It had quit some time in the eighties and was found by my dad a few years ago when he cleaned out his storage shed. My brother brought it back to our place. After a lot of searching on the net we found this page which enabled us to diagnose the main problem. (a bad video interface chip) We Found an new-old-stock one online for $24.00. Fortunately it just plugs into the motherboard without soldering. After replacing the audio/video cable and power supply plug, we got it back up 100%! The tape drive and game carts all work too.
We also got set up to download new software for it which we can upload via audio cassette.
This was only possible thanks to the Commodore fans having archived a lot of useful info for many years.
Actually we just bought that one. The Tac 3 behind it needs a new plug. We wore out the original Commodore stick.
>3DGURU
Pixel shaders? It’s lucky it’s got pixels!
>Howitzer
Got a tape recorder with a microphone jack? You’ll also need a cable with a male 1/8th inch phone plug on each end. (I got one from Radio Shack) One end goes to the mic jack of the recorder, the other goes to the line out jack of your computer’s sound card. Then you need some translation software:
and an emulator helps to test/edit programs :
>Mmph! http://www.viceteam.org/ As Mmph! suggests this is the one to get for Commodores.
Then you need some games!
Llamasoft (naturally!) > http://www.llamasoft.co.uk/frontpage.php / Softography / 8 Bit / Look for your comp. This is Jeff Minter’s site and he has some of his original 8 bit games available for free! There are many other sites with 8 bit computer programs available for free as well. Be sure to check the license info.
>migero Haven’t seen that one yet sound cool!
This is all stuff I just discovered myself. There’s even new hardware being made for these comps. The joystick I got came with a circuit board that allows a C64 to read a flash memory card!
Apparently a concerted effort was made to document every game for the C64.
The database contains 20000 entries with full support of the High Voltage SID Collection (HVSC #47).
The collection includes:
over 2900 games with linked “Original Tape”,
over 2000 games with linked “Original Disk”,
over 200 games with linked “Original Cartridge”,
over 5200 games with linked cover scan,
and lots of other Extras.
You can search for a game and download it: Impossible MissionLink on bottom right.