from 1541 Ultimate homepage:

About 100 plastic cases have arrived, and they look really great! I am glad that black has become the color eventually, and that the material looks the way it does. And I am sure that everyone who is waiting for their unit will be satisfied with the case as well! The remaining cases of the batch that are ordered will arrive a bit later. I’ll update you as soon as I know more.

There is also a downside on the cases; due to the shrinkage of the material along the long side (not very visible, but when you measure you can see it), the board is a very tight fit inside the case. It is therefore very difficult to close it, and once it is closed, well… good luck with opening it! Unfortunately it will cost me a lot of time to build the units together. Hopefully I will get good at it after the first 10 or so.. ;)

Due to the demand, another 100 units (the hardware boards) have been ordered for production and will be ready in about a month, in the end-of-april time frame.

Read more…

Commodore Free Magazine Issue #38

Contents:

• Editorial.
• NEWS:
• – 64Copy receives an update.
• – PS/2 PET Keyboard Adaptor.
• – Amiga Virus Encyclopedia.
• – VICE Updated V2.2
• – C64 Scene Website.
• – IDE V4.1 Available Again.
• – Star Commander Upgraded.
• – Jim Butterfield Commodore Story.
• – LukHash Experimental 8-bit Album.
• – Protovision News Update.
• – HardSID Develops New Products.
• Working C64 PLA Replacement.
• Interview with “Gunther Schmidl”
• CCC U.K. Mini Meeting.
• Minigrafik Introduction.
• Minigrafik for the VIC 20.
• Interview with Michael Kircher.
• Mini Minipaint Tutorial.

source: commodorefree.com

source: ebay auction

Party is over.

This is the C64 Competition results:

C64 Demo:

• 1 – Stateless by Ancients Pledge Inc.

C64 Music:

• 1 – Club Stylier by Jammer.
• 2 – Gerappa 2010 by LiSU.
• 4 – Transplantation by Surgeon.
• 5 – Klopstajlo by booker.
• X – Onelegged Female Breakdance by Randall.
• 7 – Alpenmilch by NecroPolo.
• X – Alice in Wonderland by Jan Harries.

Read more…

The 10th X party will be held from October 1th until October 3rd 2010. The party will be at the new and improved location: De Hoof 18, Someren – the Netherlands. Competitions: C64 Demo, C64 Music and C64 Graphics. source: commodore-gg.hobby.nl x-2010 homepage

Commodore 64 Gold Edition on Ebay.

from Richard Lagendijk Homepage:

This a special edition of the Commodore C64, celebrating the 1.000.000th sale of the C64 in Germany. This is one of the most desirable Commodore items. There are about 300 golden Commodore C64 produced. The numbers from 1.000.000 until 1.000.100 were for the staff of the Commodore factory Braunschweig.

The rest was given to hard- en software companies, magazine-publishers and distributors. The C64 is a computer system with a keyboard, external power-supply and a motherboard. On the motherboard you will find a MOS 6510 processor, RAM / ROM memory, MOS 6569 VIC-II video chip, MOS 6581 SID sound chip and twice a MOS 6526 CIA. PAL version.

source: ebay auction richardlagendijk.nl

Autopsy:

This is my homebrew C2N232 Interface.

from Marko Mäkelä’s homepage:

The C2N232 is a small RS-232 interface that can be plugged to the cassette port of an 8-bit Commodore computer:

• PET series: 2001, 3000 series, 4000 series, 8000 series, 200 series
• PET-II series: CBM 500, 600 or 700 series (P500 or the B series)
• Commodore VC-20, VIC-20 or VIC-1001
• Commodore 64, 4064, 64c or 64G
• Commodore 128, 128D or 128DCR
• Commodore 264 series: 16, 116, plus/4 or 232

source: Marko Mäkelä’s Homepage

iAN CooG Site has been update with some nice stuff.

• TapClean g20: Modified and enhanced TAP cleaner, added support for some common (in Italy :) turbotapes.
• CompTAP 1.0: C porting of the TMG compression format for tapes.
• UNP64 2.20: Generic C64 prg unpacker, original idea and code from Exomizer by Magnus Lind.

source: iancoog.altervista.org

This webpage has some good information of  CRT Monitors by Commodore.

source: gona webpage

from Playfaster:

Like it’s ancestor, it is a “computer in a keyboard” all-in-one. Of course, all materials and hardware have been updated.

Entry level is based on the Intel Core 2 Duo E7500 with Intel G31 Express chipset. You can, of course, upgrade it with a Quad core (Q8200, Q9400, Q9550 or Q9650). The amount of memory is 2 GB SDRAM-DDR2, upgradable up to 4 GB. Hard drive choices are many from a standard 160 GB SATA, up to 2 TB; not forgetting a removable 80 GB.

Graphic card is an Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 3100, supporting Microsoft DirectX 9.0c. Not to mention all the connectors like Ethernet, Audio in/out, microphone, 4 USB 2.0, 2 serials, 1 Parallel, PS/2, DVI, VGA or the build-in touch-pad and speakers. It is equipped with a slim optical drive (upgradable with a DVD recorder) and a PCI slot. Read more…

Kick Assembler is the combination of an assembler for doing 6510 machine code and a high level script language.

Kick Assembler comes with an exe file so you don’t need to install java. The jar file is still distributed – we will keep supporting all java compatible platforms (Linux/Osx).

source: theweb.dk

CartographPC is a Windows application created to assist in designing tile-based datamaps. This devtool serves as a companion piece to our C64 native Cartograph devtool.

The original purpose of CartographPC was to enable us to take nice screenshots of our datamaps without having to take four or six screenshots of smaller windows and piece them together. CartographPC has since grown into a full editor with the benefit of being able to load datamaps created on the C64 directly into memory and edit, save, and move them back to C64 without much hassle.

It works by creating datamaps using tilesets created on C64 with the old, but popular, ultrafont editor. Datamaps can have dimensions of 1 to 255 tiles horizontally and 1 to 127 tiles vertically. CartographPC allows the user to create a datamap as small as 40×25 tiles (one screen) and up to 255×127 tiles.

Currently CartographPC doesn’t support exported datamaps (RLE compressed or converted) from Cartograph but as noted above, standard datamaps are 100% supported.

This application was created as an internal devtool for Arkanix Labs. We’re using Cartograph and CartographPC extensively with our Crimson Twilight Trilogy (tile-based CRPG) and Damned: Out Of Hell (push scroller shooter/jump and run).

source: arkanixlabs.com c64dev.com

Cartograph is a native Commodore 64 application created for designing tile-based maps/levels.

This versatile tool allows you to create maps and levels for your games, matrices and data for demos and tools and much more.

Changelog:

• New: Support for CartographPC filetypes.
• New: Sample source code to display full screen map.
• New: Save character set as part of project file if a custom one is in use.
• Fixed: Color table was saving 4 extra bytes, these have been trimmed off.

source: arkanixlab.com c64dev.com

My homebrew Powersupply adaptor for Amstrad CPC 6128 with a External Floppy Drive 3½.

source: cpcwiki.eu jrp king homepage kjthacker.f2s.com

Some new Games & Utility for Commodore VIC-20.

• AntiISDA Warrior. The game concept for AntiISDA Warrior was first developed on the Oric Atmos. The similarity to the game Space Invaders is not only coincidental, but here only the shots are movable, and not the enemies or the initial place for fire.
• Berzerk MMX. A clone of the classic Stern arcade hit, Berzerk. Written in ca65 assembler.
• CBM FileBrowser. A file browser for sd2iec firmware based drives (uIEC/SD2IEC/MMC2IEC) and standard CBM drives too.

source: Denial (The Commodore VIC-20 forum) hirudov.com