This is a very old article from 2016 that i never published on my blog.
Summarizes the purchase, shipping, cleaning and simple repair of a Commodore 4064 with a very low serial number.
Since i had not talked about the repair, i begin to tell that only the VIC-II 6569 Video Chip in Ceramic format was broken.
In the photos there is also a comparison between the Commodore 4064 (PAL) and the Commodore Educator 64 (NTSC)
Below the old article.
The title of this post is: I want it at all costs.
But what? a computer! which model? an old one that I missed to complete a part of my collection.
This computer is really unusable, as are all of them, but this one beats them all.
It’s a Commodore 64 in a PET case produced in 1982, with a green phosphor monitor, stripped of the sound chip (SID 6581) and colour RAM (2114), with a modified kernel that doesn’t use any colour, and a keyboard with different 1..8 keycaps (no colour code on the front).
What’s left? An useless computer with no sound and no green-scale colours; it just uses black and green, while the Commodore Educator 64 has sound and can show colours in shades of green.
After getting the Educator 64 I wanted to complete the pair with a Commodore 4064, and I started to look for it.
I saw a few 4064s that sold for bizarre prices – I can’t say that they were high, because if you want something you are willing to buy it whatever the price, but anyway…
Here begins my adventure :-D
At one time a 4064 pops up in a well known auction site – take note that I don’t use artificial intelligence search engines to look for items, I don’t give a shit… if I find something when I look for it, that’s fine, otherwise it’s not a big deal.
That one was located in Germany, the price was low (at least for me – someone considered it very high), but was the seller willing ship? No he wasn’t.
I wrote to him, no reply, I sent the same message translated in German (thanks google), he responded in German telling me that the item was too big and he didn’t know how to deal with it.
I wrote him again in google German, telling him that I could send him some shipping and packaging instructions – I have them ready in many languages. His reply: I don’t ship.
I was sad and discouraged, because even if the unit wasn’t working, it was in an excellent aesthetic condition and with no missing parts.
I asked for help to my friend Andrea, who asked Ciro, who told me that I could ask his German contact Ralf Schmitz if he could lend me a hand.
Meanwhile the auction was getting near the end… still at a low price.
I wrote to Ralf – a very kind person – and he explained to me that he lives 530Km far from the place where the computer was located. Things got complicated.
I asked Ralf to contact the seller, who maybe preferred to talk with a compatriot :-D
The seller didn’t reply, the auction was ending, what should I have done? I love to risk, and while in chat with Ralf I told him the maximum amount to bid.
I won the item at the right price, in the right moment.
Then what? The seller didn’t have many feedbacks but Ralf suggested to pay right away with Paypal which offers buyer’s protection without the risk of losing the money.
I sent the money to Ralf with Paypal, and he paid the seller.
Ralf wrote him. No reply. The Easter weekend went by, still no reply.
And then one day… the guy replied! Ralf could contact him by phone and they chatted for more than one hour. The man seemed good; old but fair.
The seller told Ralf that he didn’t want to ship because he didn’t know how to properly package, he didn’t have packaging material and he didn’t want to look for it… then he told that he should have to buy some tape, and petrol for the post office, and so on…
I talked with Ralf, and one of the ideas we ditched was to ask someone to go to the seller’s place to help him to pack the 4064 and have it sent to Ralf with some kind of hitch-hiking.
I was suffering.
New solution: simplify the shipping.
I explained Ralf how to separate the monitor from the base: it’s a matter of unscrewing 5 screws, detaching a connector from the motherboard, and cutting two wires (I didn’t even think about explaining how to unsolder them).
The seller was was fine with the idea.
Ralf had to send a huge package containing the packaging material – boxes, foam and bubblewrap – and written instructions from me and Ralf.
The seller shipped the packages with DHL, which in Italy delivers using SDA (one of the cheapest and lower quality couriers). Panic.
The seller is old so he shipped one box at a time: the monitor first, that arrived in 5 days, then the base, that took much longer and made my anxiety skyrocket – Ralf told me that DHL had a few problems in Germany but the package should have crossed the border.
While he was writing to me, the second package arrived at destination.
The computer is now complete and in excellent condition, and with a slightly low serial number :-D
My thanks to Ralf Schmitz because without him this wouldn’t have been possible, and to Andrea for putting up with my anxiety during the last 20 days.
And my thanks to Giacomo Vernoni for translating this report, otherwise I would have written just a paragraph of text – and that would have been a pity :-D
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