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Hardware View archives
Commodore 64 and 128 RAM Expansion. COOL  187 °
Nov 06 2011 12:45 PM | Gandalf42 in Hardware
Digital Audio Concepts have recently unveiled their latest bit of kit for the Commodore 8-bit line; The RAM Expansion Unit. This piece of hardware comes to you in the form of a cartridge which can be supplied with up to one megabyte (1mb) of high-speed DRAM controlled by a standard 8726 REC chip.

The REC chip is in limited supply, so if you are looking for a plug-n-play device (i.e. without having to scrounge up your own REC) you're encouraged to order early. This REU is also 100% compatible with software written for Commodores original expander.. and includes software which is aware of the "Beyond 512k" hack.
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A Commodore Pet in an FPGA. COOL  176 °
Nov 02 2011 10:15 PM | Gandalf42 in Hardware
Thomas recently started in on a project to recreate his old Commodore Pet computer. He's designing it in a Xilinx Spartan-6 FPGA using a Digilent Nexys3 development board.

Features:
  • Built on a Digilent Nexys3 FPGA evaluation board.
  • Implemented in Verilog, synthesised by Xilinx ISE 13.2 tools.
  • Custom 6502 implementation clocked at 100Mhz.
  • 640x400 @ 60 Mhz VGA output. Each pixel of the PET's 320x200 screen is doubled in size.
  • 16K ROM (including character rom). 16K RAM.
  • PS/2 keyboard input translated to PET multiplexed keyboard.
  • Simulates cassette data input/output over serial port.
  • CB2 audio.
You can follow his development logs on his project page.


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Classic joystick to USB adapter. COOL  143 °
Oct 22 2011 01:35 PM | Gandalf42 in Hardware
Markus Gritsch has recently developed an adapter to allow you to use classic 9-pin Atari style joysticks over USB.

Marcus implemented the design using the PIC24FJ64GB002 microcontroller with some basic interfacing electronics and squeezed it down to a nice form factor. He now uses it to play games on VICE with his Competition Pro Retro joystick.

You can download the schematics and firmware here.
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ZoomFloppy 2.0 Software & Firmware released. COOL  145 °
Oct 20 2011 11:40 PM | Gandalf42 in Hardware
There has been a new release of the ZoomFloppy firmware. It's currently considered beta, so there may be some hidden kinks yet to be ironed out.

For those not in the know, the ZoomFloppy is an interface board for transferring Commodore 64/128 disk images to and from native Commodore disk drives.

Some of the improvements are:
  • Added support for IEEE-488 drives. (Implemented by Thomas Winkler.)
  • Added experimental support for 1571 serial nibbling via the SRQ protocol.
    Now you don't need a parallel cable with a 1571. Implemented by Arnd Menge.
  • Added support for low-level drive analysis with a 1541 index-hole sensor.
    This works only on drives with a parallel port and nibtools.
  • Bugfix: cbmcopy -r or cbmread now no longer hangs at the end of a transfer.
  • Bugfix: Don't reset the bus twice if previous command was interrupted and
    this command is "cbmctrl reset".
  • Bugfix: Increase reset time to 100 ms to be sure all drives are reset.
  • Linux build fix for more modern kernels.
ZoomFloppy 2.0 Manual
ZoomFloppy and OpenCBM v2.0 Firmware
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