I’ve made a quick and dirty c64/BASIC PETSCII pattern tester/viewer.Its based on the two dither blocks and one modifier block. you can scroll *slowly* through the 128 blocks and the RVS ON counterparts in 8 configurations. It made was mostly to find any interesting combos. Diagonals and CamelD1/D2 MOD D1/D2 …
PETSCII is block character font (and encoding as well) for 8-bit Commodore computers. If you want to learn more about it, check the links listing at the end of the post. Dither Blocks are part of the PETSCII/Font tileset that are checkered patterns, there are two full dither blocks: RVS …
Let’s start off with how much pain the c64/128 was with serial communications in the day. If you had a 1670 or something in the 300 baud trash connection.. it didn’t matter — you were happy and everything worked. I ran a BBS off a 1670 for a long time. …
To start, I’ve been using a Zoom Floppy for years now — a bare board dangling beside all the IEEE gear. I’ve been meaning to make a case, but as it happens someone else in Canada is doing it already. Take look over at corei64.com. The case is a 3D …
Tiny PETSCII Compo 2020 is on between 3 January – 2 February 2020, you can go here for more: https://csdb.dk/event/?id=2921 As it is the first compo of the year for me, I went a little nuts. I only entered three, but you can go crazy. There are a lot of …
I have a feeling that 2020 is going to be Capacitor hell. Last night I pulled out the MSD SD-1 IEEE/IEC floppy for the BBS. The main PCB looked fine, with only a few caps… but the floppy mech has and upper and lower board that is riddled with bad …
Next device in the lineup is a CBM8050 dual drive (512kb per drive). Commodore drives are assigned drive 8 as their default. As soon as you have more than one drive you either flip dips or legs of chips or scratch out a trace. 8050 are the trace variety. Picking …
A quick and fun PETSCII animation for Christmas 2019. I loved the Commodore Xmas Demo, it was always on in the our house for the season when no one else was on the machine. I’ve seen a couple posts and commentaries about how that Demo was the first released C64 demo. Merry Christmas!
It’s been a week of pain, with all things commodore but eventually it all comes around. The SFD1001 IEEE drive which was in bad condition just a few days ago got cleaned up, re-capped and tweaked. I recall taking this drive apart maybe 7-8 times, I can do it in …
I’ve been working on a new TCP/serial gateway. I know, there are a few out there — but this one looks better 🙂 . In all honesty there are benefits to each of the available options but TCPXCOM runs in almost every environment. I’m currently testing Win10 with USB2Serial dongles, …
