64 Commodore 64 Cartridges: Expansions, Interfaces, Utilities, Games
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 29 มิ.ย. 2024
- Take a look at 64 of my C64 cartridges, from fast loaders, speech synthesis, video, RAM, to CPU upgrades, disk and modem interfaces, and of course games.
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Ending music is the unreleased "POKE 1024,81" by Bedford Level Experiment: bedfordlevelexperiment.bandca...
Links:
Neutron / EasyFlash: • Neutron - New Commodor...
BWack's channel: / bbytew
Speech Synthesis Technobabble: • Star Trek Technobabble...
The 8-Bit Guy's 80-column C64: • The Quest for 80 Colum...
Zellers (Jumpman and Apshai story): • Atari Video Touch Pad ...
SuperCPU: • Exploring the SuperCPU...
C128 REU 8BST2: • Commodore 128 RAM Expa...
Epyx Fastload: • Exploring Epyx Fast Lo...
Index:
0:00 Intro
1:09 Productivity Software
3:55 Programming Utilities
4:52 Miscellaneous
5:49 Interface/Storage Cartridges
8:14 Speech Synthesis
9:39 Video Upgrade
10:20 3rd Party Games
14:09 Commodore-Branded Games
16:49 Boxed Games
20:18 Educational Software
23:36 CPU and RAM Upgrades
25:20 Utility Cartridges
32:00 Please subscribe & thanks
32:25 Credits - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
This channel is criminally underrated. Rock on sir!
I agree, it is more than excellent; Robin has such a great way of explaining things.
I was going to say that and do not get why this channel does not have 100ks of subs as is no channel with so much unique c64 content!!!
Definitely!
WOW Jeff Minter, I remember when i was a about 11 yrs old I wrote to him asking for advise on programming my own games. Some weeks later I got a letter back saying in a few simple words that I can recall, "what ever game I made It was going to be a GREAT one" :D. Didn't care if it was generic reply either, I was 11 and thought it was awesome getting a reply from the man who made the best games I liked playing for hours, like the Mutant Camel series and Hover Bovver. I think I still have that letter from 30+ yrs ago lols. This video brought great memories back :).
I still love his newer games. The stuff he comes out with now, especially the VR stuff is fucking brilliant. Just recently bought Moose Life.
I've been meaning to do a video on my C64 cartridge collection and after watching your video, I'm inspired to finally get mine done. Like you I've got a lot of cartridges, around 150 +/- if memory serves correctly. I might need to do multiple videos lol.
It was a lot of work to show (and briefly demonstrate) 64 cartridges; I can't imagine doing 150! :)
Agreed. I can tell you put a lot of work into your video. I'm thinking that I'll break mine up into multiple videos over time having each video cover a specific publisher, example Activision, Atari, etc., that way it won't be a PITA hah.
The sheer number of peripherals made for Commodore back in the day, and still being made to this day. Staggering
@Eugene Boucher Some like new things for Commodore. Even building a new system
At 7:25 I had one of those Skyworks IEEE Flash adapters connected to a "high capacity" SFD-1001 drive for running a BBS back in the 80's. I still have it somewhere stashed away in the attic, maybe I'll dig it up one day... maybe not lol. Wow such wonderful "Flash"-backs... I think it was a really special machine for many of us old timers due to our childhood/teenage memories. :)
At 25:20 looks like that Fast-Load cartridge is one of the original releases, they have re-released it later with a different box design. While it wasn't the fastest fast loader, it was one of the most compatible fast loaders with most programs. On a side note, while the freezer/snapshot type cartridges (ex. Super Snapshot, Ice-Pick, Action Replay, etc) were very useful for bypassing copy protection especially in the beginning, later on companies have started to include protection routines within the main program which had to be bypassed by crackers to make it work.
At 13:25 the last name on that "Juice!" cartridge "Haroutunian" is likely Armenian ending in "-nian" (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harutyunyan). Finnish last names usually end in "-nen".
Fantastic work! Lots of editing to do this but so worth it - thank you!
Great video Robin, love the little glimpses of gameplay/speech in there. Was fun comparing with what I had/have. I am also a fan of Super Snapshot.
Thanks for this detailed overview ! 🤗
I love your videos. My favorite cartridge to this day is Rootin Tootin. Still play it all the time and it never gets old
Great walk through of your collection. Looking forward to some more in-depth vids on some of those. Idea for a future video, compare Simons Basic against Super Expander.
Imagine showing this to a C64 user in 1990 :)
Man, I just started with emulators. It would blow the mind of a 13-year old me from the late 1980's that I basically "have" a VIC-20, a C64, an Amiga, Atari 800, Atari ST, NES, SNES, Sega Master System and Sega Mega Drive on a single computer, plus literally hundreds of games for them. 😎😁👍
Very nice compilation in a video catalog showing working cartridges!
I am a huge fan of your clips. Great videos each time.
Interesting, 30+ years later, to finally see what the box looked like that for that Epyx Fast Loader my dad had for our C64. It almost never left the C64 since we had almost no other cart stuff.
"Super Expander and Simons' Basic not compatible with each other", Story of Commodore right there.
I'd love to know the story behind there being the two.
Yeah says it all
Well, to be fair, there was no reason why they should. One would choose one or the other. In later years, yeas, but the WIntel conglomerate was already decided on, before they became public.
Great episode! I had a LOT of fun with my Super Expander cartridge. I did have a Currah speech cartridge, but I traded it for something (can't remember what), I still have my Commodore Magic Voice.
I also had a Turtle Graphics cartridge. I remember "borrowing" some of the graphics drawing code from it in my own programs! Shhhh.
Great episode. I never knew most of these existed until recently, when I found your channel.
Long time viewer first time comment - this was my favorite video by far! Loved seeing so many fantastic cartridges in one place. Most of have had or still had over the years. Expanding the 64 was always favorite hobby seeing what cld be done. The amazing thing is this was still just the tip of the iceberg. Super Snapshot 5 was also my favorite utility. Well that at Maverick. Thanks for the great video
Awesome video Robin, very nice C64 cartridge collection there.
Frieda Lekkerkerker, what a name! I have to really appreciate all the programmers and the programmers they made. Even the stuff that isn’t my cup of tea such as Tooth Invaders (played for the first time a couple years ago on cartridge) and Fraction Fever (we got that cartridge when I was a young kid), I still appreciate them because they are all part of what made the Commodore 64 experience for everyone who had them. And anything I ever bought new, I still have all the boxes and manuals. Same for some eBay and classified ad sales I picked up that still had a lot of the boxes. Those early games always had such great comic style cover art that really made the games look so much better than they actually were. And a lot of the titles you showcased here I have on disk instead of cartridge.
Sitting here, with m head nii my hands, watching every minute of a wonderful trip down memory lane... fantastic.
Great episode and I really enjoyed seeing (@3:20) the green Alphaworks designed cartridge board with the Cynthcart 1.0 EPROM installed. That’s the revision 3 board I designed back in the early 2000s. I sold thousands of these and always get a buzz seeing them out in the wild.
Nice! I think that was the first new cartridge I bought since my Super Snapshot v5 in 1990 or whatever.
Thanks for making these videos. I have just started getting into retro computers a few years ago after having been away from that scene for over 30 years and I am enjoying (re)learning about them. One cartridge (and book) that I would really like for you to cover is Simons' Basic. I just recently got a copy of the cartridge and the book and I find it pretty impressive. It's kind of ironic that my journey in the 8-bit computer world started when I moved to Alberta in the late 70s and it is starting again now that I have moved back to Alberta and retired here.
Thanks. Simons' BASIC is on my list of topics so it should happen!
I really look forward to a deeper dive on several of these. I would love to see what IDE devices you could successfully use with the IDE64. VERY impressive collection of Commodore 64 expansion cartridges. I'm also curious about C128 compatibility with these.
ThriftyAV I agree. I would like to see more about the IDE adapter and possible use with c128.
Most of these cartridges will just automatically put the C128 into C64 mode, but the ones that are just I/O, with no ROM, should work in C128 mode.
Today it doesn't matter, since anything can do anything (phones, consoles, etc). But. It might have mattered, if Intel was not listening to you all the time (even after Facebook, Twitter, etc).
Cartridges were expensive and a luxury in France when i was a child, my dad bought one in '86 called "THE TOOL-64" which was similar to SIMONS' BASIC. I had a lot of fun with this cart, learning the basics of graphics primitives. It cost about 500F vs 100F for commando (in cassette).
Awesome stuff as always. I love all those cartridges! I only have a dozen or so, but none as cool as yours!
Ah, lots of goodies here. Enjoyed that, thanks! :)
I'd LOVE to see a video with the IDE64 thing, and if you can get a hard drive/SSD working with it. That'd be really cool.
Cool collection, brings back a lot of good memories and makes me wonder if you were part of the scene back in the day?
Nice to see KCS Power Cartridge. It was fairly popular in Europe around 85/89. It is unique in that its monitor has W (Walk) command for assembly step by step execution. Also binary display for status register which made it my favourite tool for assembly program debugging at a time. Funny, that the W command does not work in later C64C models (like you use in your show) but works in the original C64 breadbins. Perhaps kernal difference- it was always a mistery to me as I thought the kernels were backward compatible apparently not.
I still remember that the box that the Power Cartridge came in was 10 times bigger than the Cartridge.
Fantastic! Thanks for sharing this.
That IDE one looks really interesting and I wouldn't mind a video. I've come across an old IEC-ATA and it's just fun to connect harddisks to the C64 (real CMD hdds are made of unobtainium here).
Thinking about getting a cartridge port multiplexer/switcher just to leviate the physical stress of inserting/removing from the computer port. They're rare here too, sadly.
You have way more carts than I have. Collecting them is really fun, even one can't use them all together. Have to say, it's such a variety and they're all great. I'm a bit jealous but since I do have an Easy Flash 3+ it's all good again :)
You have a lot of cool stuff :) I love that drawing device and the funny looking operating system.
I love being able to see so many weird accessories. So many other youtubers have been taking on bigger projects instead recently.
Love the POKE- song at the end!!
I'm also a huge fan of the IDE64 cartridge. It's filemanager is in a league of it's own - super fast and eady to use!
Your videos bring a tear to my eyes! Hard to find or afford a c64 system I had one with 4 drive printer and alot of cartridges you show! Anyone want to trade for a centeris 650 fully working!! HD and all! Well I se nope!! LOL I would not either!! Good job! Making a grown man cry!!!!! LOVE from ALASKA!!
Great episode Robin. I just love carts for the C64:)
The C64 is/was such an amazing machine. That’s why I still own one. Another great video Robin. 🙂👍
Good video. I used the C64 interface with a baycom or TNC Packet modem to connect to wireless BBS somewere in 1988~1995
The jittery drawing table probably has a couple of potentiometers in it for sense. (variable resistors) The carbon in them gets dirty over time, making them 'noisy' so to speak. A shot of contact cleaner into each with a subsequent spinning back and forth should clean them up and make it track better. Just a guess, I've never looked inside that tablet. So many neat peripherals came out for the 64 back in the day. I had a radio interface for mine that let me send and copy morse code over the air on my ham radio when I was 17. Good times.
Such a great collection :) 3370 pharmacy avenue, agincourt (now Scarborough) was 2 minutes away from where I lived. When my C64 failed, I was able to drop it off there and have them repaired in a couple of days. I looked it up on google streets and the building looks different then I remember it must have been rebuilt.
Hey. Thanks for posting all this nostalgic stuff. I saw the orange “Ontario Hydro” sticker on the back of that hard drive and was like wow this guy is in Ontario. (Me as well) Lots of stuff I used to have on my comodore! Remember the speech program called SAM?!
Amazing collection! Nice! Makes me want to go downstairs and fire up my C64 again. I wish I had saved all of my floppy disks containing all of the programs I wrote in BASIC. I have a lot of fond memories of them and would love to see them again but I don't know where my floppies ended up. Probably in the garbage during one of my apartment moves.
The IEEE-Flash clip goes onto the ground screw probably. Had a different IEEE interface, it was an external box that hooked into the IEC-488 serial lines, and had external power to control the SFD-1001. The SFD-1001 had a ground screw coming out of the back just under the IEEE connector.
I liked this video. It gave me a nice sense of nostalgia. Sadly, I don't have a C64 anymore. However, I know someone who does. I might eventually see if I can buy it from him when I have space for one. Keep up the fun videos.
So many awesome toys! Thanks for sharing!
Some of this stuff I wanted as a kid but could never had my hands on it just living through these videos now amazing stuff.
7:31 "This Plugs Into the Commodore" is a definite contender for an alternate title for this video.
Great video, thank you!
U always have the most fascinating videos
I got my 64 in '83. I stayed up for 60 hrs straights. I had so many expansions. Anyway I need all this stuff.
Love the song at the end.
Superb video - I didn't know that Wizard Of Wor supported that module.
I love the look of old Commodore 64 software packaging. The blue and silver made it stand out. I also love the look of the Commodore branded cartridges. I never had Manu. Bit I did have Omega Race and it worked. I also had Pile Position and a few others on cartridge. But can't remember all. I'd have to go search boxes in my closet and shed to find them.
I have a final cartridge 3. It has freeze/reset, extra commands, assembler/monitor, could print screenshots and more. Used it lots to find the location in memory where the lives where stored and bump it to FF when I was 13 or so 😁
Got hunderds of different C64 cartridges. Like the 1541 Ultimate II + and the EF3. There are so many to collect and there coming new ones for it. The FM YAM is also great and the X-Pander 3 is a great expansion.
fascinating! your a gold mine of fun information
Radar Rat Race was the game of my childhood! I drove my mom crazy with that song... it just never ends!
😲 Just wow!..
Ka-ching ka-ching $$$.. that collection is litterally worth a fortune..
Another great video.. Keep up the good work..
Oh also after seeing SpaceX's SN5 fly yesterday I can't help think of it when seeing Jupiter lander now. lol
"... Another beautiful piece of art"
This could be the format of your next channel. Bob Ross turns over in grave.
Very nice stuff. I love c64
Hi Robin. I watched this video about cartridges and I also listened to your recent podcast about cereals. You might be interested to know about the danish cereal Guldkorn as there was a C64 cartridge-game called Guldkorn Expressen (by Silversoft). It was available for Amiga and PC as well. There was also a Swedish version of it, called Kalas Puffs Expressen (the cereal here in Sweden is called Kalaspuffar). I watched this video while eating cereals btw. :D
Haha, when two worlds (C64 and cereal) collide! Thanks for the info about that game, and it's great to know people listen to the podcast too :)
Oh man, this video took me back to when I was a kid and had a c64. Those graphics and sounds.
Wow how nice. Thanks you so much
YES!!! New 8-bit Show & Tell.
Ah, seeing that "Super Expander 64" cartridge sitting there brings back memories. I used to love to tinker around with that (until I discovered "Simons' BASIC"). Good times! [edit: David Simons was only 13 when he wrote that?! Wow!]
Great content as ever. Half of those carts I never knew existed - Here's a tip, play the credits at 1.75 speed, it turns into groovy upbeat hit.
Love the goofy cartridge with the connectors exposed if all were like that and had that hole the would make for awesome and elaborate wallmounting pieces 🤩
Wow awesome ! I had a Mach 5 cart I forgot about that! It was for c128 mode I had a 1541 with my c128 it worked great
Sometimes "Save New York" was "Destroy New York". It was strangely satisfying to knockout the entire first floor of a building and watch the whole thing crumble. (Probably because I never had a copy of Rampage...)
Seawolf... I think my dad got that not realizing you needed paddles to play it. You can sort of play with joystick (left or right will fire a torpedo) but your subs are stuck at one side of the screen. Years later I finally had a friend loan me some Atari paddles.
Kickman - probably the very first cartridge game we ever owned. Can be played with joystick and keyboard too. I remember being home sick from school one day, and it seemed like my headache gave me superpowers, because I ended up beating level after level like I had never before done in my life (granted I was only 8 at the time, and we had the C64 only a couple of years at that point.) Eventually you end up with a lot of blue and green ghosts and pacmen (which fall very fast!)
Kids On Keys - Good memories there... Helped me learn to find the letters on a keyboard faster. Also... once I figured out how to say the author's name, I couldn't get enough of saying it... Lekkerkerker... Lekkerkerker....
I remember very well the Datel Electronics Action Replay Mk 3 that i once had, as well as their sound sampler. now that was good, it did high quality sound sampling.,
Great Video! at 8:45 you should have said "intergalactic planetary"
my neighbor had Lazarian and Jupiter Lander cartridges. In the earliest days, cartridges were amazing compared to a datasette. However, there was no piracy with cartridges. We used to buy cassettes with up to 100 games in total with both sides. They came with a list of games with corresponding 3 digit datasette counter positions but they never matched :-) it was always a couple of games ahead or behind. I remember checking all those games whenever a multi-game-pack tape was released, it was very exciting because you didn't know which games were good and you had to do discovery. At school, we would talk about the discovered games. You would also find out who liked the same games as you did. All this changed when disk drives came. There were no 100-game packages. Even though Turbotape provided considerably fast load times, it was a bitch to find a game in a tape since datasette digits did not work so good so you had to waste a lot of space and put one game or program on each side so each tape held only two programs and that took a lot of space for tapes. Also even copying cracked tape games were difficult. You needed a double-deck tape player/recorder or had to hook-up a player-recorder setup and had to do an analog copy. I guess the major advantage of the disk drive then was that the floppies took much less space than the tapes on your desk and file access was non-linear. Actually, speed was not a major issue since 1541 without Dolphin DOS or JiffyDOS was very slow anyway. Now, I have IDE64 and µIEC/SD but I still prefer a Jiffied 1581 drive. I really hope someone would make an FPGA based board someday that includes SuperCPU and IDE64 together, and even better make it internal so you could still use the expansion port.
OMG, I had COMPLETELY forgotten about Radar Rat Race. What a blast from the past!
The man with the talking Hand is back! :D
"Star Post" at 18:45 is one of those games from the C64 era that did Star Wars Artwork on the box, that is clearly some interpretation of the X-Wing, not even trying to hide it, if i was in the Shop as 10 year old seeing that box i would sooooo want it. ...and then you play the game and it has nothing to do what-so-ever with Star Wars, no X-Wing looking thing anywhere... just boxes and lines, lol
If you tried to pull that today, Disney would instantly unleash the lawyers.
Koala Paint and Magic Desk were my f'n JAM back in middle school days!
I wish you would have been able to get your hands on one of the MIDI expansions. I used one for a tad bit to full around with some music creation on my keyboard.
There was also a BBU for a RAM expansion unit made by the same company that made the BBU 2M cartridge you showed. I was able to use that and a separate RAM cartridge to store some games while powered off. Made for some nearly instantaneous games loads. Although only a few games I was able to load to the cartridge. Jumpman and Jumpman Jr. were two games I could do that with.
I love the Versa64 Cartridge PCB! I ordered some from a PCB fab for making diagnostic carts and physical versions of a couple of games from itch.io. It's compatible with 8k and 16k images, both normal and ultimax, and 8k ROMs only require a single capacitor and bridging a few connections. I highly recommend it.
Just discovered your second channel. Great.
Great content
I would ask to see more of the Versacart. It's an interesting device, but als Hans is my friend who deserves all the attention he can get :)
I agree with @The Highlander. Hans has created several hardware projects for the C64 and other retro systems and has generously shared them with the retro community. He's a very smart guy and is quite humble about his accomplishments.
Fond memories of all things CMD, including RAMLink and HD! I used to belong to a RAMLink Users’ Group back in the days of FidoNet...
I just remembered - I also had a Super Snapshot v5, which allowed me to play those multi-disk-sided RPG’s from SSI, loading from RAMLink and switching sides with the interrupt button. I knew then that loading games from HD was the tech baseline.
Fast Load.... I remember that Compute Gazette's add with the impatient face guy and the "still loading" on the C64 screen loll BTW, I got a Sierra Online BC's Quest For Tire only game i got left as cartrige with my C64 and that Simons Basic too. Great to keep it! :)
Hard to believe someone is making this video in Aug 5, 2020 during a world wide pademic.
Back then we didn't have any of those cartridges. Everyone used tape or disk.
I didn't even know about the Epyx fastloader cartridge until towards the end of my C=64 career. By then I had bought Geos, which was a last gasp to keep up with Macintosh Plus. The Macintosh with a comfy GUI to live in and PC AT with fast cpu 16mghz speed destroyed everything else.
I hacked the C=64 all through high school, but once I entered college I had access to better machines and no time for 64 programming any more. It was all Microsoft Quickbasic. Qhen I got Quickbasic for the Mac I jumped over there. Oddly, now I have more Commodore junk in the barn I haven't touched once... than I could of ever dreamed of back in the 80's.
My cartridge collection only had 3 members. 1st was Koala Paint, that couldn't print without a separate program! But they did give a detailed description of how to photograph a TV or monitor! #2 was Fast Load because that was essential.
But the third and last cartridge I acquired was one I didn't see in your collection: Pitfall II. My friends would come over and we'd play for hours. No saving the game, IIRC, it being a cartridge. Also (again IIRC) I think I finished it once. I think. . . . Anyway, being nerds, we'd shout "La grenouille de mort!" when attempting to jump the deadly poisonous (?) frog. Good times.
Pitfall II is excellent, but I only have it on disk (or possibly tape).
15:00 This Wizard of Wor was a damn good port of the arcade game.
Used to have simons basic and soccer cart,remember using tape deck earth wire to short out connector on back to input cheats and things,sys codes and stuff
So many things I remember (even though I think I only had one cartridge, The Final Cartridge III). I do know about the SuperCPU (but did not back then). The 2 Mb cartridge is sick! My first Amiga had 1.5 Mb (after my upgrade haha)... And my later one was 4 Mb.
End music is... GOLD!
Thanks, if you're one of the select few who enjoy my music, there's more here: bedfordlevelexperiment.bandcamp.com/
Love this! Have you done a video about the "User Port" on the C64? Lots of stuff was available to those who earnestly sought it.
I haven't, but I probably will get to it. I did use a modem in the user port in one episode.
The nice thing about the C64 is that the interfaces and internals are so well-documented that if you kow electronics and a little programming, it's not that hard to make your own add-ons.
Another great video Robin.
You need to try your Commodore Magic Voice cartridge again, but this time wired up so that the SID audio coming out of the C64 goes into the Audio In connector of the Cartridge and the Audio out (which contains Both the digital speech and SID sound effects / tunes) to your monitor. This makes a world of difference when playing Wizard of Wor, and Gorf, oh and if you get the opportunity you need to hear the speech on A Bee C's Cartridge.
As for the BetterWorking Turbo Load and Save, I can scan you a copy of the user manual containing the enable and disable command as well as the additional disc commands and abbreviations for Basic V4 if need it?
I've been trying to track down a copy of A Bee C's! By the way, I did have the Magic Voice cart wired in for those short clips I recorded of the Wizard of Wor and Gorf intros. I think they mostly don't use the SID in the title screens, but you can briefly hear the SID while the Gorf ships are appearing on screen.
I had Simons' Basic and Magic Desk myself... but instead of "Super Snapshot" I got an "Action Replay" (they made this also for NES, SNES etc), was also able to freeze games and save them to disk easily including it's own fast-loader...
Lazarian and International Soccer were the only two cartridges I had for the C64. Could play either for hours.
I remember I've had on cartridge four games but only I played one which was really good its name was Flimbos quest. Some of my favorite games were Impossible mission, Bruce Lee, international karate, Blood money, Commando, and many more I can't remember.
80-90 were the best for gamers, I miss it very much.
Your video quality is excellent. What mods have you done? Adrian Blacks? Nice collection of carts sir.
That particular 64C is 100% stock; it's pretty near perfect in every way so I've been using it in most of my episodes lately.
In Turkey piracy was common back in the day, therefore tape turbos and freezers were very popular in the scene. First, Freeze Frame cartridge showed up. Just freezes the memory and dumps it on tape or disk with a fixed "FF" file name with a huge block count. Then came The Ice Machine. It greatly reduced the block count but no loading stripes. Finally they cloned Action Replays under the name Multi Ice (it has multiple functions just in one cartridge!) Multii Ice 6 was the last one I owned, I wish I kept it. One thing I hated was occasional loss of one of the audio channels upon unfreezing.
Fun stuff. I was on a different platform back then but almost all of these were ported or copied. Great memories.
Ahhh, the Swift-Link...I was trying to remember the name of that..used one myself to use a modem to dial in to the local campus VAX.
13:02 Computer games have come a long way since the 80's 😂. Seriously the rate of change has been immense. What other industry has advanced as rapidly as computing?