Blogs

A Proud new(ish) owner of a C128 (that doesn't work)

Fairly recently I got myself a C128. As much as I wanted to just fire it up and see what happends, the sensible side in me told to do as many checks before actual power-up as possible.

Refurbishing my C128

9/4/2018

Eyetoy : Kinetic Combat for the PS2 and the Commodore 128

Today using motion to control games is all the rage, Kinect, Move, Wii, Wii U et al but the PS2 was where it started, Eyetoy was Ground Zero. Deep into the 6th Gen with the 7th Gen licking our heals came the 11th Eyetoy game. I was faced with a seeming impossible task, tight deadlines and the need to push the PS2's pedal to the floor, I needed an edge, something to give me a boost, I found it - a Commodore 128.

 

Frank Buss's WAV to PRG Convertor Script

From Frank Buss's page:

WAV file to sample PRG player converter
This is a converter script, which creates a C64 PRG file from a WAV file, which plays it. It is tested with Python 2.7. First download the script and then call it like this:

python.exe sampler.py
More....

new assembly language programming blog

I'm kicking off a new blog on Assembly language programming (6502, PIC/dsPIC, MIPS, ARM, AMD64) with a shout out to Dave/Bil/Terry/Fred of the Commodore TED series and how it managed ROM-over-RAM...
I was reading the data-space portion of the reference manual for the MIcrochip PIC24EP/dsPIC33EP series of 16-bit micros that came out last year, and thinking "I've seen this before"
It's hosted on Wordpress for now... http://swissembly.wordpress.com
D. Zoss

My C128 at work

Here is my C128 I use to control a miniature railroad layout in scale 1:87. I can control the speed and direction (forward-reverse) of two trains at the same time, street and houses lights, sound, turntable, windmill, lighthouse, signals... and it has also a rf remote control and two CRT monitors to the same computer. In some pictures you can see it. The code program has 430 lines. The boxes near the monitor have the electronics inside like dtmf decoder, digital-analog converter and the power stage to control the 12 volt trains.

The QuadPort

     I would like to tell you about my serial connector junction project, witch is called a "Quad Port".

Single Board Processor/DSP in an Altera

Several years ago I worked with Dr Mike Negin from Mnemonics Inc on a small handheld battery powered DSP that could detect the value of paper currencies and annunciate them.  This is a good example of a general purpose single chip system with onboard processor as an IP, in this case I used the standard NIOS processor from Altera and tweaked it for size and performance.  Different cores are available from www.opencores.org including the 6502.  In this case the magic Juju was all in the code that Dr.

Australian Commodore Users Unite!

A long time ago after finding out that there were people still using these wonderful machines through reading comp.sys.cbm, lemon and other forums I also found out that my childhood Commodore 64 and accessories were still stashed at my parents home! What luck !! So, armed with access to these new forms of communication and my old equipment I started the journey back to Commodore land. On that journey I discovered there were other Aussie's out there who were part of the revivle/retro scene and some time after decided to set up a mailing list so we could converse among ourselves.

Alternative OS(s) for C128, a practical approach

 
 
As a Commodore enthusiast and also as a happy GNU/Linux lover I want to discover all available alternative operation systems for C128 to push it to its edges  and at the same time have a usable system.
 
I start with the hardware listing, these are the main items I am going to use:
 
1. Of course a real C128, with no memory expansion.
2. uIEC/SD as storage device and a SD card.
3. 64NIC+ Ethernet cart.

Commodore Plus 4 World Website

I see the logo and I remember the first time I saw it.  I remember seeing it again when the word 264 had been replaced by Plus4.  What was to be something of a sleeper business machine juststayed a sleeper do to a bad pricing strategy: $299 instead of $79.

If you are a fan of old Commodore Computers, you need to head over to this collection and check it out:
Commodore Plus4 World

Netduino Software Emulator

What could be simpler than small opensource hardware, a software emulation of it.

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