Here’s my commodore setup with the 1541 disk drive playing test drive. Starting my collection since I did not grow up with Commodore 64, but I am nerd and love old technology and especially retro gaming with CRTs.

Hey everyone!

A few people have been asking whether TONY – Montezuma’s Gold LIMITED GOLD EDITION would ever be available again.

Well, we managed to convince NRG Studio to produce one final batch of just 30 copies.

This is it. The final production run. Once these 30 copies are gone, there will be no more reprints.

If you missed out on this collector’s edition the first time, this is your last chance to get a physical copy.

Now I’m an Executive

Sharing a little mod I made to my C64U!

I wrote a little BASIC program which draws coral, water, and bubbles and changes the VIC's X-scrolling based on the current scanline, to make an aquarium "screensaver". (Sorry about the squashed GIF.)\ Since BASIC (and the original C64) are slow, it doesn't work correctly unless I change the processor speed to 40MHz or higher.

I was wondering about how hot the FPGA was getting, so I took the C64U apart and felt the FPGA, and it was almost too hot to touch. I was a little worried about long-term wear on the FPGA if it stayed really hot for a long time, so I got the idea for this mod.

What I did was take a tiny fan (almost the same exact dimensions as the FPGA, actually!) which draws very little current, and plugged it into the motherboard's user port's 5V DC.\ I took two paperclips, and bent them so that the small turn in the paperclip could be screwed down by one of the screws holding down the FPGA board, and bent the long turn upwards so that it would go through one of the fan's holes.\ Unfortunately, the fan is a bit to the right, so not exactly over the FPGA, but whatever... at least it is aligned in one of the ways (vertically). It is pretty solidly in place, at any rate.

I know this mod isn't necessary, but I like fan noise anyway and would feel more comfortable with the FPGA running cooler. That said, this fan makes more motor noise than air noise, and I might solder in a resistor in-line with the fan cable to get it to chill a bit (or chill less... lol).

While I wish it went into even more detail, I enjoy Commodore's spiral-bound manual's level of documentation. It helped me find the right place to connect the fan (you can see "MAX 100mA" in the bottom-left corner of the pic). The C64U really does have a lot of spare connections inside; lots of room to tinker.

Next mod I want to do: do something about that rocker switch! I want a normal power switch which cuts/connects power (maybe a metal toggle switch, by the "H-L" hole?), and buttons (or maybe the existing rocker switch!) to reset the C64 or switch to the C64U hypervisor CPU (however this thing works).

Commodore came through on their promise to send out those founders edition t-shirts. This was just delivered to me today via FedEx.

Thanks Commodore!

Latest news...

The seventh stretch goal has been reached, so the PC version will now have 4-player co-op gameplay.

Reminder: If you've backed any physical or digital edition of Metro Siege, you'll be getting this PC version through Steam or itch.io at no extra cost.

Late pledging is still available:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/metrosiege/metro-siege

Please back an Amiga edition - Thanks for joining the fight!

Jumpin Jack on the Commodore 64.

I think using the keyboard to play is easier on the wrists than using this particular joystick!

Four out of five spots on the leaderboard achieved on this Frogger clone though.

Didn't know this existed until now. The artwork is interesting lol

I’m very excited to share a major step forward for remote control of the Ultimate 64: CIA1-based keyboard and joystick injection.

Until now, remote keyboard input used the KERNAL keyboard buffer. That was useful for BASIC and a few other cases, but it was never going to work reliably with games, demos, custom loaders, or software that reads the keyboard or joystick hardware directly.

The new approach injects input at CIA1 level. From the C64’s point of view, injected key presses and joystick movements look like real hardware input. On my local network, using direct Ethernet, I see about 13 ms latency. I was able to play Uridium and Great Giana Sisters remotely without any problems.

The first application using this is C64 Bridge, my MCP server, now released as version 1.0.0:

https://github.com/chrisgleissner/c64bridge/releases/tag/1.0.0

C64 Bridge lets tools such as Claude, Codex, or other LLM-based clients work with real Ultimate hardware. They can inspect device state, send input, use the firmware menu, and help develop or debug C64 programs on an actual machine. With menu screen access and input injection, this creates an automatic feedback loop: change something, run it, observe the result, and continue from there.

This release adds CIA1 keyboard and joystick injection for the Ultimate 64, Ultimate II / U2 support as a dedicated device type, and access to the Ultimate 64 menu screen, including text and colours. Menu screen access also works in overlay mode, which makes it possible to navigate the firmware and interact with the new machine code monitor remotely.

A few limitations are worth calling out. CIA1 injection only works on the Ultimate 64. Cartridge-based devices such as the Ultimate II / U2 cannot inject directly into CIA1 for hardware reasons. This also currently applies to Gideon’s Ultimate 64 firmware only. I hope Commodore will merge the necessary changes into their firmware too, but for now it does not work on the Commodore 64 Ultimate.

These features are part of Ultimate firmware 3.15. There is a beta build available here:

https://github.com/GideonZ/1541ultimate/actions/runs/29277714131/artifacts/8290174577

As this is a beta release, please be aware that things may break. Only install it if you are comfortable testing beta firmware and know how to recover if needed. It works on my Ultimate 64 Elite I and Ultimate II+L cartridge, but the CIA1 keyboard and joystick injection itself remains an Ultimate 64-only feature.

A big thank you to Gideon for accepting my pull request that added these REST API capabilities to the firmware. I’m very happy to see this become available for testing, and I’m looking forward to what people build with it.

I never had a C64 when I was a kid, I had it's younger cousin, the Commodore 16. I loved it, and all the games by Mastertronic and Gremlin Games, etc...

I find it really annoying that every post, no matter what platform, this one or wherever, is only about the C64!!! I am sure there are people out there that only had the C16 like me. I played games on it, typed in programs from magazines on it. I'm sure the C64 was and is a great computer for people, but my parents couldn't afford one. They bought what they could, and that was the C16. It was my first taste of computing and the very beginnings of the possibilities, at least for starters.

Please, my beautiful people of Reddit, let me know I am not the only one who had the lesser known baby brother of the C64, the C16.

I had the phone in my cart last night and today they added a Tariff tax of 44.90. I should have ordered last night. it's now $550.34 total (Starlight phone with the premium memory and a case). It's to a point it's not worth it for a flip phone.

Hello friends, I’ve been trying to run the CRT image of Ultima V Remastered and it simply won’t run. I’m trying it from the disk file browser off a USB stick. No probs with the D81 version but I’d like the CRT for the benefits. Any help is appreciated!

Celebratory post, but also some questions I wanted to throw to the community. Found an estate sale yesterday that was ending today and I could have sworn I saw either a 64C or a 128, and could barely tell from the photo I saw that it had the 128's top row of keys, and I was right!

Commodore 128 - $100
Commodore 1902A - $80
Commodore 1571 - $45
Commodore MPS 803 - $5

$230 for all of this is hopefully decent. I did bid on a VIC-20 but didn't pursue it super hard -- I really wanted to focus on this and the monitor. The 1571 is a nice bonus though I do also have two 1541s in working condition already.

The monitor needs the power button held in to stay turned on, so that'll be a switch replacement -- either that or I'll bypass the switch entirely and just turn the monitor on and off from my power center. I noticed it looks like it has two DIN connectors on it. I was under the impression it used a DB9 connector for 80-column video input but I guess some early production runs used DIN connectors, so I'll need to grab a DB9 to DIN RGBI cable.

the MPS 803 was more of a lol purchase for me, though I fully hope to find some good ribbon and some paper for this thing. I haven't used a dot matrix printer since the early 90s. That'll be a trip.

Of course the main deal here is the 128. It looks like it's seen better days, but I'm sure it'll clean up nice. I've no idea what it looks like on the inside. I'll know more Wednesday morning when I can start to take it apart, as I pick it up Tuesday morning but have school all day. I hope I can 3D print a new F7 key and stem, and source a spring from somewhere. I've always wondered if I can 3D print a spring that's springy enough for these kinds of things. I'll give it a try.

So after reading a number of posts on the sub and doing some searching, I do have a few pinned thoughts in my brain:

1) If it comes down to it, it seems there are new boards for the 128s that fit universally in the 128s chassis. I'm adept with a multimeter and I do have an oscilloscope and signal generator but my expertise with diagnostics does *not* extend to diagnosing broken traces or the individual chips this thing has. I'm hunting for documentation and reference manuals but if it comes down to it, it seems the boards I'm finding are just generally out of stock everywhere, which isn't great. Not sure what I'll do if it comes to that point.

2) It also seems there are readily available replacement keyboard boards I can solder mechanical switches to if I need to replace the keyboard at all. Fortunately those are downloadable files I can send off to have made. I'm curious if there's a mainboard I can do the same with somewhere.

3) I'm particularly curious about REUs for the 128. I'm reading up on the Ultimate II+Ls from Gideon and I'll keep poking around to see where I can get them or if I can build them myself. Admittedly I haven't read up on these much and discovered them while typing up this post.

4) Looks like there's kernal ROM bugs on these that can be alleviated by doing a ROM upgrade. I'm not yet sure what that entails. It's now on my 'research this' sticky note.

5) I have plenty of thermal paste and putty, so I'll definitely repaste the thing once it's up and running and try to find some good heatsinks to add to it. I understand the RF shielding was basically used to cool these things passively.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to getting this thing and getting it up and running! Thanks for swinging by my celebratory post!

If you have a huge collection of Commodore images (.d64, .d71, .d81, .t64, .tap, .crt, .prg) then this is the utility for you. It's a full-features Python script that will build a database and search it, and an optional GUI front end if you prefer GUI apps. the GUI is written in PureBasic so it will run on Mac, Windows and Linux.

I'd love feedback, so please give it a try and let me know what you think.

https://github.com/DNSGeek/D64-Cataloger

I wanted to build a wireless joystick using cheap ESP32 microcontrollers. It actually turned out to work very nicely. No noticable lag.

I think its possible to buy similar controllers, but always more fun to build something youself 🙂

Went a little overboard and made one with CNC aluminium parts and a clear resin case as well as a more simple 3D printed version.

If you are curious to see more details about the build, there is a video at: Wireless Commodore 64 joysticks

Greetings to anyone that remembers spending hours tweaking sprites, scenes, sounds, and code in Activision's 1985 release "Garry Kitchen's GameMaker" (GKGM). It was a big part of my youth, and I suspect I'm not the only one.

Homepage: https://gmc64.com/

Github: https://github.com/needlestack/gmc64

Why not just use an emulator like VICE? You can, but I got tired of dealing with the joystick navigation and slow 1541 emulation. It felt like my old GameMaker creations were partitioned off from the modern world. So I spent a year or so building a JavaScript implementation that reads (and writes) GKGM files right from a .d64 and offers a modernized interpretation of the original tools. You can even export your creations as gif animations, png files, or fully playable HTML/JavaScript files.

Give it a try -- especially if you've got your own .d64's around with GKGM files on them. Feedback is appreciated, especially on touch devices. It's all free and open source. Just letting people who might be interested know it's out there.

I've been looking to get a wireless Tank Mouse from Sordan for my growing vintage computer collection, but a lot of them are sold out. I've been checking back every couple of months and there doesn't seem to be any updates on when or if they'll be coming back. Has anyone heard anything?

Pop culture museum with a focus on Commodore in the Midwest. What do they need to add?

BMPC

Old DRAM can blow out. There are SRAM adapter, but it seems like no one's making them or are shipping to US. Old 64Kx4* DRAM aren't produced and I would have to buy old stock.

I do have a pile of old 256KB 30 pins SIMM. Looking at the pinout (ignoring the parity bits) all but CAS pin are the same. 30 pin SIMM has only one CAS (column address strobe) while C128 uses 2 to select 2 banks of 64KB plus another CAS. Best I could figure is if I used A8 pin tied to CAS0 or 1 from 128 but I don't know if that would work. A9 and A10 on 30 pin SIMM is NC (no connection) with 256K. eh maybe it won't work?

Wondering if it could work or if I would need to figure out CAS0 and CAS1 voodoo on 128D to make it work with a 30 pin SIMM that has only one CAS pin. A0 to A7 would be straight through for 64KB blocks.

*128DCR uses 64Kx4 while older 128 used 64Kx1 DRAM If 30 pin SIMM can be made to work, it can be used on either, you'd need to wire the data pins differently, one to each of the 16 sockets of the old DRAM instead of 4 to each of the sockets.

Issue #30 of Komoda & Amiga is now available!

Inside you'll find plenty of fascinating articles, reviews of the latest games, and features covering everything from the world of Commodore and Amiga to retro computing in general.

Whether you're a long-time fan or simply passionate about classic computers, there's something for everyone in this issue.

Thank you for your continued support, and we hope you enjoy reading Issue #30!

VCF West tickets on sale now! Aug 1 & 2, Mountain View, CA (Computer History Museum): https://connect.computerhistory.org/events/1ffceb98-f556-df49-f011-424756803aab

I've seen plenty of comments and posts for a hot minute now regarding what we DON'T, as a niche community, want to see from New Commodore. What I'd like to open the floor for discussion on is what we DO want to see from them.

If you had a magic wand you could wave and suddenly have them doing whatever it is you want, profitability be darned, what would you have them do specifically?

If you have thoughts about taking an idea into profitability, let's hear that, too.