A channel of infrequently useful information that is mostly tech related, such as, Linux, vintage computing, building or fixing things, food or other nonsense. This channel is essentially my public facing video-notebook so most of this is quite literally for my reference. If you happen to find something useful or even utter garbage here, please let me know. Although I do my best to minimize errors, I’m quite certain my notes are still riddled them and any corrections are completely welcome.
There's a market, you could buy dead c64's, pull the boards, swap the keyboards, and then sell as kits with printed parts. I know there's a market because SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!
As far as I can Remember, The Disk Drives _ I was Told and I Believe - were Computers all by their-selves complete with their Own CPU, just without Video or anything like that... It was weird, but instead of just being an External Device that only was Controlled by the Computers Hardware inside the C64 - It Was By Itself, basically, a whole computer that just had a basic ROM that listened for IO commands and then decoded the Information from the Disks and sent it over the Data Lines. I remember taking my old Floppy Drive Apart and being completely Baffeled at the Chips inside ... Had some Memory, a CPU and some other Logic and its own Boot ROM... which now days is surprising but considering that Back Then, there were very Few IF ANY Disk Controller AddOns, like maybe a Cart that would plug in and Interface with it that way - No Slots to plug in Expansion Cards (like ISA, PCI, or PCIe because they basically didn't yet exist) so it was more reliable and efficient for them to just make it It's Own Computer that would listen to or talk to the Main Computer - ie. the C64...
An industrial style mini-ITX board would probably be better for this application because they don't have fancy shields or elaborate custom heatsinks just a plain green PCB with off the shelf generic finned BGA heatsinks. They look like they came from the early 90's except for having a modern sockets and connectors. They are also typically very reliable, but have no overclocking features. They often have integrated CPU's however there are versions with sockets as well.
Little dimples on the plastic were a molding defect called shrink due to the plastic still being hot in the thick thread boss section and continuing to shrink while cooling after the part was released from the injection mold.
The Pcuae mod has an option to connect to the internet via usb Ethernet or Wi-Fi adapter for dialing into a bbs, and I remember seeing someone say that it also works in X-windows.
Really... openSUSE should make an easy app like what MX Linux did to make installing these 3rd party (but necessary media codecs) much easier. When I first time installed and used OpenSUSE, I was really irritated to find out most of my video files doesn't play. Adding 3rd party repos just to install these media codecs doesn't leave a good taste for me either. That being said, I'm really enjoying openSUSE Tumbleweed and it's my preferred rolling release distro. For my main daily driver PC, nothing beats my beloved MX Linux that I have customized with a lot of scripts, addons, and gui to suit my taste/needs.
I've been a kde fan since plasma 4.11 and I struggle to move away from it. I love sway and hyprland on my laptop, but I always find myself back in kde.
still to this day one of my fav ever racing games and it took forever to load lol..., and i have grown to hate arcade games now i'm all strategy and simulation these days, but this game in 2 player when you design your own courses, was awesome all it needed was to have more players allowing junctiobns and short cuts or erm long cuts lol, was genius i designed some really fan tracks at the time jull of areas of mud and junctions to catch the player out which when battling did most of the time lol, thx for the nostalgia
This game and Mig Alley Ace were twobof my favorite head-to-head games to play against my brother when we were kids. Of course, we had copies of them that were not purchased. :)
Now that you have a way into the Linux system, has anyone figured out how to integrate the switch to Linux via a menu choice added to the C64 without doing the flash update each time?
Any idea if I copied the Linux program folders and wrote to a raspberry pi or Orange Pi, would it boot and work as the C64? I want to have this computer with say a pi-4 so I can create a dual boot into the C64 or Raspberry Pi OS for internet access and all the other features on the Pi. If anyone has done this please let me know.
Amen... This is Real linux! Some tips... 1. Download vpm if xbps seems hard to remember 2. Xtools is very helpfull too. It has xlocate for example 3. If anything is not there there is xdeb to add deb files but i do not suggest and xbps-src is helpfull sometimes
Thanks, I got that and it worked. I have zero power to the washer. Control panel is out. Thinking it's the controller where the power enters the machine. Will test with multi-meter.
Interesting that it has Firefox, considering no network capabilities. I still think the most useful hack to this machine is replacing the innards with a Pi and adding an eth port and an internal SSD
Thank you for the very nice review, the lunar rovers were to used for the 'testing forks' part of the game. I had a track called 'forks' that had about 10 forks. The lunar rover had to drive slow so it wouldn't miss any forks. One wrong turn and you had to go all over again. You can race a Canam against an AI lunar rover and loose the game because you picked the wrong fork. Slow and steady wins the game.
That IS fascinating. I still love RDS, sure, I don't play it every day but periodically I have a need for a hit of nostalgia. This always does it for me. I have logged so many hours of fun, largely in doing track construction. I have so many questions about the design and building out of The greatest 8-bit racing game, the discussions around its various elements and the like. Was there ever a sequel discussed? How about more CPU racers? I imagine the game was already pushing the limits of the C64 as it was. Thank you for the great childhood memories.
I would have to take the machine apart to find out. This will be happening soon as I have to replace the keyboard on this and I am not looking forward to the pain of it all.
