Paladin of the Pegasos
Posts: 1424 from 2003/4/13
A lot to tackle here
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KennyR wrote:
Three issues take the shine off:
Nope
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- No datasette or 1541 disk drive.
Apart from some really, really obsessive purists, not many people use datasette or even 1541 these days.
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It's difficult to find an original C64 that doesn't work, even in 2016;
Not really, there are tons of broken 64 out in the wild. Sure you get a clean guaranteed working 64 on eBay, but the prices are creeping up on these. The original black brick power supplies are ticking time bombs, with most of them blowing up by now taking out multiple ICs.
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on the contrary, the power bricks, datasettes and drives all went much sooner and are real hard to find.
Yeah, the original power bricks are shit. The C64 reloaded boards use a modern 12V power supply and the boards themselves run cooler. For owners of the original C64 replacement power supplies are available. Some really suspect garbage, but Ray Carlsen has some nice higher end models. I like his $100+ models (though I'd probably just build my own).
http://personalpages.tds.net/~rcarlsen/custom%20ps.html
You don't actually need a 1541 or datasette these days. Some like them for nostalgia, I don't. I don't own a datasette and my 1541/1571 only ever get hooked up to archive some original.
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Besides, what's the point in a shiny new case if you have an old drive sitting next to it? There doesn't seem to be clever USB/SD/network-based way of handling disk images, either - or if there is, someone needs to point it out to me.
You are waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay out of the loop it seems
There are too many products to mention, presently available and soon to be available. Some time you are bored check out
1541 Ultimate II,
Turbo Chameleon 64 (true 1541 drive emulation just one feature), both of which give perfect drive emulation. Jim Drew will be releasing a really neat stand along drive emulator called
uDrive in the coming months, a true cycle perfect 1541 (and other drive) emulation. Coupled with images made with his
SuperCard Pro, you have access to actual flux level disk images.
For non drive emulators, there are tons of mass storage devices that work really well, with extra capabilities, but some limitations. Examples of these are based on SD2IEC, where there are tons of implementations. I personally
have one of these, but there are many, many others such as the
Manosoft PrincessQuote:
- S-Video? About the worst supported video connector ever. Ok, I can understand ditching the TV modulator, but you're going to have to get an S-video to SCART converter, and more importantly, a TV that supports an S-video input signal, or it's just going to show monochrome. Modern TVs don't have S-video or SCART, just a bunch of HDMI and (if you're lucky) a composite so you can plug in old video cameras.
Here in the US S-Video is perfect up to a few years ago almost all LCD/LED TVs has S-Video input and they generally do a great job. You can still get TVs with S-Video input, but they seem to be on the way out. If you don't want to deal with S-Video at all there are plenty of solutions to convert to SVGA or other types. Re-visiting the
Turb Chamemelon 64 I own, another feature is the SVGA output. Otherwise there are plenty of ways to get the signal output how you want it.
[ Edited by redrumloa 01.09.2016 - 20:42 ] 
