Cenbe's Commodore 64 System

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UPDATE 05/2023: Haven't looked at this for a while, it's really out of date. I'll rewrite it soon. (Hint: the Ultimate 64 has taken on a great deal of responsibility.)

I take pictures of my current Commodore 64 system from time to time; this picture was taken after I moved in August 2018. This is how I typically have it set up; it's basically the same configuration I've used for the last 10-15 years.

To the right is a picture of what my current C64 system looks like. I use a 64C, which is the later model with a redesigned case (the Hot Wheels car on top makes it go more faster). At the right rear, connected to the expansion port, is one of Jim Brain's X‑Pander port expanders, plugged into which are a SuperSnapshot (hardware debugger) and behind it (red), a CLD Super 1750 Clone (which provides an additional 512K of memory, although it's not directly addressable). I'm proud to own several of the 1750 Clones, which are rare and highly sought after. Behind that is a SID Symphony stereo cartridge, which provides a second sound chip for six-voice sound.

Lately, the SuperSnapshot and 1750 clone have been replaced by a 1541 Ultimate II+, which also has other interesting abilities...

The red card to the upper left of the machine is a Flyer network card, which for some time was the best Ethernet solution for this machine, although it's no longer made and has passed into legend. It works by sending commands over the serial bus to device #7. I have it connected to the 16-port managed switch which controls the network in my machine room (useful for debugging network code, since I can set up port mirroring and sniff the Commodore's network traffic on a PC). You can also see a μIEC with an SD card in it. The serial connector on the back of the machine is fitted with a Y-cable, one end of which is connected to the μIEC (and from there to the Flyer). The other end is connected to a four-port serial hub (blue box on top of the floppy drives), which allows the drives to be connected and disconnected individually without moving cables around. The gargoyle on top, of course, prevents bus contention. Although it has an IEC reset switch, I have another reset switch ahead of the Y-cable, since the reset on the hub doesn't quite have enough oomph to reset the emulated drive (device 13) on the Flyer.

The monitor is a 1084S, made for the Commodore Amiga. It has a beautifully crisp display and stereo audio inputs (although I use a set of PC speakers for this machine). Above the monitor is a parallel switch for the printer (an indestructible Panasonic KX-P1180) that can be used to switch from IEC serial mode (using a G-Wiz serial-to-parallel box plugged in behind it) to parallel mode (for use with GEOS using a geoPrint cable, which connects to the user port and has a Centronics connector on the other end).

And speaking of GEOS, the mouse to the right of the computer is a Winner M3, which I've nicknamed "Old Faithful" after the number of Commodore 1351 mice I've seen fail.

To the right of the monitor are the disk drives. The ones on the left are Commodore 1541-IIs (single-sided 5 1/4" floppy drives): the top two are fitted with a replacement ROM called JiffyDOS, and the one on the bottom is fitted with a "RAMBOard" unit that gives it an extra 8K of memory (enough to buffer a full track at a time; useful for copying, shall we say, difficult-to-copy software). See my hardware page for more info on the RAMBOard, including pictures of the disassembled drive showing how it was installed. On the right (under the disk house), from top to bottom, are a CMD FD-2000 floppy drive and a pair of CMD hard drives. One of the CMD-HDs has been modified to use a solid state drive, so I suppose it's a CMD-SSD.

The list of connected IEC devices and their default device numbers (excluding the RAMBOard-fitted 1541-II, which is only connected when needed) is as follows:

My Raspberry Pi 4 Model B has a ZoomFloppy card connected to a 1541 to create D64 disk image files from floppies (or write them back to floppies). A different PC is used to create D81s using 1581copy under MS-DOS.

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