Building a Commodore 64 - Part I - (Why!?!)

The Commodore 64 is one of the best selling computers of all time. Even today almost 30 years since it's discontinuation, there is a massive community restoring, building, developing software, hardware and games for this beloved machine.

Full disclosure I have never owned a real C64. I used to hang out with one of my mates who had one and use his. But now with the continued popularity and community around the C64, it seemed like the right time to build a new one... or maybe two.

Why!?!

But why? Why rebuild a old computer that can easily be emulated on your phone, or computer, or any number of other devices?

TL;DR

Awesome fun. 😎

Longer reasons are:

  • It's a fun & challenging software and hardware engineering project
  • To play those one or two games you remember, on original hardware
  • Nostalgia
  • Lock down
  • Bragging rights with friends
  • Maybe yet another Raspberry Pi project? 🤔
  • AWESOME fun 😎

Buy don't build!

This is one of the mantras of the software industry. It saves time and cost allowing you to focus on building what matters to the customer. If you really want to be the fun police 🚨 and just buy, your best option is The C64 and its mini brother released in the last couple of years. It's cheaper, looks the part and is easy to use, but zero fun.

Goals

As there are so many options, I set some goals I wanted to achieve.

  • As authentic as possible
  • Original case and keyboard if possible
  • Support original joysticks
  • Support new joystick adapters (e.g. Nunchuk64)
  • Modern video output (i.e. HDMI)
  • Simple loading of software from SD card / USB key
  • Fast boot times

The choices

There are probably 100's of different ways to go about building your dream C64, and that's part of the fun!

The three main directions are:

Software emulation

This involves installing an emulator on your device of choice and away you go. The most popular emulator today is VICE - the Versatile Commodore Emulator.

Hardware emulation

Hardware emulation has become popular nowadays and can be achieved using a FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) chip and firmware. The MiSTer project is one of the most popular, and it includes a C64 core.

Hardware replication

This is for the hardcore fans who want to recreate and original machine. Even then not all of the parts are available new. This direction involves a lot of waiting, a lot of soldering, and a lot of expense. The "SixtyClone" (Commodore 64 Replica PCBs) is a brand new C64 board.

The selection

In the end I chose to go down two different paths, and build two very different C64's.

BMC64 & Ultimate 64

Ultimate 64

First I built an Ultimate 64, which is hardware emulation via a FPGA implementation of a C64. Overall this was rather straight forward. Just ordering the right parts, waiting, waiting, waiting, then putting it all together.

BMC64

The second C64 I built was using software emulation. But not a simple installation on a PC, but using BMC64 which is bare metal compilation of the VICE emulator designed to run directly on a Raspberry Pi2/3. This has the ease of use of software emulation but is extremely fast as there is no underlying Linux operating system.

This was actually much more challenging to put together than expected. I wanted to mount everything inside an original case, use an original keyboard, and support both original and modern joystick adapters.

Build details

I'll break the two builds up into a number of posts, so please go and read those if you want all the details, or you will be able to just skip to some parts lists and build them yourself!

All C64 Posts