Mike, First of His Name

Knocked up a quick cartridge today on one of the PCBs I had hanging around and remembered I'd impulse purchases a heap of coloured pin headers and jumpers last year, so I busted those out and made it as fabulous as possible.

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Mike, First of His Name

We're back in business, baby!

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Mike, First of His Name

myretrocomputer.com/

So these look really nice and I'd love to have a Commodore-styled modern computer, but holy shit that's a LOT of money for an empty case.

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Mike, First of His Name

A batch of components arrived today, so I built up an RF modulator replacement board for the and the picture improvement is quite noticeable.

This is on my "sacrificial" 64 board for testing, eventually I plan to put one of these in the 128, but I have a bunch of other things for that in transit as well, so I'll wait for that to arrive and have one big upgrade day.

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Mike, First of His Name

This looks pretty unimpressive, but I've been chipping away at a little framework to hang a simple C64 game off of for a while now.

There are no graphics defined, so the screen's mostly junk, but as of yesterday that's a double-buffered, smooth-scrolling display right there with a stable status line for score.

Honestly, 90% of my fiddling has been how to format the code and run the builds. I kinda know how I'm going to structure it all now though.

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Mike, First of His Name

For someone who remembers having to restart the computer and reload the entire assembler environment from a floppy disk every time you wanted to actually test run the code you wrote (because you only had one computer) an environment like this kinda feels like easy mode.

Not to mention the whole other monitor with reference docs and an entire internet of information ...

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Mike, First of His Name

Who'd have thought that commenting my assembly code would lead to me getting a song stuck in my head?

I have only myself to blame.

#6502

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Mike, First of His Name

Finally knocked a long-standing to do list item and got a nice little build environment going for generating cartridge images.

I've got the basic code running to set up the system and run a little loop, so I can now chip away at building a rudimentary little side scroller game or something to really get my #6502 assembly knowledge back to a functional level. Then maybe try one of my more ambitious ideas!

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Mike, First of His Name

The point to setting up the this evening was to stress test the 1541 after putting a new power supply in it. I used the to write D64 images back out to physical floppy disks and then started up a bunch of stuff from them.

Worked great! I can turn disks into images and back again easily now.

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Mike, First of His Name

Some pretty dedicated nerdery going on here this evening. Probably should order a pizza at some point.

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Mike, First of His Name

Really hard to get a good photo, but all the bits of my work in its hacked together form! Now I just need to get it all into a case or on a single board or something.

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Mike, First of His Name

Haha! Huge success!

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Mike, First of His Name

New toy day! Totally going to write the shit out of some 8k ROMs now! My own DIY cartridges are not far off.

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Mike, First of His Name

Oh wow, I'm going to have to have one of these. I hope they don't cost a million dollars.

youtube.com/watch?v=4yOch48SSc

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Mike, First of His Name

This little hacked-together setup ran off its fully-charged battery pack for about 2 hours or so last night, that's with screen on and running a demo in Vice the whole time.

I'm happy with that.

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Mike, First of His Name

I've been watching the development update posts on Twitter for this for a while, and finally got to play it on a real this evening:

sarahjaneavory.itch.io/neutron

Great new little shooter game. Treat yourself to it.

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Mike, First of His Name

Did a little fooling around with my box. Roughed out screen location with a cardboard panel, and threw in some battery charging controller bits I had in a drawer. Charges on USB for now but I have a tiny 5v PSU on the way to go in there.

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Mike, First of His Name

Finally got my little screen and some time to play. My is alive ... albeit loosely mounted in the case.

Need to get the Dremel out and make some holes now!

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Mike, First of His Name

Anyone interested in a SX mini? Just got this little case and looks like it'll be the perfect size. Waiting on a better screen to be delivered now and I'll start playing. Plenty of space for a battery pack too!

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Mike, First of His Name

OK this is neat: accentual.com/bmc64/

Vice emulator for the Raspberry Pi running on bare metal, no Linux layer to slow things down.

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