I Found My Ultimate Commodore 64

I came of age in the era of pentiums and PowerMax my favorite childhood Computing memories involve things like playing Rise of the Triad With a Friend by literally dialing into his Windows computer from mine hey John I know you watch these videos sometimes anyway the world of 8-bit micros was just a bit before my time and I can't help but feel like I missed out on something special well recently I lucked into a beautiful working Commodore 64 setup locally and I've picked up a whole bunch of joysticks peripherals modern gizmos and internet connectivity doodads so today join me as I speed run 40 Years of 8-bit micro Computing that I missed out on as a kid so stay tuned foreign and if you enjoy watching a grown man Marvel at computers that are only slightly older than he is I hope you'll consider subscribing to the channel together we're keeping vintage computers out of landfills one by one whether they like it or not ah the mysterious Commodore 64. famous of course for two things one being the best-selling computer model of all time and two having the most terrifying theme song for any computer ever huh don't believe me well take a listen and ever-changing views and computer terminology [Music] the Commodore it won't stop keeping up with me [Music] that was silly now when I was a kid by the time my family finally got a real home computer that wasn't a busted 286 laptop that we found in a flea market we were well into the era of gigantic honking Pentium systems so I grew up obsessed with writing programs in qbasic on my middle school dos computers and then Visual Basic at home anyone remember the whole AOL prog scene but there was always this mysterious Specter of a strange world that came before where my beloved basic wasn't just an application to run from dos or Windows it was everything and the computers they weren't huge hulking behemoths that screamed with fans roaring in hard drives dying they were small silent and dare I say cute I mean the whole computer inside of a keyboard what I never really understood this era of computers when I was a kid even though I missed it by just a couple of years and it wasn't until I discovered the huge amount of Commodore 64 content right here on YouTube that I realized the Simplicity of these basic based micros wasn't a limitation it was a superpower those point-and-click interfaces of Windows and Macintosh hid the computer away behind layers of abstraction but in these old micros the whole computer was right here fully open and available ready to do exactly what you tell it to do so finally after years of Fascination I found just about the ultimate Commodore 64 setup locally with this beautiful monitor fully working system and even the disk drive and you know we do a lot of White Knuckle upgrading around here I think it's about time we just sit back relax and enjoy an old computer for what it is oh God I'm gonna wind up taking this thing apart and fussing with it aren't I so let me show you all the cool stuff I picked up for this machine since I got it we'll play some really cool games and maybe even take this thing online right after this word about today's sponsor PCB way in fact I'm not just here to pitch PCB way I'm here to use PCB way I recently printed up these very lovely pcbs with white solder mask with a very interesting pattern on them by the way it's also PCB Way's fifth annual PCB design contest where you can submit your own Creations for a chance at a bunch of really cool prizes so if you have any PCB or prototyping needs I hope you'll give pcbway.com a try so what really inspired me to finish up this setup here was watching Veronica explains take her Commodore 64 online with a Serial Wi-Fi modem built for the Commodore 64. and that's actually where this cool Linux is awesome and so are you t-shirt comes from and I had no idea about the Vibrant Community of bbs's that can cater to the Commodore 64's unique abilities we'll check out some of those in a bit but first let's check out all the cool stuff I got for this ultimate setup now one big issue facing Commodore 64s today is original power supplies which can be well a little more than just flaky in fact from what everyone tells me these things can go so wrong that they will fry the system so you could recap these and completely redo them or like I have there are aftermarket brand new Commodore 64 power supplies like this one here that I got from Poland these start at like 33 euros and uh the one I got even has a second port to power something else now that we have power sorted we need some way to play games because what good is a Commodore 64 if you're not playing games now I never got the hang of those little black joysticks probably because I have huge Hulk Hands so I found this huge Hulk sized Ultimate Super stick oh man just look at this thing now it doesn't have any of the original packaging and in fact it was sent to me just loose in the Box here ah it's awesome it's even clicky and it has suction cups on the bottom so it can stay in place during our intense gaming sessions now if you know me I'm really more of a trackball person so I found just the thing this weko command and control trackball which uh yeah it's pretty much just a joystick and trackball form check this thing out it is heavy duty and it weighs a lot more than the joystick honestly so yeah we have two options for playing games but what if we want to do something a little more modern like use contiki which is a graphical Mouse based operating system well I found the fabled 1531 Commodore Mouse once again just plugs right into the joystick port and look at that the lovely tank Mouse as it's known hopefully it works so yeah this is a lot of cool stuff but how are we gonna get games on here to play well we do have the lovely 1541 disc drive and it does work but that's a little bit tedious I have something better the Kung Fu flash a cartridge that goes in the cartridge port and takes a Micro SD card with images and then when we want to go online well you've already seen the c64 Wi-Fi modem from retro rewind I also have the c64 Nick which I don't think we're actually going to get a chance to use in this video because I need to get an eprom programmer so we can use some software with it alright so let's hook this thing up and we don't need this disk drive for now or actually at all because we're going to be using this Kung Fu flash to load software and I am so excited to have found this beautiful 1702 monitor which is a color monitor that takes uh yeah chroma Luma and audio because there is a speaker on the side I think under the handle maybe it's on the top I forget but in any event this is going to give us a great picture we just plug into the video port on the back here and we have our aftermarket power supply which has a switch on the supply itself so we plug that into power on the c64 here and then I'll turn this on and then hide it underneath the monitor stand here for that nice clean setup and we should be ready to turn this thing on oh yeah and right into basic now of course we need to run some games and software on this thing or who am I kidding pretty much just games so we have the Kung Fu flash here and I got this from the future was 8-bit and I have added some other software on here that we'll use to test some of our cool stuff here today but this goes right in the cartridge port and now when we turn on the system it's gonna boot right into that cartridge which loads the Kung Fu flash operating system which then lets us explore and execute all the files on this SD card now it came with a whole bunch of stuff including a ton of games and that's really exciting and I've also put some of my own stuff on here but for now here is all the games that I put on here myself such as 3D pinball presented by ass I guess you know this is a fully keyboard controlled game and it's actually a pretty sweet pinball game which I'm not very good at okay now what I'm really excited about here let's hook up our ultimate super stick with dial a speed TM and Auto fire and yeah the buttons are just repeated on each side and I think A and B do the same thing so really this is four copies of the same button now when we restart the system it goes right back into the last thing that was running and I don't know why it was flashing like that but there's something we can do on our Kung Fu Flash because there are these control buttons here so we can red button to reset it and then we can go on the keyboard here delete to go up a directory or home to go back to the root directory so I want to load up a game that I think will use our joystick well this is a game called Awakening which is a modern game written in 2015 as part of a game jam and uh yeah it's pretty epic it's basically a full-on adventure kind of RPG game yeah this joystick works pretty well except uh it the suction cups maybe have kind of lost their suction over time okay let's try something a little more active with our cool Ultimate Super stick oh yeah 1943 doesn't get more active than this game all right oh yeah autofire really makes this game pretty easy yeah just cheating a little bit with Auto fire that's ridiculous yeah just an Unstoppable death machine of course totally fair okay now the joystick was great how about our trackball and uh this really doesn't sound very good it makes like a different noise depending on which way you roll it I do think that's a pool ball in there oh it's terrible you have to really spin it to move and now it stopped working okay this is not very good so I guess we're gonna have to at some point take this thing apart and try to fix it all right let's check and see if our mouse works and we're gonna do that with kantiki now I think this needs to be in Port two oh that's uh that's not right okay mouseport one wow that works great look at that yeah check it out this mouse pointer is way smoother than I expected it would be from this old ball Mouse and look our little sliding pads are melting off that always happens now unfortunately we're not going to be able to do too much with contiki today you see to get contiki browsing the web we need some sort of ethernet solution like this 64 Nick plus which allows us to connect an Ethernet cable and plug this into the cartridge port but there's a problem at least in this setup our cartridge Port is taken up by the Kung Fu Flash and the Kung Fu flash is how we were running contiki so we can't really Swap this in because there's no way to then run contiki except there sort of is because we can Flash an eprom with software and install it here and it will boot up and let us use that software so we could put contiki on an eprom and have a full web internet browsing solution in one single card which is exactly what I want to do just as soon as I get an eprom programmer which I have been putting off but no fear we have another way on the internet this is the c64 Wi-Fi modem so we just need to plug in our Kung Fu flash to the cartridge port and our c64 Wi-Fi modem into the modem Port here oh I think the Commodore just broke now when I turn it on these things just flash rapidly I think I know what's going on though I think I made a big stupid here but we're gonna have to take this apart yeah look at that I blew this fuse right here because I think I did a big stupid and plugged in the Wi-Fi modem while the system was still turned on and hopefully it didn't do any more damage than that thank goodness for these big glass fuses in here [Music] all right well today's lesson is don't plug in a cartridge if the machine is on because if you plug it in kind of crooked you might short out the pins and blow the fuse anyway I have a terminal program on here called CC GMS which is kind of recommended by the people who make the Wi-Fi serial modem and this terminal program is really designed to let you connect to bbs's although this is a more modern release from 2021 Modified by someone called Always but we can F7 to change things like the baud rate and the modem type and the Wi-Fi modem comes at a default of 1200 board but you can spice things up quite a bit so I think I still have mine set for the maximum 9600 and now I'm talking directly to the esp8266 microcontroller that's inside the Wi-Fi modem I can type in at config at plus config to configure things like the Wi-Fi connection flow control oh and action Wi-Fi is a hotspot that I made specifically for this video so you're not gonna find it if you're looking around for it on the internet but now we can actually connect to online services via their host name so we do at DT which is an old Haze modem command but instead of a phone number we can put a web address so particles bbs.dyndns.org port 6400. all right after a couple tries connected to particles BBS yes we support Commodore color 40 columns mode and then look look how beautiful this looks on a Commodore 64. compare that to the last time we connected to particles BBS from an Apple One replica yeah this is awesome and if you're new to bbs's you've never seen one before it's basically what the internet used to be like back in the 80s and even into the 90s you dial into a BBS hosted on another computer and I'm pretty sure particles is hosted on a literal commodore 64. my favorite part of a BBs is the games and I'm pretty sure I still have the high score on some of these games but let's double check my favorite game on here is just word star which is a Word Scramble game Mochi figured out my word which was networking okay so now we have to figure out samuwa tours Center hmm I just think it's so cool that there are these hidden places on the internet that you can connect to with vintage Tech like a Commodore 64 and have a really great experience on talking to people playing games and uh yeah there are tons of bbs's still very active oh man I've been having so much fun with this computer and I'm so incredibly lucky to have found this wonderful setup and I found it all locally amazing and of all the peripherals that I bought for this machine my favorite has to be the ultimate super stick here because I've just been playing a whole bunch of games on this machine with the super stick and it has been a ton of fun there are so many good games both from back in the day and modern games written for the Commodore 64. now there are a few more things I want to do to make this the ultimate ultimate Commodore 64 setup specifically I want to get the 64 Nick plus working which I need software like contiki to use this and to do that I need a different way to load contiki so I need to get an eprom programmer so I can put contiki on an eprom I think that'll work and there's also stuff like the sdiec which is a floppy Drive emulator which would free up the cartridge port and allow me to run software off of disk images but if you enjoyed this video I'd appreciate a thumbs up and if you'd like to see more retro Computing Shenanigans like this please subscribe down below and thank you very much for watching and a special thanks to Camilla noseda Chris allegreta Chris Biggs Chris Calderon Chris Nelson Cobalt retro Tech controlla Rhys Daniel Hubbard Dwight a Spencer Greg from rutk mods Paul Spencer Ryan Scott Thompson and Sue Tech who are my highest tiered patrons and all of my patreon supporters for helping to make these videos possible thank you

Channel: Action Retro

Views: 43,155

Keywords: retro, vintage computers, macintosh, apple, retrocomputing, retro computers

Id: -17KguwXGO4

Length: 22min 33sec (1353 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 05 2022