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The "Commodore 64 @ 933.000 Mhz"
By JJ aka DocLorren - Posted on April 28, 2003
Introduction
The Geek inside took
over command the minute I spotted the M9000.
The nice compact layout, the onboard features,
the impulse-buyer-friendly price and the power (enough for
the usual stuff while I have to feed my P4 with SETI or Folding@home
just to keep it from becoming bored), had not passed unnoticed.
I didn"t care too much about the power consumption, you
need an power outlet anyway if you want to do some serious
work or want to see the end of the DVD for that matter. Didn"t
care about reviews talking nonsense about gaming performance
and other trivia. Didn"t care at all. The Geek inside
talked in its authoritive voice: "Buy one, buy one! You
must! Must!" The Geek inside usually wins, especially
around payday. This time it won without a struggle. Payday
was yesterday…
There it was, being admired, caressed, turned
over and admired once more by yours truly.
The shiny heatsink, the little fan waiting
in anticipation, the hidden processor not knowing when its
first set of instruction would arrive, aaah the joy!
OK, now that I had it and had satisfied
the basic need of just needing one (you fellow Mini-ITX-ers
know what I am talking about), the inevitable question arose:
"What to do with it?"
It was about to become my fifth computer,
and I could really not think of yet another "serious"
purpose for this machine. This time I would not convince the
girlfriend that it was a necessary piece of kit that was absolutely
needed for some scientific groundbreaking work. This time
I might even have to hide it from her eyes. Familiar feeling,
friends? Ok, so it was about to become my first totally superfluous
computer.
So what.
This was to be a project to fulfil some
basic needs. You just know that some people have those. Now
that I have introduced you to the rational reasons why I had
to get hold of one of these puppies (none, as you would have
guessed by now), I am about to tell you how this project turned
into: "The Commodore 64 @ 933.000 Mhz"
Seeing all the nice, funny and wonderfully
ridiculous housings on mini-itx.com, I decided to revive "The
Significant One from the "80s". Then, I used to
have a Commodore 16 on which I experimented with BASIC programming
until it decided to retire after a physical "Peek"
and subsequent "Poke" in its internals. "That,
you should not have done, my friend…", was the feeling
I was left with when the screen turned black, never to return.
The C16 was thrown away. That was unwise since they are quite
a little bit rarer than the 64 and nice to look at. Remember
they were dark grey with light grey keys? Anyway, Nostalgia
took over (two very influential powers "Nostalgia &
the Geek inside" you see…) and I bought a defect
C64 on Ebay for almost two Euros. Sometimes you just have
to throw in some serious money to get what you really, really
want :-)
Here it is, looking very sharp, its
original design appealing as always and complimentary with
a nice touch of fading and aging of the plastic housing, adding
to the feel of authenticity:
First its
defective intestines were to be surgically removed, which
was easy enough by just unscrewing the case (three screws
from the bottom) removing the upper lid holding the keyboard
(taking care not to break or severe the plastic hinges on
the upper lid; they are a little weak), disconnecting the
keyboard and power LED cable from the mainboard.
A couple of screws (eight if
I am not mistaken) had to be removed before the complete mainboard
could be taken out of its natural habitat.
What is left will look like this
depending on your skills not to break stuff:
Here you see the empty undertray
of the C64, with some tape to mark and protect the area that
is to be milled out for a close fit of the EPIA. Oh, you can
see it in the background of the picture giving a good representation
of the relative dimensions of the donor / recipient. The piece
of plastic that has to be removed is exactly between two little
ridges (arrows) on the inside of the undertray; the EPIA I/O
backplate fits like a glove between them. Of course this is
purely coincidental but for people that want to do this casemod,
it is very convenient to know. Also notice that because the
C64 originally ran @ a mere 1.023 Mhz the heat produced by
the 6510 processor did not require a fan to cool things down.
Some slots provided the necessary airflow and I am very happy
to say that they are located at the area where the EPIA is
to be fitted. This is the second coincidence, hmm…
In the picture above you can see the plastic
removed from the undertray, while the upper part is taped
to get the same treatment in just a minute.
Below is evidence of the ruins you create
by milling (and thereby melting) the plastic, but please keep
your faith: everything will be alright (again depending a
bit on your skill and nerves).
The end result after one hour of filing
the plastic with delicate instruments can be seen below. Yes,
this is going to be good. You will notice that the two lids
articulate at an angle (approx. 10 degrees) while the backplate
is straight. I do not recommend you trying to bend this plate
as it is rather fragile and will probably break. It fits OK
though, as you can see:
The next step was to find a suitable place
to locate the PCI-bracket for the two additional USB 2.0 ports
and the Firewire connections. Let"s see where can we
put those:
Here you can see that I did not screw the
bracket to the case although I did later on to secure it and
again the fit is remarkable. The coincidence rate is reaching
significance shortly, I presume. Note that you will have to
shorten the bracket a little bit by sawing, to make it go
in smoothly. Now, for the first time I was about to test-fit
the M9000. The C64 isn"t that big but still the board
is dwarfed. There is plenty of room for peripheral gear as
you can see. After final positioning, the four holes that
were already on the mainboard were also drilled in the casing,
and the M9000 was tightened with screws and four nylon rings
providing about 2 mm of clearance from the bottom to improve
heat dissipation / airflow. The EPIA M-series is known for
its low power consumption and heat production but still it
is going to be a lot warmer in here than in the days it did
BASIC PacMan. Remember, a modern 7200 RPM harddisk is producing
quite some heat as is a spinning DVD drive. And they are about
to be fitted…
First, the DC-DC converter was installed next
to the M9000, because I was planning to use the former data
recorder opening in the lower tray to become the power connector.
Below you see the converter, the place were the power connector
is going to be (yellow arrow) and the two aluminum brackets
I installed to fit a slimline DVD player (red arrows).
I decided to play around a little bit with
the cables just to make sure they had sufficient length, the
final arrangement would become a little tidier as you will
see later on. A 256 MB RAM module was fitted since I think
that it is the minimum (but also sufficient) amount needed
to be able to work with XP Professional smoothly.
The next step was to make room for the slimline
DVD-player (Samsung SN-608B). I decided against a plain CD-ROM
player because the M9000 is sooo suitable for multimedia applications
it would be a shame not to use a DVD player. I also decided
against a DVD/CDRW combo since the whole project was about
doing something fun instead of wasting buckets of money. (This
happened anyhow but see, I was beyond the point of no return;
I could abandon the project halfway and end up with some pretty
useless components or finish and spend even more, what would
you do?)
In the following two pictures you have a detailed
view of the location and construction where the drive was
to be attached. Creating the large slot where the DVD-drive
bezel would fit was the most distressing part of the project
to get nice "n" tidy without destroying things.
In the end, with use of the dremel and file the result looked
OK and the fit was pretty good. I toyed with the idea to create
a front loader but in my opinion that would give a rather
awkward look of the rounded front of the C64. Whether a full-size
drive would fit in there? Not in your dreams! By the way,
normal IDE cables do not fit slimline drives. You will have
to get an adapter to make things work.
WARNING! The next phase should preferably
be performed at a quiet afternoon with just you, your C64-project,
a cold beer in nearby reach and the absence of anyone that
thinks you should grow-up. The height/tilt/rotation adjustment
needed to get the player in the right spot will get you to
curse, despair and display all kinds of half-grown behaviour.
But when, at last, you have put it in the correct place and
the lid pops out smoothly, it is time to invite your significant
other(s) back in and proudly present your work.
2nd WARNING! They will not understand what
you are talking about and they might have a different appreciation
of your achievement than you were anticipating. YMMV.
Noticed the two Velcro strips on the DVD-player?
They are the attachment points for the harddisk that is mounted
on top of it (Maxtor D740X, 40 GB, 7200 RPM). Any concern
about the robustness of this construction evaporated after
playing with the optimal position of the harddisk. This is
a very secure way to fix stuff. Below you see an overview
of the, nearly completed system. I put in a round IDE cable
because it looks a lot better and provides a cleaner space
for (probably) better airflow. Also notice the abundant use
of tie wraps on the ATX power cable and USB/Firewire cable
for the same purpose.
On the right side the original C64 metal lid
can be seen. Normally this would house the power connector,
power button and the two joystick ports. I converted it by
glueing a piece of aluminum on the backside and drilled holes
in it to contain two leds and two push button switches. The
green led is lit when in "sleep mode", the red led
is the "on/off" indicator. The red button is for
resetting, the black one for powering up/down the system.
Cables were soldered on the leds and switches
and plugged in the board. The original power led on top of
the C64 casing was connected to the harddisk led output. That
way the disk activity can be easily monitored.
Ok, now with the bulk of the work done, this
is what the (almost) completed machine looked like.
The two round openings on the back were subsequently
closed by glueing another aluminum plate on the inside of
the case. In one, a hole was drilled to allow for the fitting
of the 12v power connector. The power for this C64 comes from
a crude PSU originally manufactured to power camping refrigerators.
For this humble but noble purpose, it delivers 13 volt and
5 amps, therefore it must also be able to provide the juice
needed for the EPIA to play DVDs and do some background tasks.
And besides it only cost 19.95 euros. You will be hard pressed
to find a OEM PSU for that money. Excellent value I would
suggest. Converting the cigarette lighter cable was a piece
of cake.
After some preliminary test-runs the plans
for incorporating the PSU in the C64 casing were rejected.
Although the power consumption is low, things can get warm
in there.
Once, I measured over 70 degrees from the
CPU on an, admittedly, warm day while playing a DVD without
any tasks running in the background. Probably the relatively
poor airflow is to blame here. I am considering using the
opening next to the power connector at the backside to get
some airflow with a 40 mm fan located behind it. Maybe, it
will not be necessary; I will have to do some more CPU-demanding
tests here.
Ok, that is more or less how this Commodore
got to run at a frequency 911 times its original speed. Last
week I got hold of a box full with original Commodore goodies
including a working C64, a PSU, datarecorder, joysticks and
disk-drive (all this set me back a full 8 euros on Ebay, damn
they get pricier every day), so a few things have been added
on the to-do list:
- Getting the keyboard to function. I tried
squeezing the standard PS2 foil in the keyboard but with limited
success and destroying the original wiring. Neil who built
the Commodore ITX-64 might provide
a solution here.
- Fitting an optical mouse in the original joystick. This
should be cheap, easy and fun to do. I"ll just have to
provide some room and make the "fire" switch to
function again :-)
- Hiding the camping PSU in the datarecorder. Fun and easy
as well.
Incorporating an infrared led somewhere on the casing for
communication with phone, PDA etc. The M9000 has fast-IR on
board you know…
- Improving airflow to cool things down, as mentioned in the
text.
Now that this little project is finished,
I will have to find myself something new to pass time with.
Maybe I should have closer look at that new M10000 board.
Nice.
Hmm, tempting, maybe try a smaller HD drive,
fit it in a different case. Maybe create a whole bunch of
retro looking EPIAs. Let"s see, if we could just find
something nice to put it in…
(Oh-oh, the Geek inside and Nostalgia took
over again)
I"ll let you know when the new toy is
up and running.
Ciao,
DocLorren
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