Repairing Commodore 1541 Diskette Drives (link) is not something I have tried before. But when I recently had these four broken drives thrown in my general direction I had to take up the challenge! The problem with diskette drive repair’s is that most diagnostick software … Read more
I really like the cartridge format for the Commodore 64 (link). The simplicity of loading games by inserting the cart into the Expansion Port, turn on the machine and boom – the game is ready to go! It does not get any easier than that. In this … Read more
…and a yellow longboard have been added to my collection of Commodore 64 motherboards. The yellow Assy 250425 Revision B longboard is in really great shape. It has a MOS 8500 MPU which is quite unusual for the long boards. Normally they have MOS 6510 … Read more
During the last couple of weeks I’ve received 8 (!) broken Commodore 64 machines that were in need of repair. The repair logs of three of them have already been described here (link), while the latter five had issues ranging from faulty Serial Ports (link, link, link), … Read more
The most common cause of a black screen on the old Commodore 64 long boards (link) is a broken Programmed Logic Array (PLA) chip located at position U17. Based on different input signals, the PLA creates chip select signals and controls which chip is to … Read more
The semi analog SID chip (Sound Interface Device) is an electronic music synthesizer and its distinctive sounds are easily recognized by any Commodore 64 owner. Back in the days, most SID tunes ended up in games or demos to basically support the graphics on the … Read more
One year and 64 posts later… Exactly one year ago, the first blog post was uploaded here on breadbox64.com – and today the 64th (quite a coincidence in numbers there, eh?) post is being uploaded! During the last year many many hours of soldering, faultfinding, game-playing, … Read more
After waiting patiently for more than two months, I finally recieved my Commodore 64 games back from grading by the Video Game Authority (VGA). The VGA (link) is a company which verifies the authenticity of games, checks for signs of tampering and appoint each game with a … Read more