{"id":910,"date":"2014-02-11T22:49:26","date_gmt":"2014-02-11T22:49:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.system11.org\/?p=910"},"modified":"2014-02-11T22:50:01","modified_gmt":"2014-02-11T22:50:01","slug":"tidying-under-the-stairs-c64-dtv","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.system11.org\/?p=910","title":{"rendered":"Tidying under the stairs… C64-DTV"},"content":{"rendered":"

A few (well 6 or 7) years ago someone came up with the bright idea of building a C64 into one of the most popular joysticks of the period, a Competition Pro.<\/p>\n

\"c64dtv\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I’m not sure if the original moulds were used, the stick certainly looks like a Competition Pro, but made more cheaply and the directions don’t feel quite like they should.\u00a0 Inside is a small board running a re-implementation of the C64 hardware which was designed by a Jeri Ellsworth, a self taught chip designer.<\/p>\n

It’s flash memory based, and comes pre-loaded with a selection of games mostly from Epyx and Hewson depending on which region you purchase – and you should purchase carefully because the PAL units have a problem in the colour output (fixable if you have the skills).\u00a0 There is (or was, these are kind of old hat now) a modding community with adaptions for extra joystick ports, flash memory access interfaces and so on.\u00a0 I’ve not touched mine although I really should do the colour fix at some point.<\/p>\n

Here’s a bad video of it in action, not sure why but the DVD recorder I used to make the video seems to add stepping artifacts to movement, the actual unit doesn’t suffer from this.<\/p>\n