My uncle ran a computer store in the 80s and I just texted him to see if he knew how much REUs went for. He has always been a Commodore fan (he even has a tattoo of the logo). He said that he can try and track down a price sheet from back then but he's pretty sure they were MSRP for 299 but most shops would price them at MAP which was 199.
@@Jody_VE5SAR A store can't advertise a product for lower than the MAP (minimum advertised price) without risking penalties for the manufacturer. If a store wants to sell a product for $189, but the MAP is $199, then they would have to show the customers the full MAP of $199 but provide a $10-off coupon for the purchase of the unit on request.
Sonic is actually a port of the already existing 8-bit version for the Sega Master System/Game Gear. That being said, it's a near perfect port of it, and it even runs a bit better than the original version!
Next thing you know you're going to tell us that the Super Mario Brothers game was also available on some other system before the C64! ;) Or were you just being cheeky with your comment? If so, well done. You got me!
@Brandon Taylor SEGA has selective caring. It seems like most of the time they'll let Sonic stuff slide, but SEGA is more protective of their other IPs in terms of fan works. I remember they were issuing take down notices of people merely uploading Saturn gameplay and I've seen groups receive C&Ds for fan games like the Streets of Rage remake and a few other things.
Sonic the Hedgehog port to C64 was a real shot in the arm to 8-bit retro game development world as it so viscerally made very clear what the REU brings to the table - exciting
@@sonicthehedgehog23145 I see no reason why it could not. Only what might be limiting factor are sprites and onscreen color pallete, maybe memory. Also question is, what amiga? There are multiple ones with some being much more powerful.
Yes, it's so interesting how there's now quite the cult following of the C64 that can finally afford to use these super accessories that we wish we could have had just as easily some 4 decades ago! And with people developing modern solutions for old machines, like being able to run flash storage on these computers, this is really a magical era for nostalgia, isn't it?
Not just nostalgia, it's quite amazing how even people my age (born late 90s) can still use and experience these machines. It's because of the documentation and preservation that the community has done. And as someone who is interested in retro tech I'm very thanful for it.
Yeah i look back with resentment. Im like "oh you have an 040 cpu... Thats cute.. i just threw away a pentium 233 mhz chip cos its taking up space.." :)
Back in the early 90s, I ran a CNet BBS off a REU using it as a ram disk on a C128 in 64 mode with two 1581s. Had the BBS menus and doors stored on the REU and the message base on a 1581. Think I only had a 2400baud modem but even with that the REU made a noticeable performance boost for users. Within a few years, moved on to a A500.
I was wondering anyone would mention this use case. I ran my 1750 clone on a 128 with New Image BBS for a few years in college. It took forever to power it up and copy all the modules into the REU but it ran so smoothly once it was up.
you ran a BBS on an A500? Blasphemy. I had a friend who had pretty much every major "A" computer except Apple - Amiga 500, Atari 520ST, Atari 800XL... and he ran the BBS on the Atari 8-bit then later a PC. He never used the Amiga for running the BBS. Mostly calling them. And playing games.
Same here Don. I ran a Cnet bbs with Empire and a few other overlay programs loaded into what we at the time called a "Rampack". It made a big difference in game play as Empire was a series of overlays that needed to be loaded in sequence with each game event. Good times.
I had one of those. I even had it all wired up with extra sockets and the glue logic (74series ftw) to make it a two megabyte reu, just at 15 I never came up with the money for the actual ram chips. There was also an update to software to properly use all that ram. This was more ram than pc-xt's of the time.
The C64 was my first computer. I'm always blow away by how much good programmers could squeeze out of that thing! The quick dive into assembly instructions and clock cycles was really interesting. I'd love to see more of that.
My experience with the 1764 REU was discovering that my RAM disk was not as slick an idea as I thought when my C64 crashed and I lost the term paper i was working on at 2:00 AM in the morning on the last day of the semester. The old and dying refrigerator drew enormous current when it kicked on and my landlord's brother-in-law wiring job wasn't up to the task of supplying it and the rest of the house. Fortunately I only lost the bibliography but man it was a pain. Save early and Save often has been my motto ever since.
I absolutely never tire of seeing petscii robots on this channel. I think it's fascinating to see it evolve, and it really sets this channel apart because basically every device you review has a special petscii port that specifically shows off its features. It's not something you can really get anywhere else on TH-cam
My mother entered my brother and I in a draw in New Zealand, he ended up winning 1st prize which was a commodore 16. Mum had stressed to both of us if one happened to win then the prize was for the two of us so we were stoked. We had that computer for approx 6 months when to our surprise Dad went and upgraded to the commodore 64 with the tape deck, floppy disk drive & dot matrix printer. Along with all that we got some games on cassette and cartridge, I remember really liking 'Who Dares Wins' on cassette and 'Lode Runner' on cartridge. We did eventually get some games on floppy disk and they loaded fairly quickly. We had a lot of fun with this setup as it kept us entertained for hours.
Great video as usual. Just wanted to say that, after the fall of CMD, we were in an REU desert for ages! The 1541 Ultimate II was some relief, but it was very expensive for a long time, and might still be considered a bit of overkill. I think we are finally going to start seeing actual stand-alone REU clones in the next few years.
Yep for sure. I beta tested an REU compatible project that was 100% compatible, that I could see. I think he released it as open source but not sure it was actually finished. The prototype that I have is large but also had things like VGA out, RTC and something else. He streamlined it to just an REU but I have not seen that one yet.
@@thecorruptedbit5585 yes you could as it also has REU built-in. But like you said if you just want REU it is overkill. A cheap alternative is in the works.
Great Video. I can help with the price. The REU listed for $149 in the USA when it came out but I got mine on sale at Toys R Us for either $109 or $129. I do know that later on they were selling them for $99 and that is when we picked up a second unit for our BBS. I still own my 1764 and the PSU is still in use on my 64C.
I'm pretty sure I picked mine up for around $100. I was a poor college student at the time. I definitely would not have spent more than that. I used it along with CNet BBS. CNet used this trick of overwriting specified sections of running code with different code loaded from disk. This allowed the size of the program to be much larger than available RAM. By copying the program disk to the REU, then running it from there, not only did it run much faster, I had the entire floppy disk space available for saving the data from the BBS.
@@BrianMelancon Oh that is cool, I remember CNet but never used it. I ran a Color64 BBS and the REU used it as basically a drive and it installed all the BBS overlays to it so that it would not have to load them from disk. Overlays were basically games and mods for the BBS. The bootup took some time and required several disk swaps and Commodore's own software fast loader. I still have all those files but can't remember how to boot it. haha. One of these days I will try it again. Yeah $100-129 for the REU at the time for a computer that was only $129 was a large investment for a kid just out of HS as I was. haha.
I had a 1750 back in the day. I used it with my copy of C-NET/64 where a lot of the BBS software would be copied on startup. It made the experience a lot faster and allowed for the floppy drives to be used for file transfer and message storage. I think I'd gotten mine for around $350 at the time, but I can't remember exactly.
When I was little, we bought a brand new C128 system with a 1084s monitor and the 1760 REU. We used it primarily for GEOS in 128 mode, and mostly to copy applications from the various disks into the REU at runtime so it was faster and easier to run a bunch of things at any given time. Of course, we had to reload it every time we rebooted the 128, but it was at a time when you never expected instant gratification. You'd sit down, boot up and load GEOS, then after it was loaded, pop in our prepared applications disks and copy them into the REU before we started doing anything. I remember trying to use it in C64 mode and never really understanding why it didn't do anything but that was my pre-teen self having a very rudimentary understanding of computers and what they were capable of. I do remember that the cost of our 128 system including a printer was somewhere near a thousand dollars at the time, and this was somewhere between the late 80's and early 90's. I want to say somewhere around 88 or 89. It's been a long time, but I vaguely remember the REU cost somewhere between $50 and $100 depending. Most people didn't have them, I knew more people that ran dual disk drives than had an REU at the time. Then again, we bought ours on base, so it's possible there was some kind of special military discount so my prices may be faulty. Seeing some others mentioning around $200 wasn't out of the question, it would have depended on how and where you got it, too.
I'm a 51 year old dude, probably your age also. I love going back and rewatching your older videos! Four, five, six years ago even. So much to learn & relearn, this is one of the great things to use TH-cam for! Lots of negative things about YT, and although I love Rumble & Bitchute, YT still "works" the best with a plethora of information!
8/5/22 Great review, I still own my Commodore 128 with the 1750 ram expander, 5 1/4 floppy drive, 1581 3 1/2" hard floppy drive, and a C=> monitor. I ended up buying my ram expander from someone on Q-link. and your right it was quite expensive, but I was a bigger user of the various GEOS programs making my computer very useable as a desktop along with my HP Deskjet 500 where I could DL a printer drive off of Q-link. All that you said was true about speeding up things when using the expander, plus I had a jiffy Dos chip installed to speed up the booting. Nice to see that there still are users out there still supporting C=> in 2022. The fact that the 128 was a 3-in-one computer where I used both the 64 modes and 128 modes spent a lot of fun time and useful hours while never turning the computer off without any power or heating problems for years.
Once you brought up the surprising capabilities of this device, I was hoping you'd mention that you ported Petscii Robots to work on it. Great to see that! The jump in visual quality is impressive considering this is possible by just connecting a peripheral to a regular C64.
Thanks David, I completely forget that we supported the REU in Maverick. Thanks for showing this device off as it was a somewhat niche product probably due to pricing.
I for one remember seeing "$CALL" and similar in sales flyers throughout the 90s and it really annoyed me. Sure, sometimes the price might be fluctuating, but I generally took not showing the price to mean "it's way too expensive / our price isn't the cheapest."
I bought an expansion kit for my 1750. Bumped it up to 1024k - could have pushed it to 2 megs, but there were rumors that this was hard on the REU's MMU chip and it would sometimes fail. The kit had a daughter board, a lot of memory chips that had to be soldered in piggyback on the stock chips. 15ns chips! There was an article in RUN magazine that talked about it in detail. I still have it!
Just after the launch of the REU, there was a major memory chip shortage. I had already moved on from my C64 to a PC. The owner the PC repair shop, in San Diego, told me he was buying REUs to harvest the ram chips and resell them to PC users.
I remember I had a REU for my Commodore 64 specifically for running the bbs software Color64. Color64 had modules that needed to be loaded up every time a user went to a different section. Without a REU the modules would have to load off the drive which would take time. With the REU no loading time as it was much faster. I remember some bbs's that ran color64 used hard drives for the C64 at the time and didn't need the REU since the drives were fast enough to load the modules. Good memories and good times!
Actually that BNE will usually be _three_ cycles, not two. BNE is two cycles when the branch is _not_ taken and either three or four cycles when it is taken, depending on if it needs to cross a (256 byte) page boundary. In a loop copying several pages of bytes it will of course be taken about 255 times as often as it's not taken, and there will also be a bit of extra overhead for setting up the loop for the next 256 bytes to copy. That's a minor quibble, though. Overall, nice job on explaining (for those not familiar with this stuff) why DMA was so much faster than programmed I/O!
Run Magazine issue 47 - November 1987 page 50: 1700, 1750 and 1764 REU carts for $119,95, $199,95 and $149 respectively. Starting at page 45 in the same magazine "The tale of the RAM and the Mouse" is a good read.
Locally we used these REU's to power our BBS software and load the entire BBS into the REU so it would require less (slower) disk access. We also had a local modder who would upgrade smaller memory units to 512k to save on costs or availability where possible. Very handy units!
Dear David, Thank you for sharing useful information about Reu. Unfortunately I don't have real hardware, but thankfully vice emulator give us this chance to have fun moments with reu specially watching nuvie videos
Reminds me of my TRS-80 Color Computer 3 512k RAM expansion which also used bank-switching, except that unit went inside the CoCo 3's case and generated a ton of heat. It was also one of the first victims of a DRAM shortage in those years, inflating its cost by 200%.
Using RAM disk back then or simply familiarizing with floppies table of contents, sectors, editing things directly in memory or with some hex editor is what separates old and new IT guys. I had a use case for a RAM disk on a windows server VM loaded with 64GB RAM where only few GB were actually being used/required and nobody even knew such thing was possible to have part of RAM available as a drive letter. Yes, SSDs make it less useful these days, but it's just one example. These days people can't do anything when there is no mouse to click.
Just curious, ever thought of going on a small tour to give technical seminars devoted to discussing techniques for vintage tech restoration? If you, LGR, techmoan, Tech Tangents, and your brother were to hold a conference panel I'm sure there'd be a great turnout.
I would have thought that one of the main things that these expansions would be good for would be in terms of running GEOS on the C64. In fact, I suspect that ROM point could well have been intended for GEOS to be pre-loaded into the ROM making for very fast boot times and having more memory available in order to run programs on top of GEOS.
I was a heavy user of GEOS back in the day, and indeed, the 1750 hooked up to a Commodore 128 made GEOS lightning fast. That alone was reason to get one.
Thanks for the video! I’m old enough that I could’ve owned a Commodore computer, but I just never did. I love the technology of old computer systems, and you do a great job of explaining it. Also, love the shirt! Classic poem!
I LOVE that someone made a Sonic the Hedgehog port to the C64! That is one of my favorite retro games. I remember the awe hearing my brand new Genesis sing "SEEEEGA" the first time I powered it on...
I had a teacher that Invested in a c64 REU, He told 8 year old me it was that biggest waste of money of any c64 product, and (at the time) was yet to find a use for it- guy was a bit of a fanatic.
Many of the later Infocom games and some re-releases would use the REU. The initial load time was longer, but after that, it did everything (except game saves,) from the REU instead of disk.
Back in the day I had a 256K REU for my C=128. A friend in our local Commodore Computer Club piggy-backed some RAM chips onto the existing RAM chips and (with some simple, but clever wiring) converted it to a 512K unit just to demonstrate that it was possible. I don't have my Commodore stuff anymore (sigh) and my friend has passed away, so I can't give you specific specifications for the conversion, but I do remember that it was a fairly simple hack when he showed me how it's done.
I had bought (well, ok, my parents bought for me) a 1750 REU for my 128. It took a couple years of me playing with it to realize it didn't have as much RAM as advertised. Sent a letter to CBM and they advised me to send it back for analysis. Turns out I had a 1750 case with 1700 internals. Since I clearly hadn't opened it up and altered anything they replaced it out of warranty. I still have two letters from them on CBM letterhead.
Even without speaking of REU's extra RAM and DMA, that's one capability that the 6510 or VIC misses : byte block move. The demoscene would have loved it.
Lots of people in the comments talking about the official Commodore REUs, and some talking about the more recent CMD options, but does no one else remember the “geoRAM” product that came in-between them? I’m not sure if/how it might differ from the other options, to be honest, but I remember reading about it in magazines back in the day. :-) Wikipedia suggests it’s incompatible with other REUs, and was mainly supported by GEOS. And a magazine preview of it from back in the day said that it sold for $125, including a copy of GEOS 2.0, and didn’t require an enhanced power adapter for the C-64.
Correct -- geoRAM is incompatible with the REU, and does not have a DMA controller. geoRAM works by banking in a 256 byte window of ram in the cartridge i/o space. They are super easy to code for, and kinda cool, but nowhere near as powerful as the C= REUs.
Wow. So much to add. I own all three models 1700/1764/1750 and one of them was modified to 2Megs by literally stacking chips. I can try to get some pics. For me, why I have these is… I ran a Color64 BBS which could use the ram disk as fast storage to swap modules (messages, xfers, games, etc) superfast versus floppies. Before the REU, the Lt. Kernal hard drive (with parallel access) was the best option. Eventually Color128 was released which could utilize 80-column mode, ANSI, both 64k ram banks (which solved a major issue with ColorBBS) as well as 2mhz mode (and being able to go up to 9600bps.) Burst mode however meant that even a 1571 was pretty fast to load. My BBS used an REU for actual system files with a backup stored on a RamLink (CMD) which had a battery backup. But I’ll dig those out and show them off. The 2Meg REU I have still has the original shop that did the mod listed. I believe Transactor magazine showed how to accomplish that (so that might be a fun side topic/project). I believe the CMD XL actually uses the REC chip from post-collapse Commodore to function and also why so few of them existed. I do wish someone would develop a modern REU using modern chips and just transplant the REC in. It’d save power but also be able to go beyond 2Megs. See the 2Megs was accomplished by switching banks in. I believe 2Meg was the limit of the existing bank select byte (using all 8 bits) but you COULD in theory add another byte in another location to swap in even more memory but as little software could address, I don’t think many did though I did see the emulator you had did reference a 16meg one, which ironically is the max on the RamLink. Thanks for posting!
Sonic 1 for the c64 is such a pristine port - any bugs that were in the Master System version could be performed in this version too! It's actually somewhat better in some regards, as Bridge Zone Act 2's autoscrolling has been removed and acts like a regular stage, and Jungle Zone Act 2's killing camera-lock was removed as well, like in the Game Gear version!
I love learning about all the stuff I didn't know existed for the 64, as I was just a smidge too young to understand it all. I hope to some day find a working unit and start my retro-collection with it, followed by an A500.
I had a 1750 along with my 128D, also had the 1351 Mouse, 1581 3.5" drive, and 1084 display. I later expanded the 1750 REU to 1 MB, by piggybacking the the DRAMs with a pin jumpered to the REC chip. I believe the REC chip can handle up to 16 MB, there just wasn't enough room inside the REU for that much RAM. I had to discard the RF shield when I expanded it.
I never knew how much mine cost, as I got it in a trade in 1988. The second PC clone I built, I only had it for a week when a friend offered to trade his whole 128D setup for it. Timing was good, as I had yet to even buy software for the that PC clone. But I still had a C128 with a bunch of software. But I didn't have the display for both the VDC and VICII, and I only had a 1541 drive.
The soundtrack in this video is so good, I had to go listen to the whole thing on Spotify after finishing this video. It's the Attack of the PETSCII Robots soundtrack by Anders Enger Jensen for anyone curious.
I added sockets and extra RAM to my 1764 to give it 512K RAM. It was the second hardware mod I did. The first was adding switches to my 1541s to change the device number.
As soon as I heard the slightest mention of Sonic before it became widely known I bought my REU off Ebay for about half of what they were going for a month later. It's a neat device and it opened up the ability to play Sams Journey on NTSC which is an absolutely delightful game. What people seem to be doing more now though is just using larger carts to feed their games. A Pig Quest which is hopefully out this year is all bitmap GFX and uses a big cart format. Lykia is a 1MB cart game which is a lot of data in 8bit terms. But I do think between REU and large size carts we are going to see some absolutely stunning titles in the next couple years.
Great research(!) The price of the 1764 is listed on Page 48 of Compute! Gazette Issue 63, on page 48 of Run Issue 43 (1987-07) and on page 37 of Run Issue 75 (1990-03).
RAM disks were of great use in the 1980s because disk drives were so slow. If you were capturing real time data you could not write to disk fast enough in many cases. But you could do a run using the RAM disk to store the results and then at the end of the run copy the result set to disk. I had to do this to capture telemetry on early DOS laptops in 1986.
We had an expansion card for the C64, my brother got this one, the seller has pushed him to buy withit. Actually, my brother wanted to buy an Amiga 500 then. The seller has probably cheated him quite bit. But to take him in protection he was still young at the time. I can no longer say the price but the expansion was expensive and seemed pretty useless to me when I used the C64 and got it years later. Now I know why, I never saw the utility disk. I wonder if my brother got it back then, because I still had the complete disk box many years later. thank you for the video after all these years you have solved a mystery . BR Thomas
A branch instruction takes 3 cycles if it's taken, so the CPU copy loop in the example would be 14 cycles, except for the last iteration. If you happen to put your loop so that it crosses a page boundary, add one more cycle :)
Well, I did say it was a best-case scenario (short of unrolled loops). Most of my large data copy loops (copying more than 256 bytes) use indirect addressing so those take considerably more cycles.
My uncle ran a computer store in the 80s and I just texted him to see if he knew how much REUs went for. He has always been a Commodore fan (he even has a tattoo of the logo). He said that he can try and track down a price sheet from back then but he's pretty sure they were MSRP for 299 but most shops would price them at MAP which was 199.
MAP?
MAP - minimum advertised price
@@Jody_VE5SAR A store can't advertise a product for lower than the MAP (minimum advertised price) without risking penalties for the manufacturer. If a store wants to sell a product for $189, but the MAP is $199, then they would have to show the customers the full MAP of $199 but provide a $10-off coupon for the purchase of the unit on request.
Gsus! It was more expensive the the commodore itself.
@@pd1jdw630 well, RAM wasn't cheap back then.
The 32K EPROM socket can be used to add GEOS onboard to the REU for instant loading of the base GEOS application.
@@8BitNaptime I believe it does have priority. I no longer have a REU to confirm.
Sonic is actually a port of the already existing 8-bit version for the Sega Master System/Game Gear. That being said, it's a near perfect port of it, and it even runs a bit better than the original version!
Next thing you know you're going to tell us that the Super Mario Brothers game was also available on some other system before the C64! ;) Or were you just being cheeky with your comment? If so, well done. You got me!
@@JustWasted3HoursHere There were no systems before C64 - myths, legends and fake news!
@Brandon Taylor SEGA has selective caring. It seems like most of the time they'll let Sonic stuff slide, but SEGA is more protective of their other IPs in terms of fan works. I remember they were issuing take down notices of people merely uploading Saturn gameplay and I've seen groups receive C&Ds for fan games like the Streets of Rage remake and a few other things.
@@JustWasted3HoursHere port of the gameplay and gfx, rather than demake of the megadrive version
I have sonic already on 2 disks waiting to play, but cannot find an reu.
Sonic the Hedgehog port to C64 was a real shot in the arm to 8-bit retro game development world as it so viscerally made very clear what the REU brings to the table - exciting
Agreed. Although more native games for the SuperCPU would be nice too
From what i saw on screen it was most likely Master system port.
@@ponocni1 Even the developers say as much
@@ponocni1 i feel like the genesis sonic 2 could be ported to the amiga
....if you really tried
@@sonicthehedgehog23145 I see no reason why it could not. Only what might be limiting factor are sprites and onscreen color pallete, maybe memory. Also question is, what amiga? There are multiple ones with some being much more powerful.
Yes, it's so interesting how there's now quite the cult following of the C64 that can finally afford to use these super accessories that we wish we could have had just as easily some 4 decades ago! And with people developing modern solutions for old machines, like being able to run flash storage on these computers, this is really a magical era for nostalgia, isn't it?
Not just nostalgia, it's quite amazing how even people my age (born late 90s) can still use and experience these machines. It's because of the documentation and preservation that the community has done. And as someone who is interested in retro tech I'm very thanful for it.
@@carlangelo653: Nice, yep!
Yeah i look back with resentment.
Im like "oh you have an 040 cpu... Thats cute.. i just threw away a pentium 233 mhz chip cos its taking up space.." :)
Too many years running workbench on 2 megs and no mmu i suppose. Lol
I love how they even recreated 8-bit Sonic 1s broken demo. That's true dedication to the source material.
Back in the early 90s, I ran a CNet BBS off a REU using it as a ram disk on a C128 in 64 mode with two 1581s. Had the BBS menus and doors stored on the REU and the message base on a 1581. Think I only had a 2400baud modem but even with that the REU made a noticeable performance boost for users. Within a few years, moved on to a A500.
Good times Don. I ran a BBS from 86 to 89 on a Apple IIC with a external 3.5 drive and I think it was 512K memory upgrade using a 2400 baud modem.
I was wondering anyone would mention this use case. I ran my 1750 clone on a 128 with New Image BBS for a few years in college. It took forever to power it up and copy all the modules into the REU but it ran so smoothly once it was up.
I think your first sentence might be the most beautifully retro thing I’ve ever heard.
you ran a BBS on an A500? Blasphemy. I had a friend who had pretty much every major "A" computer except Apple - Amiga 500, Atari 520ST, Atari 800XL... and he ran the BBS on the Atari 8-bit then later a PC. He never used the Amiga for running the BBS. Mostly calling them. And playing games.
Same here Don. I ran a Cnet bbs with Empire and a few other overlay programs loaded into what we at the time called a "Rampack". It made a big difference in game play as Empire was a series of overlays that needed to be loaded in sequence with each game event. Good times.
I had one of those. I even had it all wired up with extra sockets and the glue logic (74series ftw) to make it a two megabyte reu, just at 15 I never came up with the money for the actual ram chips. There was also an update to software to properly use all that ram. This was more ram than pc-xt's of the time.
The C64 was my first computer. I'm always blow away by how much good programmers could squeeze out of that thing! The quick dive into assembly instructions and clock cycles was really interesting. I'd love to see more of that.
BTW, your opening theme song makes me happy every single time I hear it. It's everything I wish my memories of the 80s were actually like.
I came here to say this. I've been watching for years and the theme still slaps.
Same. I love it. 😁
My experience with the 1764 REU was discovering that my RAM disk was not as slick an idea as I thought when my C64 crashed and I lost the term paper i was working on at 2:00 AM in the morning on the last day of the semester. The old and dying refrigerator drew enormous current when it kicked on and my landlord's brother-in-law wiring job wasn't up to the task of supplying it and the rest of the house. Fortunately I only lost the bibliography but man it was a pain. Save early and Save often has been my motto ever since.
I absolutely never tire of seeing petscii robots on this channel. I think it's fascinating to see it evolve, and it really sets this channel apart because basically every device you review has a special petscii port that specifically shows off its features. It's not something you can really get anywhere else on TH-cam
I like that you have actual good sound production levels. Love you show!
My mother entered my brother and I in a draw in New Zealand, he ended up winning 1st prize which was a commodore 16. Mum had stressed to both of us if one happened to win then the prize was for the two of us so we were stoked. We had that computer for approx 6 months when to our surprise Dad went and upgraded to the commodore 64 with the tape deck, floppy disk drive & dot matrix printer. Along with all that we got some games on cassette and cartridge, I remember really liking 'Who Dares Wins' on cassette and 'Lode Runner' on cartridge. We did eventually get some games on floppy disk and they loaded fairly quickly. We had a lot of fun with this setup as it kept us entertained for hours.
Great video as usual. Just wanted to say that, after the fall of CMD, we were in an REU desert for ages! The 1541 Ultimate II was some relief, but it was very expensive for a long time, and might still be considered a bit of overkill. I think we are finally going to start seeing actual stand-alone REU clones in the next few years.
Couldn't you use a Turbo Chameleon? (it's really overkill, but still)
Yep for sure. I beta tested an REU compatible project that was 100% compatible, that I could see. I think he released it as open source but not sure it was actually finished. The prototype that I have is large but also had things like VGA out, RTC and something else. He streamlined it to just an REU but I have not seen that one yet.
@@thecorruptedbit5585 yes you could as it also has REU built-in. But like you said if you just want REU it is overkill. A cheap alternative is in the works.
Great Video. I can help with the price. The REU listed for $149 in the USA when it came out but I got mine on sale at Toys R Us for either $109 or $129. I do know that later on they were selling them for $99 and that is when we picked up a second unit for our BBS. I still own my 1764 and the PSU is still in use on my 64C.
I'm pretty sure I picked mine up for around $100. I was a poor college student at the time. I definitely would not have spent more than that. I used it along with CNet BBS. CNet used this trick of overwriting specified sections of running code with different code loaded from disk. This allowed the size of the program to be much larger than available RAM. By copying the program disk to the REU, then running it from there, not only did it run much faster, I had the entire floppy disk space available for saving the data from the BBS.
@@BrianMelancon Oh that is cool, I remember CNet but never used it. I ran a Color64 BBS and the REU used it as basically a drive and it installed all the BBS overlays to it so that it would not have to load them from disk. Overlays were basically games and mods for the BBS. The bootup took some time and required several disk swaps and Commodore's own software fast loader. I still have all those files but can't remember how to boot it. haha. One of these days I will try it again.
Yeah $100-129 for the REU at the time for a computer that was only $129 was a large investment for a kid just out of HS as I was. haha.
@@RacerX- What was the name of your BBS?
@@robertleeluben City Limits BBS.
@@RacerX- it sounds familiar, I was all over Miami area BBSs and did a lot of CG graphics as Creeping Death.
I don't know why, but I absolutely love this channel's intro music
I can’t believe I’m exited to learn about obsolete electronics I’ve never heard of
Yea! RAM those days was something you never get enough
Using it as a ram disk was perfect for running a bbs, color64 bbs to be specific. Especially if you had lots of kids for it.
I had a 1750 back in the day. I used it with my copy of C-NET/64 where a lot of the BBS software would be copied on startup. It made the experience a lot faster and allowed for the floppy drives to be used for file transfer and message storage. I think I'd gotten mine for around $350 at the time, but I can't remember exactly.
i enjoy the production value of your videos. sound, video and editing is all 10 / 10.
I had one for my C128. Used it mostly as a RAM Disk for GEOS. Made it lightning fast. Just had to remember to save any files back to disk.
When I was little, we bought a brand new C128 system with a 1084s monitor and the 1760 REU. We used it primarily for GEOS in 128 mode, and mostly to copy applications from the various disks into the REU at runtime so it was faster and easier to run a bunch of things at any given time. Of course, we had to reload it every time we rebooted the 128, but it was at a time when you never expected instant gratification. You'd sit down, boot up and load GEOS, then after it was loaded, pop in our prepared applications disks and copy them into the REU before we started doing anything. I remember trying to use it in C64 mode and never really understanding why it didn't do anything but that was my pre-teen self having a very rudimentary understanding of computers and what they were capable of. I do remember that the cost of our 128 system including a printer was somewhere near a thousand dollars at the time, and this was somewhere between the late 80's and early 90's. I want to say somewhere around 88 or 89. It's been a long time, but I vaguely remember the REU cost somewhere between $50 and $100 depending. Most people didn't have them, I knew more people that ran dual disk drives than had an REU at the time. Then again, we bought ours on base, so it's possible there was some kind of special military discount so my prices may be faulty. Seeing some others mentioning around $200 wasn't out of the question, it would have depended on how and where you got it, too.
I'm a 51 year old dude, probably your age also. I love going back and rewatching your older videos! Four, five, six years ago even. So much to learn & relearn, this is one of the great things to use TH-cam for! Lots of negative things about YT, and although I love Rumble & Bitchute, YT still "works" the best with a plethora of information!
8/5/22 Great review, I still own my Commodore 128 with the 1750 ram expander, 5 1/4 floppy drive, 1581 3 1/2" hard floppy drive, and a C=> monitor.
I ended up buying my ram expander from someone on Q-link. and your right it was quite expensive, but I was a bigger user of the various GEOS programs making my computer very useable as a desktop along with my HP Deskjet 500 where I could DL a printer drive off of Q-link. All that you said was true about speeding up things when using the expander, plus I had a jiffy Dos chip installed to speed up the booting. Nice to see that there still are users out there still supporting C=> in 2022. The fact that the 128 was a 3-in-one computer where I used both the 64 modes and 128 modes spent a lot of fun time and useful hours while never turning the computer off without any power or heating problems for years.
9:29 I think maybe those of us that AREN'T living in caves wouldn't know about it.
Once you brought up the surprising capabilities of this device, I was hoping you'd mention that you ported Petscii Robots to work on it. Great to see that! The jump in visual quality is impressive considering this is possible by just connecting a peripheral to a regular C64.
I think it's a strange concept to remove PETSCII out of PETSCII Robots.
The fact that you know so much about this stuff is simply astounding. Thanks for sharing!
This isn't rocket surgery.
Thanks David, I completely forget that we supported the REU in Maverick.
Thanks for showing this device off as it was a somewhat niche product probably due to pricing.
I for one remember seeing "$CALL" and similar in sales flyers throughout the 90s and it really annoyed me. Sure, sometimes the price might be fluctuating, but I generally took not showing the price to mean "it's way too expensive / our price isn't the cheapest."
I bought an expansion kit for my 1750. Bumped it up to 1024k - could have pushed it to 2 megs, but there were rumors that this was hard on the REU's MMU chip and it would sometimes fail. The kit had a daughter board, a lot of memory chips that had to be soldered in piggyback on the stock chips. 15ns chips! There was an article in RUN magazine that talked about it in detail. I still have it!
“Let’s go back to 1985 and the introduction of the Commodore 128.” Oh I wish! But happily I still have mine from back then.
6:20 "not sure how useful since it will lose its contents at poweroff" -- puts new meaning to the age old wisdom of keep good backups :P
Just after the launch of the REU, there was a major memory chip shortage. I had already moved on from my C64 to a PC. The owner the PC repair shop, in San Diego, told me he was buying REUs to harvest the ram chips and resell them to PC users.
It was great seeing you at Game Fest in Austin. I’m glad the copy of Sonic I gave you was put to good use. Great video as always.
I literally just used the globe demo to test a fix I did on my old 1541 this afternoon! Wow, what a weird world!
I remember I had a REU for my Commodore 64 specifically for running the bbs software Color64. Color64 had modules that needed to be loaded up every time a user went to a different section. Without a REU the modules would have to load off the drive which would take time. With the REU no loading time as it was much faster. I remember some bbs's that ran color64 used hard drives for the C64 at the time and didn't need the REU since the drives were fast enough to load the modules. Good memories and good times!
12:49 Sonic ending his life.
Actually that BNE will usually be _three_ cycles, not two. BNE is two cycles when the branch is _not_ taken and either three or four cycles when it is taken, depending on if it needs to cross a (256 byte) page boundary. In a loop copying several pages of bytes it will of course be taken about 255 times as often as it's not taken, and there will also be a bit of extra overhead for setting up the loop for the next 256 bytes to copy.
That's a minor quibble, though. Overall, nice job on explaining (for those not familiar with this stuff) why DMA was so much faster than programmed I/O!
The energy inefficiency of the Commodore in general is impressive. MSXs worked just fine with much smaller, internal power supplies.
I still have one of these for my C128D, and it still works! Made things work much more efficiently.
Great video, crazy how they got around system limitations back then
Talking about clock cycles in 2022 may seem something incredible for today's younger engineer.
Run Magazine issue 47 - November 1987 page 50: 1700, 1750 and 1764 REU carts for $119,95, $199,95 and $149 respectively.
Starting at page 45 in the same magazine "The tale of the RAM and the Mouse" is a good read.
The video clips, this expansion enabled was impressive. The Dallas intro sequence for instance.
Locally we used these REU's to power our BBS software and load the entire BBS into the REU so it would require less (slower) disk access. We also had a local modder who would upgrade smaller memory units to 512k to save on costs or availability where possible. Very handy units!
Dear David,
Thank you for sharing useful information about Reu.
Unfortunately I don't have real hardware, but thankfully vice emulator give us this chance to have fun moments with reu specially watching nuvie videos
Neat! Two of the three channels I've rung the notification bell for have uploaded on the same day!
Reminds me of my TRS-80 Color Computer 3 512k RAM expansion which also used bank-switching, except that unit went inside the CoCo 3's case and generated a ton of heat.
It was also one of the first victims of a DRAM shortage in those years, inflating its cost by 200%.
Using RAM disk back then or simply familiarizing with floppies table of contents, sectors, editing things directly in memory or with some hex editor is what separates old and new IT guys. I had a use case for a RAM disk on a windows server VM loaded with 64GB RAM where only few GB were actually being used/required and nobody even knew such thing was possible to have part of RAM available as a drive letter. Yes, SSDs make it less useful these days, but it's just one example. These days people can't do anything when there is no mouse to click.
I built a project called neoram which gives you up to 2mb extra memory and has a battery backup so you don't lose the data. well worth the effort
That is one excellent t-shirt.
Always great to learn from a new video
Just curious, ever thought of going on a small tour to give technical seminars devoted to discussing techniques for vintage tech restoration? If you, LGR, techmoan, Tech Tangents, and your brother were to hold a conference panel I'm sure there'd be a great turnout.
I would have thought that one of the main things that these expansions would be good for would be in terms of running GEOS on the C64. In fact, I suspect that ROM point could well have been intended for GEOS to be pre-loaded into the ROM making for very fast boot times and having more memory available in order to run programs on top of GEOS.
I was a heavy user of GEOS back in the day, and indeed, the 1750 hooked up to a Commodore 128 made GEOS lightning fast. That alone was reason to get one.
I keep thinking the Rocky Horror Picture Show game took advantage of the REU on the C128.
i love watching vintage tech videos :D!
Thanks for the video! I’m old enough that I could’ve owned a Commodore computer, but I just never did. I love the technology of old computer systems, and you do a great job of explaining it. Also, love the shirt! Classic poem!
I LOVE that someone made a Sonic the Hedgehog port to the C64! That is one of my favorite retro games. I remember the awe hearing my brand new Genesis sing "SEEEEGA" the first time I powered it on...
I had a teacher that Invested in a c64 REU, He told 8 year old me it was that biggest waste of money of any c64 product, and (at the time) was yet to find a use for it- guy was a bit of a fanatic.
I love this channel. I won't pretend to understand lots of what's going on but I am learning!
Many of the later Infocom games and some re-releases would use the REU. The initial load time was longer, but after that, it did everything (except game saves,) from the REU instead of disk.
Thanks for another informative, entertaining episode! To me, it's always a good day when David posts.
Back in the day I had a 256K REU for my C=128. A friend in our local Commodore Computer Club piggy-backed some RAM chips onto the existing RAM chips and (with some simple, but clever wiring) converted it to a 512K unit just to demonstrate that it was possible. I don't have my Commodore stuff anymore (sigh) and my friend has passed away, so I can't give you specific specifications for the conversion, but I do remember that it was a fairly simple hack when he showed me how it's done.
I had bought (well, ok, my parents bought for me) a 1750 REU for my 128. It took a couple years of me playing with it to realize it didn't have as much RAM as advertised. Sent a letter to CBM and they advised me to send it back for analysis. Turns out I had a 1750 case with 1700 internals. Since I clearly hadn't opened it up and altered anything they replaced it out of warranty. I still have two letters from them on CBM letterhead.
This is a fantastic topic for a video. Fascinating stuff!
The only reason that could push me to buy a REU back in the 80's was an arcade port of dragons lair or space ace. Thank you 8 bit guy for this video.
9:26 Oh Wait, it included Sonic in this video! Nice work David!
That came out 10 years after I bought my PET. All a distant memory.
Even without speaking of REU's extra RAM and DMA, that's one capability that the 6510 or VIC misses : byte block move. The demoscene would have loved it.
Brilliant video, thanks. It must take ages to do all the graphics but they explain everything so well! Really enjoyed that. :)
Lots of people in the comments talking about the official Commodore REUs, and some talking about the more recent CMD options, but does no one else remember the “geoRAM” product that came in-between them? I’m not sure if/how it might differ from the other options, to be honest, but I remember reading about it in magazines back in the day. :-)
Wikipedia suggests it’s incompatible with other REUs, and was mainly supported by GEOS. And a magazine preview of it from back in the day said that it sold for $125, including a copy of GEOS 2.0, and didn’t require an enhanced power adapter for the C-64.
Correct -- geoRAM is incompatible with the REU, and does not have a DMA controller. geoRAM works by banking in a 256 byte window of ram in the cartridge i/o space. They are super easy to code for, and kinda cool, but nowhere near as powerful as the C= REUs.
I always love when the 8 bit guy uploads. his videos are always interesting.
I really like these technical videos.
Funkiest intro music on TH-cam 🤘🏻
Hopefully this is the start of more REU games and more/cheaper REU clones
dang i love the intro
WOW Sonic was really impressive!
Wow. So much to add. I own all three models 1700/1764/1750 and one of them was modified to 2Megs by literally stacking chips. I can try to get some pics.
For me, why I have these is… I ran a Color64 BBS which could use the ram disk as fast storage to swap modules (messages, xfers, games, etc) superfast versus floppies. Before the REU, the Lt. Kernal hard drive (with parallel access) was the best option.
Eventually Color128 was released which could utilize 80-column mode, ANSI, both 64k ram banks (which solved a major issue with ColorBBS) as well as 2mhz mode (and being able to go up to 9600bps.) Burst mode however meant that even a 1571 was pretty fast to load.
My BBS used an REU for actual system files with a backup stored on a RamLink (CMD) which had a battery backup.
But I’ll dig those out and show them off. The 2Meg REU I have still has the original shop that did the mod listed. I believe Transactor magazine showed how to accomplish that (so that might be a fun side topic/project).
I believe the CMD XL actually uses the REC chip from post-collapse Commodore to function and also why so few of them existed.
I do wish someone would develop a modern REU using modern chips and just transplant the REC in. It’d save power but also be able to go beyond 2Megs.
See the 2Megs was accomplished by switching banks in. I believe 2Meg was the limit of the existing bank select byte (using all 8 bits) but you COULD in theory add another byte in another location to swap in even more memory but as little software could address, I don’t think many did though I did see the emulator you had did reference a 16meg one, which ironically is the max on the RamLink.
Thanks for posting!
These power supply units are the definition of bricks.
Sonic 1 for the c64 is such a pristine port - any bugs that were in the Master System version could be performed in this version too! It's actually somewhat better in some regards, as Bridge Zone Act 2's autoscrolling has been removed and acts like a regular stage, and Jungle Zone Act 2's killing camera-lock was removed as well, like in the Game Gear version!
Excellent vid! Thanks!! As always, you rock!
I love learning about all the stuff I didn't know existed for the 64, as I was just a smidge too young to understand it all. I hope to some day find a working unit and start my retro-collection with it, followed by an A500.
Remember using nail clippers, to double the density, of a floppy? =)
Test Drive II is one that I can remember that used the REU.
You forgot the new remake of "Super Ghosts and Goblins", it asks if you want to preload the entire game into your REU.
Super interesting! Thanks for making this video!
This is the best thing I ever saw.
I had a 1750 along with my 128D, also had the 1351 Mouse, 1581 3.5" drive, and 1084 display. I later expanded the 1750 REU to 1 MB, by piggybacking the the DRAMs with a pin jumpered to the REC chip. I believe the REC chip can handle up to 16 MB, there just wasn't enough room inside the REU for that much RAM. I had to discard the RF shield when I expanded it.
I never knew how much mine cost, as I got it in a trade in 1988. The second PC clone I built, I only had it for a week when a friend offered to trade his whole 128D setup for it. Timing was good, as I had yet to even buy software for the that PC clone. But I still had a C128 with a bunch of software. But I didn't have the display for both the VDC and VICII, and I only had a 1541 drive.
Oh my!
Sonic on a C64!!!??!
Waw!! 😁
Thanks 👍🏻 😊
The soundtrack in this video is so good, I had to go listen to the whole thing on Spotify after finishing this video.
It's the Attack of the PETSCII Robots soundtrack by Anders Enger Jensen for anyone curious.
I added sockets and extra RAM to my 1764 to give it 512K RAM. It was the second hardware mod I did. The first was adding switches to my 1541s to change the device number.
As soon as I heard the slightest mention of Sonic before it became widely known I bought my REU off Ebay for about half of what they were going for a month later. It's a neat device and it opened up the ability to play Sams Journey on NTSC which is an absolutely delightful game. What people seem to be doing more now though is just using larger carts to feed their games. A Pig Quest which is hopefully out this year is all bitmap GFX and uses a big cart format. Lykia is a 1MB cart game which is a lot of data in 8bit terms. But I do think between REU and large size carts we are going to see some absolutely stunning titles in the next couple years.
Great research(!)
The price of the 1764 is listed on Page 48 of Compute! Gazette Issue 63, on page 48 of Run Issue 43 (1987-07) and on page 37 of Run Issue 75 (1990-03).
And? My Compute!’s Gazettes and Run magazines are boxed away, please put us out of our misery and tell us what the prices were! :-)
@@ScrapKing73 There's a thing called PDF now.
@@ScrapKing73 Found it. :) $109 for the 1700, and $117 for the 1764. (Only $8 more for that big old power supply and double the ram? Really?).
@@bozimmerman Those are discounted prices from 1990 or so.
He's looking for the ORIGINAL release price, NOT discounted prices
RAM disks were of great use in the 1980s because disk drives were so slow. If you were capturing real time data you could not write to disk fast enough in many cases. But you could do a run using the RAM disk to store the results and then at the end of the run copy the result set to disk. I had to do this to capture telemetry on early DOS laptops in 1986.
My guys got a zombie hand in the thumbnail
We had an expansion card for the C64, my brother got this one, the seller has pushed him to buy withit. Actually, my brother wanted to buy an Amiga 500 then. The seller has probably cheated him quite bit. But to take him in protection he was still young at the time. I can no longer say the price but the expansion was expensive and seemed pretty useless to me when I used the C64 and got it years later. Now I know why, I never saw the utility disk. I wonder if my brother got it back then, because I still had the complete disk box many years later. thank you for the video after all these years you have solved a mystery . BR Thomas
A wonderful topic for a video, Thanks.
I seem to remember the c64 version was $249, and the 128K 128 version was 149, he 512 was $399
A branch instruction takes 3 cycles if it's taken, so the CPU copy loop in the example would be 14 cycles, except for the last iteration. If you happen to put your loop so that it crosses a page boundary, add one more cycle :)
Well, I did say it was a best-case scenario (short of unrolled loops). Most of my large data copy loops (copying more than 256 bytes) use indirect addressing so those take considerably more cycles.
@@The8BitGuy Even in a best case scenario the branch would be taken each iteration except the last one :)