic while I moved on with my life and with other, more capable, but far less endearing PCs.
Imagine my horror though, a few years ago, during a bout of nostalgia, asking my dad if I could retrieve the C64 from the attic when he advised he'd given it away to a charity shop several years previously. I was utterly gutted and a few choice words were exchanged. It represented a very happy part of my past, which I'd assumed was safe and which he'd thoughtlessly given away. And so I became determined to put this right. This, naturally put me on a path to track one down and so it was that on the 9th February 2021 I became the proud and happy owner of my very own Commodore 64. If you're not familiar with the C64, the following summary of my experience might be interesting. Those with much more familiarity, please note I skip over a lot to keep this as brief as possible.
Now of course, it is one thing to simply own a retro computer, it is quite another to use it in the 21st century! The world has moved on and it hasn't carried 1980's technology with it particularly well.
The first challenge was to switch the thing on. One does not simply plug in a 38 year old power unit and hope it works, not if one expects ones electronics to survive at any rate. This necessitated the purchase of a brand new PSU and a few long weeks while waiting for that to arrive.
In the meantime, as I had knowingly bought the C64 with the "1" key snapped off, this required immediate attention. The key itself was fine but the broken stem was firmly embedded inside.
The trick here is to drill, with the finest drill bit you can, a tiny hole into the broken stem in the key, and then drive in a small screw which provides enough purchase to extract one from the other. There are a number of online stores which specialise in selling parts and spares for retro computers and as you will see, I make good use of them! Spare key stems are easily obtained and apart from having to completely disassemble the whole keyboard to fit it, is simple enough. I took this opportunity to give the keyboard PCB a good clean. While I was poking around inside I decided to replace the standard red power LED (which I've never liked) with a shiny new blue one (which I like very much but which will drive the purists nuts).
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| Broken key stem removed |
The next challenge was to connect the computer to a TV. Luckily, I didn't (still don't) have a top of the range modern TV. New TVs in 2021 restrict themselves to HDMI for connectivity. The C64 I had in the 80's connected to the TV via the aerial (RF) socket. Neither modern HDMI nor old RF were going to be suitable. Instead I had to use a composite cable and my TV supported this, as well as SCART and Component, all connections sadly lacking in much newer TVs. However for a few £s a suitable cable can be bought which connects the socket on the C64 with the yellow (video), red and white (audio) composite sockets on the TV.
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| C64 Composite cable |
We have power, we've fixed the keyboard, we're connected to the TV. Time to power on.
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| The obligatory first program |
Picture me all big grins as the familiar blue text on blue background pops into life in front of me and I type the obligatory "Hello World" program.
Ok, so I have a working C64. Now we need a way to save and load data. The machine I bought came with a Datasette - the tape deck Commodore 64s need to use tapes - but like i said above, time has moved on. Surely there was a better way? Enter the pi1541.
"WTF is a pi1541?" the uninitiated will rightly ask. Ok, so, a brief explanation. Back in 2012 a simple cheap and small computer was released called the Raspberry Pi. Being small and cheap very clever people began using the Raspberry Pi for hundreds of different projects, and one of those projects, was to perfectly emulate the old Commodore 1541 disk drives, but using modern SD Cards instead of old floppy disks. Thus, Raspberry Pi + 1541 = pi1541.
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| Raspberry Pi Zero, pi1541 hat and serial cable |
There is more than one type of pi1541, all using different flavours of Raspberry Pi. The version I went for was the smallest and IMHO neatest of the variants which used the Raspberry Pi Zero and a hat (hat = a circuit board which plugs into the top of the Raspberry Pi) which incorporated an Epyx Fastload cartridge which could all be bundled up nicely in a 3D printed case and, because it got its power from the C64s cartridge port, didn't require an external power source and another trailing cable.
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| pi1541 in 3d printed case |
An amusing aside: the Pi Zero I'm using has a 1 GHz processor onboard. The C64 processor, the venerable 6510, is 1 MHz (approx). It tickles me no end that my storage device is 1000 times faster than the computer it's plugged into.
Anyway, into this we insert a micro SD card which has the software loaded to turn these components into, effectively, a disk drive, and we are off. I can simply copy any games or programs I want to run onto that card and then load them up on the C64 via a very useable file browser, and it's so quick! Oh to have had that back in 1984! God what a game changer! No more finding games on tapes. No more waiting ages for games to load: a few swift key presses and the job is done. It's bloody brilliant.
This is when, however, I started to notice that all was not quite right with my C64. Music and sound effects didn't sound healthy and there was something flaky about the power switch. The initial enthusiasm about the C64 simply working had worn off too and I was becoming deeply unimpressed by the frankly appalling quality of the video signal which was full of artefacts and smearing.
Something had to be done. But before I could address any of that, on the 27th of March, having owned the C64 for exactly 50 days, this happened:
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| Something's broken |
I am no electronics' guru. I don't have the necessary equipment (logic probe or oscilloscope) to diagnose this, but thanks to some very clever folks on the interwebs, who give out their experience and knowledge freely, I had a pretty good idea what might have gone wrong. So, it was time to hit the shops again and this time my shopping list consisted of:
1. New SID chip (to fix my audio problems)
2. New Power Switch
3. New PLA (coz based on symptoms, I think that's what broke).
This is where, believe it or not, I started to get quite philosophical about this whole endeavour. I had a decision to make. Did I want to restore my C64 to its natural state using all original parts salvaged from other machines? Or did I want to take advantage of advances in technology, and utilise the great brains of others who had created modern replacements for these parts?
It seemed to me, that investing in original parts, salvaged from other machines would be a mistake. In the first instance, this encourages people to strip otherwise fixable machines to sell them for parts, which simply makes the number of working machines rarer and rarer. And secondly, I would be buying something which could fail at any time which seemed like a total waste of money.
This is why I resolved to buy brand new replacements and as luck would have it, both the PLA and the SID chips had a plethora of replacement options to choose from. I simply scoured retro computing forums for the most favourable variants and added to my shopping cart:
1. An ARMSID. A replacement for the SID Chip.
2. A PLAnkton. A replacement for the PLA.
3. A brand new power switch.
But like the Ship of Theseus... when do changes such as this mean the C64 is no longer a C64 but an emulator? It's an interesting point, but when the replacements are sitting in the sockets of the original chips with hardware replicating all the processes of the original hardware and which can simply be removed to re-insert an original chip, we're not straying far from originality.
The additions were a triumph. With the addition of the PLAnkton my machine came back to life (a very fortunate, if educated, guess). The ARMSID cured all the audio woes (it became obvious that one of the 3 voices in the original SID chip was corrupt somehow) and now sounds magnificent and the new power switch, which for anyone with a modicum of soldering experience is a dawdle to replace, meant that the machine powered on instantly and no more irritating lag between pressing the switch and several seconds of nothing happening which was my experience up to that point.
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| Left to right: PLAnkton, ARMSID and new power switch |
That just left one remaining issue. The less than stellar video quality. I say less than stellar; it was really frickin bad. What to be done about it though?
In its natural state the C64 can output Video in 3 ways: by RF into an aerial socket; by composite and finally by s-video (sort of). All of these work reasonably well on an old CRT television, and of the lot, the "s-video" output garners the most favour with C64 enthusiasts.
However, my TV doesn't support s-video so that's a non starter. RF, as I mentioned above, would be silly, and the worst possible outcome which meant I either lived with the terrible output from composite, or we got radical.
I had another consideration too. My TV isn't going to last forever. Its already 11 years old. Realistically, it could go at any time and when it does, well, modern TVs do not have composite inputs and buying a special converter to convert a terrible composite image and output to upscaled HDMI would be a tortured mangled horror show.
So. Yes ladies and gentlemen. It was time to get radical: enter the Commodore 64 Component Video Mod - DIY Kit.
Unlike my other fixes and changes, this was definitely not trivial (not for me at any rate). Installing this mod first requires that we remove the RF modulator within the C64 - a smorgasbord of capacitors and resistors, all wrapped in a steel box soldered firmly to the C64 motherboard. Nobody wants a blow-by-blow of how I managed this but suffice to say, two painstaking hours with a desoldering gun, desolder braid and a good old fashioned desolder pump finally saw the box released, with no damage done. The best advice I received was to be patient, and that was 100% correct.
In place of the now removed RF modulator, we have to replace all the old and compromised circuitry with new and improved circuitry. This involved soldering several pin headers in precise places such that the new Component mod will sit exactly on these pins and can be soldered thereon. Output sockets on the new board have to be at the right height to allow access through the existing holes in the C64 case too, so precision is key. I took my time and my soldering isn't dreadful so the end result is perfectly serviceable. This board connects to a second, smaller board which is placed under the VIC chip (the chip which controls video on the C64) by a ribbon cable and works by intercepting some of the video signals before the VIC chip and bypassing the existing, and noise prone circuits. Crucially, and as the name implies, this mod outputs a Component signal which, in theory, should be of far superior quality to Composite. And so it proved in practice. Connecting my upgraded C64 to my TV with new Component cables results, at last, in a perfect picture which stands a much better chance of being converted to HDMI sometime in the future.
So yes, we are now a long way from an original C64 but given the future of AV technology, if I want a useable machine in the years ahead, it was the only sensible option. Everything I've done to my machine is reversible, with a bit of effort, so I'm not particularly concerned about straying from the path of original hardware and I'm very happy with the end result.
This has been a great experience so far, but one which comes with a few caveats, which if you're a novice like me, are good to know in advance: running old hardware is rarely going to be a trouble free experience. You have to be prepared to invest time, money and thought into getting it, and keeping it running, and unless you are confident with a soldering iron, I wouldn't recommend it. For myself however, I enjoyed this experience enough to take it a step further and am now gathering all the parts required to build a brand new C64 from scratch. You can read about my progress with this, here.
