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Running Apple ][ Software on a Commodore 64 — Silently
The computer business in 1984 was a bizarre mix of hobby-level companies, a few small companies that had made it big, and a lot of big companies starting to take notice of personal computers. Plenty of...
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Amiga and Commodore, Back Together (Sort Of)
The story of Commodore, the famous manufacturer of home computers, is a murky one at best. Commodore fans will decry their woeful marketing and dismal product roadmap, while former employees such as...
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New File Manager is C64’s Answer to Norton Commander
Norton was always a PC company — Norton Commander, the file manager that launched a thousand clones, was only ever available for DOS, like the rest of the company’s offerings in those days. If they’d...
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C64 Finally Gets the SRAM Corporate Wouldn’t Pay For
If you think RAM is expensive now, try putting yourselves in the shoes of a Commodore engineer, circa 1981. RAM was eye-wateringly expensive by modern standards, and Jack Tramiel wanted 64K of the...
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Tiny C64 PSU Rejects Tradition, Embraces USB
The Commodore 64 has, by modern standards, the interesting power requirement of needing both 5 VDC and 9 VAC. Traditionally, one would use an iron-core transformer to step-down the wall current — be it...
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Is it a Pet? No, it’s a Teacher’s Pet!
Here at Hackaday we cover the world of retrocomputing, which means that we see all manner of older computers in our everyday work. We might even claim that we’ve seen them all, were it not that every...
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Diagnosing a Mysterious Fault with a Commodore 1541 Disk Drive
Some PCB corrosion on the bottom of the 1541 drive. (Credit: TheRetroChannel, YouTube) Recently [TheRetroChannel] came across an interesting failure mode on a Commodore 1541 5.25″ floppy disk drive, in...
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C64 Gets a Modern Interactive Disassembler
If you want to pull apart a program to see how it ticks, you’re going to need a disassembler. [Ricardo Quesada] has built Regenerator 2000 for just that purpose. It’s a new interactive disassembler for...
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Commodore 64 Helps Revive the BBS Days
Before the modern Internet existed, there were still plenty of ways of connecting with other computer users “online”, although many of them might seem completely foreign to those of us in the modern...
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Building a Commodore 64 Laptop
What might a laptop version of the Commodore 64 have looked like if one had been released by the late 1980s? This is the question that [Kevin Noki] tried to recently answer with a custom C64 laptop...
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Keebin’ with Kristina: the One with the C64 Keyboard
[Jean] wrote into the tips line (the system works!) to let all of us know about his hacked and hand-wired C64 keyboard, a thing of beauty in its chocolate-brown and 9u space bar-havin’ glory. Image by...
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Commodore’s Most Popular Computer gets DOOM-style Shooter
When people talk about the lack of a DOOM being the doom Commodore home computers, they aren’t talking about the C64, which was deep into obsolescence when demon-slaying suddenly became the minimal...
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One ROM: the Latest Incarnation of the Software Defined ROM
Retrocomputers need ROMs, but they’re just so read only. Enter the latest incarnation of [Piers]’s One ROM to rule them all, now built with a RP2350, because the newest version is 5V capable. This can...
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Commodore is Back Selling New C64s, but Should You Buy them?
It’s hard to argue with nostalgia, but you can toss a bucket of cold facts over it. In the case of the recent rescuing of the Commodore brand from the clutches of relabeling of generic electronics by...
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Repairing An Obscure Apple II Clone
The Apple II was made in great numbers, as was the Commodore 64. But the Mimic Spartan? It was a weird Apple II clone that you needed a Commodore 64 to use. [ARC Javmaster] has found one of these...
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Commodore 64 on New FPGA
When it comes to getting retro hardware running again, there are many approaches. On one hand, the easiest path could be to emulate the hardware on something modern, using nothing but software to bring...
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Coleco Adam: A Commodore 64 Competitor, Almost
For a brief, buzzing moment in 1983, the Coleco Adam looked like it might out-64 the Commodore 64. Announced with lots of ambition, this 8-bit marvel promised a complete computing package: a keyboard,...
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Let’s Buy Commodore! Well, Somebody Is.
When a man wearing an Atari T-shirt tells you he’s buying Commodore it sounds like the plot for an improbable 1980s movie in which Nolan Bushnell and Jack Tramiel do battle before a neon synthwave...
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The Commodore 64 Gets An HDMI Upgrade
The Commodore 64 may remain the best selling computer of all time, but it has one major flaw. It doesn’t have HDMI! That makes it a total pain to use with modern displays. Thankfully, [Side Projects...
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TeensyROM NFC Game Loading on the C64
When retro computing nostalgia meets modern wireless wizardry, you get a near-magical tap-to-load experience. It’ll turn your Commodore 64 into a console-like system, complete with physical game cards....
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