GRG's Miscellany

My C64 is still banjaxed, but now in a way that makes me feel it's closer to being fixed. I had thought it was just a dead PSU, so I ordered a new one.  When it arrived, I plugged it in and.....the same problems happened.  So that's the first potential fault ruled out. So I ordered a C64 dead test cartridge .  When this arrived, I plugged it in and powered on...and it gave me all sorts of crap on the display.  Still recognisable characters and border, but utter random garbage.  There was some screen flashing, which is the way the cart indicates dead-ram chips, but it couldn't decide which one - every time I switched the machine on it gave a different number of flashes. The internet had already suggested that garbage text meant a duff multiplexer, and with the cart encountering seemingly random errors across multiple chips, I decided to order a couple of spare multiplexers (there are two in the C64). So today I cautiously desoldered the U13 multiplexer and solde...

So moving house has been an absolute pain in the plums.  Monthly projects are on hiatus and until the start-of-term chaos has died down, I'm working on the odd piece of project here and there. The first such project is doing some C64 development, which I've wanted to do for literally years.  I bought an SD-card reader from the future was 8-bit and when it arrived, I dug out  my C64 from storage and powered it on... ...and it was dead. Not fully dead, just...weird.  Blue border and blue background are fine but the screen is filled up with garbage text. So step 1: order a new power supply.  The PSU I was using wasn't a Commodore original, but a replacement from the late 80s.  The problem could still be a b0rked or loose chip, but I got paranoid about using a vintage PSU anyways so I ordered one from Poland.  If that doesn't fix it, I plan to follow some of the procedures here . In the mean-time, I decided to search for an IDE that would run on linux and...