5 ms·

The 6526 (CIA) was the first chip I could fix by replacing the broken one to another functioning one. Those CIAs are at high risks, because they are directly co

The 6526 (CIA) was the first chip I could fix by replacing the broken one to another functioning one. Those CIAs are at high risks, because they are directly connected to the 2 joystick ports of the C64. You just need to touch some pins at the port and you probably grill your CIA with static electricity. Unfortunatly the CIAs getting rarer and rarer, because the cannot reproduced by FMPGs until today, so you need to get a space CIA from another machine. Maybe in the future this will work with replications.

rollcat 4y ago
Recently an entire C64 was built from scratch using modern parts, I think there were some FPGAs involved. It's unfortunate that the design is so brittle (maybe good idea to mod a protective shutter), but I wouldn't worry about future repairability. Also TIL that C64OS is a thing. Maybe C64 is the design we should be looking into when considering permacomputing.
- Aldipower 4y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34389496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34389496 Hey, if you referring to this video, I made a comment there that the CIAs are straight out of the eighties. It was a little bit clickbait. The C64 was build from scratch, but not all parts were freshly made. Absolutely the C64 is a thing for permacomputing, haha.
- dongecko 4y ago
  There is also the evo64 project which rebuild the c64 with modern parts.
Findecanor 4y ago
One thing that people do to break the first CIA chip is to connect a gamepad from a Sega Master System or for the Mega Drive/Genesis. They work fine on other systems that accept "Atari-compatible" joysticks, such as the Atari VCS, Atari 8-bit, Amiga, etc. so you'd think they'd work fine here too, but no. Sega had put the pull-up resistors in the controller instead of on the motherboard, thus providing positive current on each input pins when a button/direction is not pressed. But for the C64, the inputs are supposed to be disconnected when not active, and when CIA #1 is reading the keyboard, the extra current could overload the chip. You could make an adaptor though with a diode on each input line. (The adaptor should also route Vcc to pin 5 which is Sega's Vcc pin)

rollcat 4y ago

Recently an entire C64 was built from scratch using modern parts, I think there were some FPGAs involved. It's unfortunate that the design is so brittle (maybe good idea to mod a protective shutter), but I wouldn't worry about future repairability. Also TIL that C64OS is a thing. Maybe C64 is the design we should be looking into when considering permacomputing.

Aldipower 4y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34389496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34389496 Hey, if you referring to this video, I made a comment there that the CIAs are straight out of the eighties. It was a little bit clickbait. The C64 was build from scratch, but not all parts were freshly made. Absolutely the C64 is a thing for permacomputing, haha.
dongecko 4y ago
There is also the evo64 project which rebuild the c64 with modern parts.

Findecanor 4y ago

One thing that people do to break the first CIA chip is to connect a gamepad from a Sega Master System or for the Mega Drive/Genesis. They work fine on other systems that accept "Atari-compatible" joysticks, such as the Atari VCS, Atari 8-bit, Amiga, etc. so you'd think they'd work fine here too, but no. Sega had put the pull-up resistors in the controller instead of on the motherboard, thus providing positive current on each input pins when a button/direction is not pressed. But for the C64, the inputs are supposed to be disconnected when not active, and when CIA #1 is reading the keyboard, the extra current could overload the chip. You could make an adaptor though with a diode on each input line. (The adaptor should also route Vcc to pin 5 which is Sega's Vcc pin)