Commodore 64 VIC-II 6567/6569 Replacement Project

https://github.com/randyrossi/vicii-kawari

by snvzz • 3 years ago

95 26 3 years ago

hougaard• 3 years ago

Just reviewed by Adrian: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bak-MePFsJ0

irdc3• 3 years ago

Retro-YouTuber Adrian Black did a video on the VIC-II-Kwawari just this weekend: https://youtu.be/bak-MePFsJ0. TL;DW: works well, kinda awesome.

basementcat• 3 years ago

In addition to providing VGA and DVI output, this optionally adds a blitter and hardware multiplier and divider to the c64.

snvzz3• 3 years ago

And configurable color palette, and some video modes, including a pet-compatible 80 column one.

pantulis• 3 years ago

Impressive! Is that a C64 any more???

jansan• 3 years ago

I would like to learn about the background of the project developers. Not their names and where they are from, but how they got the knowledge to realize projects like this. Are they hobbyists who work in unrelated fields and just learned this from books and videos? Do they have degrees in electronics and do work like this in their jobs?

Stuff like this looks almost superhuman to me and I would like to know how one can get the abilities to pull this off.

lstodd• 3 years ago

I know nothing about this project devs, but I made a framebuffer/driver for my old EGA monitor out of an ARM Cortex-M7 devboard, some SRAM pulled out of old 486 boards (cache memory they were) and a level converter.

It did not go as far as being worthy enough to be published, but it worked.

It is not particularly superhuman, me not having any degrees or related work, just some years playing with electronics as a hobby, then taking old IBM EGA manual and designing the thing in a couple of evenings.

It's not rocket science :) However nowadays even rocket science isn't.

Everything is pretty simple, especially if you throw sufficiently large FPGAs on the problem.

jacquesm4• 3 years ago

Your skills are valuable.

jacquesm4• 3 years ago

Usually they do this sort of thing professionally and they use these skills in their hobby projects as well. An electrical engineering degree would be a good start to acquire these kind of skills, alternatively a hardcore HAM or very serious hardware hobby.

JKCalhoun• 3 years ago

I worked with a software engineer at Apple that played with FPGAs on the side. So maybe as a hobbyist it is doable.

cmrdporcupine2• 3 years ago

The creator is a friend of mine and an and on-off coworker for 20+ years.

Software guy. SWE background. Mostly unrelated fields though we did both work at Google in the Nest division with embedded LInux stuff, but on the software. No degree in electronics, taught himself the hardware end of things and the FPGA end of things.

Not superhuman. Just really passionate about the C64. You can do it, too.

chrismcb2• 3 years ago

The basic answer is "yes." Some of them are hobbyists, some are professionals.

jwr• 3 years ago

It's a good occasion to mention the Ultimate64: https://ultimate64.com/Ultimate64

Gideon isn't very good at advertising, so not everyone knows this even exists. It's a complete C64 emulation motherboard. You mount it into an existing C64, place the SID in a socket (for real analog SID sound) and enjoy a modernized C64 with perfect zero-delay HDMI output, great sound, 1541 drive emulation, cartridges, etc.

It still blows my mind that you can plug in a USB stick containing every C64 game ever written.

This thing is really impressive and after you've used it for a while, it's actually hard to go back to the "real" C64 motherboard :-)

Implementing all this on an FPGA is a mind-boggling feat, and I have nothing but the highest respect for Gideon.

snvzz3• 3 years ago

Gideon isn't very good at advertising

He's so bad at it that I thought none of the Ultimate64 was open source hardware.

But most if not all of it is.

jacquesm4• 3 years ago

Likewise Dennis van Weeren's 'MiniMig' Amiga do-over:

https://www.minimig.ca/

Findecanor• 3 years ago

You mount it into an existing C64

There are also replacement C64C cases, mechanical keyboards and at least two SID-chip replacements based on ARM-based MCUs available. ARMSID is the most well known of the SID boards (I forget the other one)

PhasmaFelis• 3 years ago

It still blows my mind that you can plug in a USB stick containing every C64 game ever written.

This reminds me of a friend who had every Atari 2600 game ever written on a 3.5" floppy...

rcarmo• 3 years ago

The amount of C64 projects out there is pretty amazing. Having been a Sinclair user, I am almost envious (although there are plenty of software emulators that deliver a very nice experience)

Toenex• 3 years ago

Don't forget the Spectrum ZX Next (https://www.specnext.com/) if you can get one. I managed to get a N-GO clone from ebay last year (https://manuferhi.com/p/n-go-full-include-wifi-rpi-zero) which is excellent.

peter_d_sherman• 3 years ago

Great work!

Also, I think it is a brilliant idea to have included DVI/HDMI output for this chip -- which didn't support it in its original incarnation; i.e., DVI/HDMI didn't exist in the 1980's...

Commodore 64 VIC-II 6567/6569 Replacement Project

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