There's a little blackout around 8:11 in the video, sorry about that, something went wrong during editing! The full sentence I wanted to say is "Another point for the iComp case is that it can actually fit a PCB with a socket with an EPROM in it." Half of that is missing but re-rendering and re-uploading would take some time and effort so I hope you are satisfied with this little written correction. ;)
Thanks for the update. I just noticed the issue. I feel nothing was missed since you mentioned the timing of it going blank and what you said, since there was only a few seconds missing.
Fun fact. Jupiter Lander (and Kickman) can also be used as a dead test cartridge, although not as good as the real dead test, they (at least) will work if the kernal and/or basic rom is bad.
Yes! That's why I have Jupiter Lander as the second ROM on the original Dead Test cart I made. I heard Commodore used those games for testing C64s in the factory before they made the Dead Test/Soak Test cartridges. :)
Get a 3D pen to fill in places you need to change or fill. Great for adding or modifying project boxes. You can fill that hole make the standoff larger then drill a hole in the correct spot.
I thought it might be easier to just grind down the end of the case so the board is long enough in the "right" position. (Or to put it another way: Maybe the board isn't a few millimeters too short, maybe the case is a few millimeters too long.) Edit: No, there's a "shelf" inside the shell that would also somehow have to be moved back the same amount. It looks like the answer is to relocate the center post by some means, but all the ones I can think of have problems. The simplest would be "tweak the model, print again" but he didn't print it himself.
You could get a small washer and bend part of it up at a 90 degree angle to go under the board where the screw hole is to hold the pcb down so more of the contacts are exposed.
Now you have to prove how useful your brand new cartridge is ;-): I am looking forward to a bunch of repair videos… till then merry Xmas and a happy new year, Jan!
Thanks! Maybe you can ask somebody with an EPROM burner to make the EPROM for you? There's lots of peeps in the community that have those TL-866s or similar simple devices. If everything fails, send me an email and we'll figure something out. ;)
I could do with making one of these. Might be handy when I get round to fixing those two non-working C64s! (I do have two working ones, the later C64Cs). Thanks for the video!
A little trick i learned to make hot glue seem less hacky, get black hot glue! It instantly looks way more "pro" haha. I use it all the time for securing fragile solder connections.
I'm not sure that applies inside a red case. Black hot glue does certainly have its uses though! I found mine at a Daiso store. One complication to bear in mind though: if the material making the mix black is carbon, which it often is, then it's conductive. Since it's mixed into plastic, it probably won't be conductive over any long scale, but if applied to the pads on a PCB, it could potentially short them together. If overheated, the particles tend to settle out, which is how I came to realize that it was just clear plastic with black powder in the first place. It probably won't be a problem with a layer of solder mask in between, so this is limited to contact points and other bare patches.
Yeah, I wanted to make a proper cartridge for quite a while but never got around to it. Very happy I finally did. My original DIY carts were just quickly hacked together to get the job done (and they have worked for much longer than I ever anticipated)! :D
Given that _one_ of the options is likely to be productive, it saves wear and tear on cartridge slots because in a sense, he's always using the right tool. Adrian Black has a double-ended cartridge where one end is a dead test and the other is diagnostics, and although that's convenient enough for keeping them in the same place, he does have to extract it, spin it around, and re-insert it to switch roles. The truly merged version doesn't need to. Since the trick seems to be to use a bigger EEPROM and then toggle the higher address lines manually, I wonder how many cartridges could reasonably crammed into one package. I have a feeling this will be limited more by easily available EEPROMs rather than by the number of bits that can be crammed into a rotary encoder.
Nice build. I prefer the two sided cartridge design, one side dead test, other side diagnostics. No switches, so I don't have to think, just unplug it and plug it back in from the other side.
Well, it is mainly very senstive to a specific PLA flaw. It doesn't serve as a good test for the C64 in general, nor does it mean that a PLA that survives Zaxxon is automatically a good PLA.
Yeah, the original carts I made were VERY spontaneous builds. Served me well for all these years but somehow I always procrastinated making a nicer version until now. 😅
Yeah, German is strange. The literal translation of "Papierkorb" is "paper basket" but it's commonly used for most indoors trash cans/waste baskets in German. :D
@@JanBeta I think that's pretty common in every language -- there's something specific to a purpose, and it gets a name that makes perfect sense. Then the name gets applied to everything that somewhat resembles the original, and the name no longer makes so much sense because they are put to different purposes. It's like calling modern smartphones "phones" when people spend most of their time avoiding using them to make voice calls. 😆
I've sold a dual ended cartridge with both carts. And a 3d printed case for a couple years. No jumpers to deal with. Get with the program. Pun intended
Yes, I've seen the double ended carts around, they look useful, too. Maybe I'm going to build one of those additionally and see which one is more useful. :)
Why didn't you just take a little off from the "bottom" of the cartridge enclosure (maybe on a flatbelt sander or something) and screw the PCB in the hole?
I considered removing a bit of the bottom of the shell but there are ridges that hold the PCB in place that would have prevented it from being inserted deep enough into the connector unfortunately.
Nice work, as always. I think you do yourself an injustice when you call it a hack job. Looks good to me. As someone else mentioned, you perhaps could have removed some material from the bottom of the cartridge so the screw could have been used to fix the PCB.
Hey, thanks! I considered removing a bit of the bottom of the shell but there are ridges that hold the PCB in place that would have prevented it from being inserted deep enough into the connector unfortunately.
I should look at making up some carts for when (well, if, Evri (aka Hermes) delivers it) my C64c arrives, with a 250466 board & the early style keyboard, cos I like that style... :)
@@JanBeta Thankfully it arrived on Sunday, intact, not too sure about the solderwork done by whoever recapped it though, they look a bit cold-jointed & blobby, so need to get OCD on it and reflow those joints!!! Also need to build a PSU for it, cos it was just the C64c on its' own, no peripherals, but that has to wait 'til after christmas when I have the money... :)
Ah, I see! Magnet wire is a bit easier to remember though. :D (Now I'm wondering what the actual German word for it is, I'm going to have to look that up! :D)
Magnet wire doesn't have to be copper, but it practically always is. I can think of exactly _one_ case where guitar pickups are being wound with enameled _silver_ wire. Still, we know what "magnet wire" means even if those aren't the words we'd usually use. It doesn't even sound wrong.
I just recognized your composite-to-hdmi converter. Have you modded it to have a direct composite input? Mine came with an additional (ugly) composite/svideo-to-scart adapter.
Yes, it's one of those inexpensive SCART-HDMI things. I hacked in some RCA jacks and a heatsink a while back. I even made a video about that hack job: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-SK4p9B9Fit8.html Served me well ever since, even if it doesn't look great. I only use it for testing stuff on the bench though because the lag is quite significant and makes gaming a bit painful.
@@JanBeta Thanks for your reply. I just watched the video and the RCA jacks mod is something I will definitely do too. I use the SCART-HDMI converter to connect my amiga 1200. For some reason I need to use the composite input. Using Scart directly does not seem to work. The OSD tells me it detects a 50 Hz signal, but the screen stays white. I even used a differen scart to hdmi converter (MATR CS34L from reichelt) with the same effect. As for the heatsinks; Since the case is made of metal I think it may be an reasonable idea to screw a hetsink/heatpipe to the casing which then connects to the top of the chips - not unlike what commodore did with the TED chip.
Cool project. It occurs to me that you labelled your carts in English rather than German. Obviously, you're fluent in English and do your YT videos in English, likely to have a wider audience. But I would think for your personal items, you would revert to German.
Must've been youtube. I didn't say anything wrong. Well, I did say they're on ebay already and I should have watched your video further. My apologies. You do a great job!
Mh, nothing in the spam filter, and you are (obviously) not blocked or anything. RU-vid must have just swallowed your comment. Sorry for the inconvenience. I meant to answer: There are several diag/dead test cartridges around but I like Sven's design a lot (and I actually had all the parts here) so I decided to build it for myself (and share the build process).
There is a new tester using MLC64 full 6502 CPU emulator powered by Teensy 4.1. microcorelabs blog entry from 2021/11/22 called "commodore-64-tester-using-mcl64"
