Commodore Plus/4 - Keyboard fix mod using simple pins.
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 16 ต.ค. 2024
- A classic problem due to ageing of the keyboard ribbon cables.
A simple solution to keep you going is to make a new kind of connector using classic pin-headers, the best way is to use a replacement in any case.
Hey, thanks gonna try this out, I got a lot of 3 Plus/4's that I've been fixing and one of them did get a lifted ribbon connector like this. Didn't know what I was gonna do.
That's a very good idea and well executed, I hope I won't ever need to use it but if I do it's very good to know. Thanks ;) and happy new year too
Hi Peter, thanks mate and happy new year. I think i should replace the ribbon as a whole or make simple cable connections one-by-one to the keyboard PCB, to make it even better and future proof :-) maybe in the future, cheers!
putting in sprites would have made a total mess out of the now very clean and tidy design of the ted chip registers. and furthermore, you can simply do your moving objects in software and have as many of them as you want. not just 8 or 8 per scanline. (and be stuck with some format and sizes some chip maker picked for you at that, making all games look the same ;) the nintendo ppu can do a lot more regarding sprites than the vic-II ever could (it is also far more of an absolute mess design wise). nope. what commodore produced there is pretty much, the perfect display and sound controller chip. unlike all their previous attempts. with the ted they finally got everything just about right. everything you need to know fits on a single page of paper. and then your software just works as expected. whereas both the vic-20 and the c64... are a total horrid mess with bank switching and what not. the ted (in a cmos version without the i/o gates and dram refresh, preferably with rgb sync out instead of combined signals) is a chip you could sell in large quantities today. the vic-II... is just not suitable to sell as a seperate product. it's a pile of nasty hacks thrown on top of each other. (but as stated there definately are worse video chips than the vic-1 and vic-2 :P. the plus4 as a whole is a much cleaner and better design than the c64. and if it would not be so easy to make software work on all of them at the same time, and you'd have to choose between developing for the plus/4 or the 64 or the pet or the vic20, then the plus/4 would win. (the code required to initialize the c64 to the state you want it to be in is just way way way longer for one thing... ;)
see in most setups that have sprites the part that overlays the sprites and does the collision detection isn't even the same chip :P (just like parallax scrolling backgrounds usually are seperate controllers) and with the vic-II they clearly are seperate circuits too even if it's put on the same die. and they simply left all that crap out. which is fine. as those that want it can do it in software (it's also a lot faster than a c64 anyway ;) the ted chip does appear to be based on the same logic as the vic. as in the output looks more or less identical. but it is a much improved and cleaned up version. (the additional colors actually just being luminance levels, which i think have always been there as colors can differ from one revision of the vic-II to the next, but just were not accessible)
they certainy have made things that are a bigger mess. :P the b and p cbm-II series, the superpet and the 128 to name a few :P lol. the plus/4 is the best thing they ever came up with, right along with the pet 4032 and 8032. they even made brand new diskdrives for it to finally address that slowness issue. properly. the pet and the plus/4 were 'we want a product that does this or that to this specification' products. the rest of em were 'accidential' products. some guy putting some chips together in his spare time and all of a sudden it somehow got mass produced. and it shows. (the c64 being nothing more than an ultimax someone crammed more ram into and a second 6526 ;) it is literally the only thing they produced in a long while since the pet that did not eventually ship with still half broken chip designs. it all works as expected. in the digital sense even if due to hmos and hmos2 production issues some have electrical problems 40 years later. 6522? broken design. 6526? broken design sid? why is only one of the voices usuable as a random number generator not all of them? vic-1 and vic-2 ? eh exactly who did the register layout? lol. but no. every single chip in the plus4 does exactly what you expect of it. even the acia works well (and there are a lot of half broken 6551 derivatives out there on the market)
mos was a chip seller. this is a chip you can sell. the vic-ii is not. nobody gonna change his entire design to meet all the weirdness of that thing to implement it.
Hi there! yes, very well said mate! I totally agree and the story is known. At least it is commodore 16 compatible but you know that everyone expected this to be C64 compatible. I had this machine back in 1989 and was sold but then i rushed to get it back later because for me, it was a truly unique machine with great potential! Thank you very much for watching!
@@CB3ROB-CyberBunker It was a great machine, like you implied ...not for games but for processing power and for deep-dive experienced programmers. Great knowledge base you are mate!