Our onsite team (= @franky ) is all set up to broadcast live onsite from the X-party in Someren, Holland. So if you can't be there in person, follow on Twitch or Scenesat.
Interesting fault: After playing around with my childhood C64 breadbin from 1983, the screen suddenly lost all contrast and went very dark. #retrocomputing#commodore#c64 1/3
I finally finished Sam‘s Journey and I must say it’s an extremely well done game. I „only“ got 63% score, so retrying a couple of the levels will definitely be on the menu! #commodore#c64#retrogaming#SamsJourney
After getting the #Commodore#C64 and #C128 running again, the next device to repair is the #C1571.
It had #corrosion and #rust on the main board and the power supply is beyond repairworthiness. I'd replace the latter with a #meanwell RD-35 with 5 and 12 volt output.
One #diode was rusty, a few traces needed #cleaning and five #resistor looked bad. Hope the black hybrid chip is still okay.
Sadly, the lower read head seems to be broken, my work might've been in vain. #floppydrive#retrocomputer
I finally did it and moved to a more appropriate "home realm" for a #FreeBSD enthusiast. Thanks @stefano for offering this!
Moving followers worked flawlessly, restoring all my settings was pretty quick, but of course all my old toots are left on https://techhub.social/@zirias 🙈
So I guess I'll introduce myself here by writing a little thread, adding a few of my works that someone might find interesting. But first a bit of "who am I":
I'm a "professional" software architect/developer (mostly #dotnet platform in the day job), FreeBSD hobby-admin and ports committer, #C64 fan (and occassionally coder and even musician), and apart from computers also interested in music (playing a few instruments myself), traveling, cooking, sometimes sports, sometimes politics ... but probably won't toot about any non-technical stuff (or, very very rarely).
Unfortunately this project is stalled, I hope to find the time to continue it. Here's a #C64 conversion of an old #Amiga type-in game found in some german magazine (AmigaBASIC). It's pure #mos6502#assembly and actually adds lots of features to the original (like a score, like music, like fast scrolling and fast movements ... btw the sound/music code is also hand-written, no tracker used).
One of my "dream projects" (maybe after retirement 🙈😁) would be to create yet another :commodore: #C64 OS. One that works on a vanilla unextended machine.
There are quite a few around of course. To make something meaningful, you have to think about what could give #retrocomputing enthusiasts an excuse to use their breadbin once in a while 😏
I think it should just support very basic #Internet service clients, like Email, IRC, BBS (via TCP), ... of course this means to require one hardware extension (apart from your obligatory floppy drive): Some #ethernet (or wifi) hardware. There are a few around, so "drivers" for those would be needed.
This sets the baseline of features required. Multitasking will probably be unavoidable (clients need to be able to do stuff "in the background", like e.g. respond to IRC PING messages). There's already a LOT of complexity attached to that requirement. You'll need an executable format with relocation info, and a program loader doing the relocation on startup of a new process. You'll need a concept how to deal with the tiny hardware stack (partition it, relying on apps not to overflow? copy it around on each context switch?). You'll need a concept how to dynamically allocate memory (probably just page-wise). And so on.
A windowing system IMHO makes no sense at all on that machine. The UI should focus on text (maybe a set of virtual consoles?). Support for GUI apps might be possible, but then only "full-screen". 🤔
Using Visual Studio & Vice emulator with Kick Asembler to develop native Commodore 64 programs in assembly language. Even pushes your symbols to the monitor!
New video:
Zombie Floppy: How To Revive A Broken 1541 Head
The Commodore 1541 floppy drive is a real workhorse, that was used by millions of C64 users.The Mitsumi drive assembly has the annoying fault to have their drive heads fail due to some wires going open inside of the read/write head. A clever user by the nickname of Ruuudi has designed a little bodge PCB to make the dead drive head work again:
Finally arrived on Disk 4 of #SamsJourney. That’s the last disk! The previous level was called „Platform Hell“ and yeah that’s true! #commodore#c64#retrogaming
Another dead C1541 on our desk. This one was reported as "not working". It was gutted for its 6502 and 6522 VIA chips, but supposedly even with those in place it wasn't working. So let's have a closer look... #commodore#c64#c1541#floppydrive