The Commodore 64 has a Successor (and it's amazing!) | Nostalgia Nerd

[Music] okay very exciting day because a package has arrived from trends electronic and it's a mega 65 oh yes let's get into it right after i thank squarespace for sponsoring so what is the mega 65 well according to the mega65.org website it's a 21st century realization of the c65 heritage a complete 8-bit computer running around 40 times faster than a c64 whilst being highly compatible but wait what is a c65 well otherwise known as the c64dx it's a prototype computer that commodore were working on during the early 90s essentially it was intended to be a souped-up commodore 64 backwards compatible but stealing some of the features from the amiga line a halfway house if you will of course with the amiga doing well commodore quickly realized the redundancy of this project and threw it on the trash pile with their numerous other projects however a few prototypes did live on and they now fetch significant amounts of money when sold so some fine folks at the museum of electronic games and art hence mega a non-profit entity dedicated to preserving digital heritage decided to work on bringing this product to the masses the mega 65 is an open source recreation of this abandoned machine along with a few upgrades here and there what i have here is the first version of it the dev kit intended to allow developers to become familiar with the technology and expand its reach now this was a limited run of a hundred machines and it wasn't cheap but all proceeds will help push the project forward to realizing the full machine in the near future and that's a cause i definitely want to support it's also about 90 000 cheaper than buying an original c65 if you believe that last selling price so think of it kind of like the commodore version of the zx spectrum next they've just taken a different route to get there anyway being a dev kit i have to build it first so let's begin now i ordered this back in june and trends electronic were charged with putting this kit together handily the mega 65 team have created an assembly video so i'm going to follow that as i go oh look at that main board what a thing of beauty we'll revisit it in a minute as you can see the main shell is acrylic it feels like putting together a school project but you also get a repurposed floppy drive the keyboard a few cables and the main board of course putting the whole thing together was pretty straightforward and you get to rip off copious amounts of protective covering so that's satisfying but i did have a few issues with my particular kit first is that these clear washers were definitely the wrong size rather than slipping onto these screws easily they required considerable force to even start to thread on this isn't how washes are supposed to be so where they were required for spacing i substituted my own rubber washers which worked out quite nicely the keyboard i must say is phenomenal it's a mechanical affair with cherry mx switches and double shot keycaps each press requires slightly more than your usual amount of force but it feels so sturdy and expensive i believe this is the final keyboard so that will be on the finished mega 65 which is nice you don't get a battery with this kit but luckily i had one lying about to power the real-time clock so the other issue i had was the flimsiness of the plexi laser case the top panel just didn't want to align properly and the only thing which made it was slight force unfortunately this slight force also snapped the acrylic it's not that noticeable but you know still quite irritating the final part is to pop the sd card in via this access hole on the bottom and that's pre-loaded with boot software and the like and there we go i mean it looks absolutely stunning even with that crack i love clear plastic already but the final product really does look amazing i actually think i prefer it to the c65 case i mean look at it just look at it i also seem to have bagged an incredibly low serial number there were what 200 i think original c65 prototypes made so the mega 65 team have kicked off this batch starting at 200 which means mine is what a third in the line so the power cable is unfathomably tiny so i hope they extend that for the finished product but anyway i'm just going to plug in some speakers via the 3.5 millimeter jack and then connect it directly to my trusty ibm vga flat screen time for the moment of truth [Music] oh [Music] left to its own devices it boots straight into mega maze and already you can tell this thing is distinctly commodore in descendancy the sound the screen resolution the colors man you can see why they chose this game it's simple but it shows off how much more advanced the c65 hardware it was when compared to the c64 so what do we actually have powering this well it's fpga driven using a xylinx artix a7 200t semiconductor other cores are in development such as amiga and atari st but they'll come in due course what we've got is a 40 megahertz 8 bit cpu with 384 kilobytes of fast ram and 8 megabytes of serial ram or it will have in the final version sound is via four sids opl2 is apparently a work in progress and there's four channels 16-bit dma-based audio integrated into fpga we've got a vic-4 video controller with vga and hdmi out which is nice there's also a 100 megabit lan and an expansion connector which can be used with commodore 64 cartridges and future expansions of course we've also got the licensed commodore 65 rom which gives us this boot screen i'm sure many of you are familiar with this screen but i'm also sure that many of you have actually never used it in the flesh these machines offer that chance and frankly it's amazing i've been wanting to get my hands on one of these for ages i love what the team are doing here so let's dig a bit deeper right after we dig deeper into websites it was a close call today whether i built this mega 65 or that arcade cabinet in the corner anyway earlier i was just thinking about those websites where you could upload high scores remember those well thanks to my sponsor squarespace you could set up a website exclusively to record high scores in minutes i mean you could set up a website in minutes for whatever you want and it will be automatically optimized for mobile check out squarespace.com nostalgianerd for 10 off your first website or custom domain create something that's yours okay so the menu that you'll use most often is the freeze menu you can get to it by holding down the restore button for one second the borders flash and then we get this screen so from here you can change the cpu mode between 4502 and auto which really doesn't seem to do much at present change the rom the cpu frequency between one two three and a half and 40 megahertz swap the joystick ports over enable or disable the cartridge slot change the video between ntsc and pal and also activate various other screens monitor allows you to debug the screen p unprotects the rom a brings up the audio screen where you can change all kinds of output settings and even more in advanced mode all of this and the actual machine state can be saved with the f7 key and then you can scroll through the slots using the left and right cursors which is nice although the on-screen documentation for this bit is a bit lacking pokes sprite editor and poke finder don't seem to be ready at this stage but then remember this is only a development kit so we've got unfinished software and a fair few bugs to boot it's from this screen but you can also access both physical and virtual disk drives now you can actually plug in an external drive if you wish such as this commodore 1541 you can also use the onboard three and a half inch drive or you can access either of the sd cards we've got the one in the bottom but you can also insert a micro sd card in the back which then takes priority over the former interestingly you can't actually dump files onto the sd card directly the mega 65 only seems to work with disk images and d81 images at that so if you've got a load of d64 images well you'll need to decompress them to d81 files before loading them on you also need to format the sd card according to the mega 65's particular wishes and you do that through the configuration menu both the power switch and the reset switch are on the left hand side although for this we'll need to do a cold boot whilst holding down alt turn it on and you get this screen there's a keyboard test utility a configuration menu and a disk management utility it's from here that you can format your sd card and this sets up a couple of partitions makes the card bootable but then also allows you to insert it into your pc and copy across files as needed you can see that we've got both the mega 65 rom on the original card along with the freeze screen program the audio mix program and a few disk images so you need these files on the card to access those earlier menus if you boot the system without an sd card inserted you get this screen which doesn't seem to do much at all anyway we'll come back to those supplied disk images a bit later the configuration utility allows you to change joystick and mouse emulation settings chipset and real-time clock settings standard video mode some audio options and to specify your mac address if you were to hook this thing up to your network but for now let's look at some compatibility and some games on booting you can interrupt the auto load to that maze program by pressing run stop this plonks you straight into 65 basic or basic 10. you can access your disk images from here just like you would using a commodore 64 or you can type go 64 to boot into commodore 64 mode this is also possible directly by holding down the mega key on boot now once you've mounted a disk image shift and run stop will automatically load the first program on the disk or you can do it the old-fashioned way one really nice feature about this system is that by default it will produce disk sounds to add atmosphere as they say even if you're not reading from an actual disk plugging a joystick into port 2 is as easy as it has ever been so let's get cracking let's kick off with driller okay so it loads and everything looks like how i remember this game on my 64 when i was drawn into this wonderful new 3d world of intrigue and curiosity of course with standard clock speeds it's slow but speed up to 2 megahertz and it's a little better 3.5 megahertz and it's a bit better again 40 megahertz and yeah actually that's a bit too much okay how about stunt car racer well the screen is looking a little corrupt here and gets even more corrupt when playing with speed settings in part that's due to the system forcing programs to freeze halfway through code execution but it's also because at the moment i've got the 65 in ntsc mode now this ibm screen doesn't like 50 hertz but by switching to an hdmi output i can hook it up to a monitor and if you'll excuse me stretched perspective we get a much cleaner representation of stunt car racer two megahertz is very much the optimal speed here and actually it's incredibly playable at this pace two megahertz nice if i could stay on the track at least how about the c64 first person game mood which is doom backwards well here's a game which actually runs pretty well at 1 megahertz but ramp it up to 40 and it's as smooth as the devil's arse honestly i recommend trying this game out if you haven't already it was about this time that i thought a cartridge game would be nice maybe one of those excellent boxed examples i received the other week okay so as it stands the 65 isn't enjoying the cartridge games i have i tried a few in various screen modes and they all crashed so i suspect this is another dev kit related issue which will be solved in due course alright let's get back to basic there's already a pretty comprehensive manual for this thing you can download it from the mega 65 website and the amount of detail on the basic commands is quite phenomenal remember all the games i just loaded are really just commodore 64 games but the 65 has so much more scope and potential potential that was never realized it's a lot faster it's got new bitplane modes and it has a complete dos interface for using that three and a half inch drive and the mega 65 iteration takes it a lot further than even the original intended specs there's a whole new world to explore come on guys don't include test images if i have to censor it's also pretty user friendly in this incarnation as a very simple visual demonstration you can change the colors with the press of a key you can switch to graphics mode you can even activate the matrix mode debugger by holding down the mega key and pressing tab matrix mode debugger i mean i just like seeing that screen effect over and over you can switch between 40 and 80 columns on the fly i also like switching between upper and lower case something quite mesmerizing about that oh and you can create a basic window so by pressing escape followed by t you can define a window size and then basic will be entirely confined within that window yeah that's quite cool which is going to be hugely useful for coding all of this is quickly and simply explained in the manual whatever command do you have well you can access the core menu by holding down the mega key and pressing no scroll on boot so this shows you the future scope for additional fpga cores i mean overall i'm really impressed you know this machine has so much potential and so much scope but it's hard to know where to begin you even get the version of geos out of a box although this is a work in progress and it did have problems working with my amiga mouse the amiga mouse does work absolutely fine in the configuration menus but in geos only clicks are sensed no movement again this is the development system and this video is really just to give you an idea of how this machine works and why it's here i mean i'm barely scratching the surface but what this does mean is i'm properly invested in this now i'm really looking forward to what the final product holds if you fancy having a dabble with what's on offer you can grab an emulator through the mega 65 site in the meantime i'm going to leave you with some stunning shots of the case and some of the demos and programs included on the sd card including the c65 notepad which was made entirely in basic 10. so stay tuned for more thanks for watching and have a great evening [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Nostalgia Nerd

Views: 334,911

Keywords: mega 65, commodore 65, mega 65 dev kit

Id: 2-voZvEtz48

Length: 20min 22sec (1222 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 30 2020