A little while ago I got a second VIC-20 which was in a cosmetically almost mint condition. Sadly the motherboard has a fault where it fails to read the joystick and the keyboard correctly resulting in the controls in games not functioning. The VIC-20 I had works great but cosmetically has seen better days. The label has come off and there has been extensive yellowing of its case. One has a serial number only in the ten thousands while the other machine has a serial number well into the hundred thousand. The cosmetically good looking machine being the oldest of the two and the yellowed machine being the younger system. So the younger system works great but looks sh*t and the oldest system looks great but runs sh*t.

In this video I play quite a few of the classic arcade ports and well known games on the Commodore VIC-20. I grabbed the footage using a Pioneer HD-DVD-Recorder that allows me to grab the footage on the HD or directly on CD-R, DVD-R or DVD-RW. I use the latter so I can reuse the disc after I imported the files off the disc (a simple copy of the mpg stream) into

Okay it turned into an over an hour long extravaganza playing the games until the first game over and me babbling about the gameplay and the technology involved. Read more below...

Retro-Repair Adventures:

• Part One
• Part Two (You're here already. Quit clicking.)
• Part Three
• Part Four - (coming somewhat less soon)

Woot! recently had a deal on an 8GB Eye-Fi memory card that I took advantage of for the express purpose of no-brainer automatic photo uploads from my digital camera directly to my Flickr account, which I thought would provide a smoother and higher quality workflow than using my iPhone 4. As such, I set the Eye-Fi up last night and took some very casual photos. While the transfer process really didn't go well (I'll need to experiment a bit more), transferring only two photos correctly and requiring me to manually transfer the rest, the end result was still some photos of recent items in my collection that also happened to be in my staging area, which I decided to share below with some minor commentary so the initial work wouldn't be totally wasted. Enjoy:

The latest issue, 56, of the excellent Commodore Free magazine is now available in the usual PDF, ePUB, MOBI, HTML, TXT, SEQ, and D64 disk image formats. Get your copy in the format of your choice here!

The latest issue, 56, of the excellent Commodore Free magazine is now available in the usual PDF, ePUB, MOBI, HTML, TXT, SEQ, and D64 disk image formats. Get your copy in the format of your choice here!

The latest issue, 55, of the excellent Commodore Free magazine is now available in the usual PDF, ePUB, MOBI, HTML, TXT, SEQ, and D64 disk image formats. Get your copy in the format of your choice here!

The latest issue, April 2011, of the excellent Commodore Free magazine is now available in the usual .PDF, .txt, .seq, .d64, .html, EPUB, and MOBI formats. Get your copy in the format of your choice here!