5 ms·
Commodore 64 VIC-II 6567/6569 Replacement Project
- hougaard 3y agoJust reviewed by Adrian: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bak-MePFsJ0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bak-MePFsJ0
- irdc 3y agoRetro-YouTuber Adrian Black did a video on the VIC-II-Kwawari just this weekend: https://youtu.be/bak-MePFsJ0 https://youtu.be/bak-MePFsJ0. TL;DW: works well, kinda awesome.
- basementcat 3y agoIn addition to providing VGA and DVI output, this optionally adds a blitter and hardware multiplier and divider to the c64.
- snvzz 3y agoAnd configurable color palette, and some video modes, including a pet-compatible 80 column one.
- jansan 3y agoI would like to learn about the background of the project developers. Not their names and where they are from, but how they got the knowledge to realize projects like this. Are they hobbyists who work in unrelated fields and just learned this from books and videos? Do they have degrees in electronics and do work like this in their jobs? Stuff like this looks almost superhuman to me and I would like to know how one can get the abilities to pull this off.
- lstodd 3y agoI know nothing about this project devs, but I made a framebuffer/driver for my old EGA monitor out of an ARM Cortex-M7 devboard, some SRAM pulled out of old 486 boards (cache memory they were) and a level converter. It did not go as far as being worthy enough to be published, but it worked. It is not particularly superhuman, me not having any degrees or related work, just some years playing with electronics as a hobby, then taking old IBM EGA manual and designing the thing in a couple of evenings. It's not rocket science :) However nowadays even rocket science isn't. Everything is pretty simple, especially if you throw sufficiently large FPGAs on the problem.
- jacquesm 3y agoYour skills are valuable.
- jacquesm 3y agoUsually they do this sort of thing professionally and they use these skills in their hobby projects as well. An electrical engineering degree would be a good start to acquire these kind of skills, alternatively a hardcore HAM or very serious hardware hobby.
- JKCalhoun 3y agoI worked with a software engineer at Apple that played with FPGAs on the side. So maybe as a hobbyist it is doable.
- jwr 3y agoIt's a good occasion to mention the Ultimate64: https://ultimate64.com/Ultimate64 https://ultimate64.com/Ultimate64 Gideon isn't very good at advertising, so not everyone knows this even exists. It's a complete C64 emulation motherboard. You mount it into an existing C64, place the SID in a socket (for real analog SID sound) and enjoy a modernized C64 with perfect zero-delay HDMI output, great sound, 1541 drive emulation, cartridges, etc. It still blows my mind that you can plug in a USB stick containing every C64 game ever written. This thing is really impressive and after you've used it for a while, it's actually hard to go back to the "real" C64 motherboard :-) Implementing all this on an FPGA is a mind-boggling feat, and I have nothing but the highest respect for Gideon.
- snvzz 3y ago>Gideon isn't very good at advertising He's so bad at it that I thought none of the Ultimate64 was open source hardware. But most if not all of it is.
- jacquesm 3y agoLikewise Dennis van Weeren's 'MiniMig' Amiga do-over: https://www.minimig.ca/ https://www.minimig.ca/
- Findecanor 3y ago> You mount it into an existing C64 There are also replacement C64C cases, mechanical keyboards and at least two SID-chip replacements based on ARM-based MCUs available. ARMSID is the most well known of the SID boards (I forget the other one)
- PhasmaFelis 3y ago> It still blows my mind that you can plug in a USB stick containing every C64 game ever written. This reminds me of a friend who had every Atari 2600 game ever written on a 3.5" floppy...
- rcarmo 3y agoThe amount of C64 projects out there is pretty amazing. Having been a Sinclair user, I am almost envious (although there are plenty of software emulators that deliver a very nice experience)
- Toenex 3y agoDon't forget the Spectrum ZX Next (https://www.specnext.com/ https://www.specnext.com/) if you can get one. I managed to get a N-GO clone from ebay last year (https://manuferhi.com/p/n-go-full-include-wifi-rpi-zero https://manuferhi.com/p/n-go-full-include-wifi-rpi-zero) which is excellent.
- peter_d_sherman 3y agoGreat work! Also, I think it is a brilliant idea to have included DVI/HDMI output for this chip -- which didn't support it in its original incarnation; i.e., DVI/HDMI didn't exist in the 1980's...