Yesterday a Commodore 65, a rare unreleased prototype by Commodore, was sold on eBay for $9,100! You can follow the story on the Lemon64 forums. The seller, Dimitris Podaras, had bought TWO of these rare machine about a year ago, on eBay also, for $5,000 each. He just sold them both, this one with a nice profit!

One day we will know who bought the other one… ;-)

I have started working on a site dedicated to the CMD SuperCPU: supercpu.org. It is a Wiki-based site where I intend to maintain a list of links to existing SuperCPU resources, as well as some harder-to-find content, like articles from paper magazines or print ads.

Right now I have a couple of articles that I OCR’d from Commodore World magazine, as well as a couple print ads scanned from the same source.

The Golden Jubilee C64 was a limited edition of the Commodore 64, created by Commodore Germany to celebrate the 1,000,000th Commodore 64 sold in Germany. It is hand-painted in a gold color and fixed onto a plexiglass plaque. Each Golden Commodore 64 has a serial number written by hand; mine is #1,000,043.

The Golden C64

Probably the greatest extension ever produced for the Commodore 64 by the wizards at Creative Micro Devices (CMD). It will boost your 1 MHz C64 to a cool 20 MHz.

SuperCPU 64

The VIC-1001 is the Japanese version of the VIC-20. It was actually released first in Japan, and then later in the rest of the world, so this is the first post-PET Commodore machine ever released! It was in a way a precursor to the VIC-20 and C64 family.

VIC-1001

I am really very happy with my latest Commodore-related purchase, the CMD RAMLink. It is really an impressive piece of hardware (and not only because it is entirely made of thick bullet-proof steel!) It cam with 8 MB of internal RAM (mounted on a RAMCard) and the original manual. I plan to test it with GEOS 128 and Contiki.

CMD RAMLink

I just finished upgrading my SAM Coupé with all kinds of gizmos provided by Colin Piggot of Quazar. My old SAM which was an old model with ROM 1.0, only 256K of RAM and no internal disk drive is now absolutely state-of-the-art and ready to connect to the Internet via Colin's Trinity Ethernet interface! All in all, this SAM Coupé cost me quite a few work and money to get it up to speed:

• Its case was initially so dirty that I had to take the computer apart and wash the plastic case in my shower
• The keyboard was horribly yellowed, so I took it away, and replaced it with a brand new one I found on eBay
• It came with no internal disk drive; I bought one from Quazar
• It came with only 256K of RAM instead of the 512K necessary to run modern software; I found the RAM upgrade at Quazar
• Its ROM version was 1.0, which is very old (the latest version is 3.0); I found a replacement chip guess where?

Next up: connecting it to my LAN!

Quazar Inside

Today I received a nice brazilian ZX Spectrum clone!

Microdigital TK90X

 Some pictures of my first C64 mod...

Paint it Black

I just received my HardSID 4U today and it's beautiful! No time today to install the SID chips, but I have 4 x 8580's ready to jump in there!

HardSID 4U output ports

 I spent some time tonight installing a couple JiffyDOS chips in my Commodore SX-64, and I took some pictures along the way. The installation is fairly simple, even though the SX-64 is pretty crowded. The performance improvement is impressive, and I love being able to just hit F1 to list a directory, instead of typing LOAD "$",8 and then LIST :-)

SX-64 JiffyDOS welcome screen

OK, I have several Live IDs, which means I have several Live Spaces, it's a mess right now, so I'll just post this news here as well:

Tiphaine was born three days late on May 20th at 7.08am, she weighed 3.7 kilograms and has lots of dark hairs! Tiphaine and her mother are fine, and Ariane is very excited to meet her little sister!

I collect vintage (OK, OK, old) computers. This is a hobby that requires quite a bit of storage space, so I'm not sure how long I'll keep it up, but for now I still buy some new exotic things from time to time.

The two latest additions in my collection are:

Taken from Windows Live space: Timex Computer 2048 + Commodore CBM 610

A Timex Computer 2048, a clone of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, that was sold in a few countries like Portugal or Poland. It is a rather nice looking piece of kit, looks a bit like the 2068 but in black. It is complete in its original box, with all its cables and docs (in Portuguese). I haven't got time to test it right now, unfortunately.

Taken from Windows Live space: Timex Computer 2048 + Commodore CBM 610

A Commodore CBM 610. It comes without any cables or accessories, but it is esthetically perfect.