Autopsy:
Today i picked up two Commodore 64, both are in poor condition and Broken.
The first one with the chip SID 6581 can play a garbled sound and the closing hooks broken, the other one with the chip PLA 906114, 7406, CIA 6526 dead. I made some cleaning and repaired the problems.
Autopsy:
MSX was the name of a standardized home computer architecture in the 1980s conceived by Kazuhiko Nishi, then Vice-president at Microsoft Japan and Director at ASCII Corporation. It is said that Microsoft led the project as an attempt to create unified standards among hardware makers.
from Wikipedia:
On 27 June 1983, the date considered the birthday of the MSX standard, the MSX was formally announced during a press-conference, and a slew of big Japanese firms declared their plans to introduce machines. The Japanese companies avoided the intensely competitive US home computer market, which was in the throes of a Commodore-led price war.
Only Spectravideo and Yamaha briefly marketed MSX machines in the US. Spectravideo’s MSX enjoyed very little success, and Yamaha’s CX5M model, built to interface with various types of MIDI equipment, was billed more as a digital music tool than a standard personal computer.
source: wikipedia
I had to make this change to get the Expansion Ram 320XL running on my Atari 800XL:
source: atariage.com
Autopsy:
The Expansion Ram 320XL is a external plug and play 320kB memory expansion card for Atari 600XL and 800XL machines designed by ctirad a user of AtariAge Forum.
Additionally there is a possibility to disable internal memory and remap it onto card (switchable via jumper), thus one can “fix” many failing XLs without even looking inside. Also, an unexpanded 16kB 600XLs can be upgraded to 320XL without any additional work.
The Expansion Ram 320XL uses banking via bits 2,3,5,6 and 4 of PORTB. As you can see this is compatible with “Atari magazine” expansion rather than a most common RAMBO or Compy shop setup, however I have to say the comaptibility with both old and new software is excellent. There can be only problem with some programs, which does use the separate Antic/CPU banking.
The Installation is very easy. The Atari 600XL users will just plug it into PBI port. For Atari 800XL is a bit more complicated, because Atari decided to remove 5V power from the PBI connector from it. Thus 800XL users will have either to use additional power cable which will fit into joystick port or solder one wire inside atari to make the PBI port powered like on 600XL (look photo).
For more information and price visit the atariage.com.
source: atariage.com
Micro SwinSID KIT by Peter Sieg:
Certainly you can’t expect perfect emulation, but we are very close, the audio is much more clean than the original SID chip, if the project continues on this road we will arrive very soon on the perfect emulation.
Micro SwinSID (SwinSID88) is a hardware replacement for legendary SID sound chip which was placed in every Commodore C64 computer.
This project is based on the microcontroller ATMEGA88PU from Atmel and the emulation code is written by Swinkels. The first version of the pcb (prototype) was made by Crisp.
For more information and price visit the forum64.de.
Recent Comments