Commodore 64 portable with LCD

I Had a similar suggestion 2days ago, however I suggested incorporating an Atari and ColecoVision since the cartridge slots are almost identical, and it would be nice to have all the retro systems in one place.

That would be really cool. I forgot that they had n adapter for the colecovision to run 2600 cartridges. I'd love to make the portable 2600 but the case would be an issue for me.

Ryan Edwards wrote:

 

Ben

 

Being a retro kind of guy and seeing all the other systems you have shrunk or made very portable I was wondering if a Commodore 64 with floppy drive and LCD would be a good challenge to take on. I still to this day play some of my older C64 games in my man cave.

 

Ryan

I have spent some time thinking about this and the truth is, it is much harder than it sounds. I used to use and repair C64's back in the day so I know quite a bit about how they work. The Floppy drives are not like modern floppy drives and to read the disk you have to use the original 1541 drive. The old drives were very prone to loosing alignment and alignment was done with a special 5.25" floppy and an oscilloscope. So I would be very surprised if Ben could do anything with the floppies. Most of the C64 disk images are done by taking the old 1541 drive and wiring it to a parallel port to copy the disk image to a modern system.

Ill also note that carriages were not a big thing on the old C64's most of it was on single sided floppies that were about 150k in size. I say about because they were measured in blocks back then. (664 blocks to a single sided floppy)

So what could be done? Well you could make a portable C64 with a Raspberry Pi, and LCD then load the disk images onto the SD card, or use an SPI flash memory to store the disk images. Some of the larger Arduinos can emulate the C64, so it could be done with one of them, an LCD, and an SD card reader.

However there may be legal questions with such a build as the only way to get the software on them would be to use disk images or rom images and the questions of copyright violations comes up with those.

That is just my thoughts on it, I have looked at making a C64 portable but at the moment have way too many projects to take on a new one.

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www.xganon.com

as for the disk drive I have a couple lying around, but I'd like to get a little off topic here for a second if I may in reference to your statement about the legality of the ROMS, in regards to the whole "Intelectual Property" if you really consider it the whole concept of "IP" should be illegal, consider if you will, if the man who created fire was concerned with "IP" where would humanity be today, in point of fact, the whole computer age owes itself to the concept of open source, and the idea that a company fighting over a piece of software that is over 20 years old and they haven't made a cent on it in over 15 years is insanity, the whole idea that we are "stealing" when we make ROMS of obsolete games is rediculous, as of the completion of the program, all the programmers had been paid for the work they did, and up until they stopped retailing the software, all the people involved in the manufacturing of the disks/cartridges had been paid in full, all the employees at the retail outlets were paid up until they stopped carrying the program, so after it is no longer made available to the public because "it stopped being profitable" what gives them the right to accuse people of stealing?

think about it this way, I used to work in excavation laying water lines for residential, if my pay worked the same as Movies/Music/video games, then I could demand that all the people who get their water from the line I helped install should be forced to pay me a percentage of their water bill for the rest of my life provided the water line I installed is still in use, as much as I would love that to be true (ludacris as it may be)

I mean no animosity toward you, I'm just sick of "IP" keeping us slaves to corporations and giving the rich more ill-gotten gains while keeping innovation at a snails pace or fear of infringing on some greedy persons "Intelectual" rights.

Karl,

I don't disagree with you, however a show like this linked to Element14 presents a target for the Lawyers that protect IP in its current state, and from my experience they do not walk the gray line in any way.

Ill note here that I am not affiliated with the show, or Element 14, nor am I a lawyer.