This week was another week where I mostly just took it easy and played video games :P However, I did do some stuff in the end..

The main things I actually made any progress on were 1. doing some repair work on my ol' c64's (for some reason I was sucked back into that realm; probably due to the new X demos that came out recently) and 2. prototyping some oldschool effects (probably related to #1, but yeah.. ).

Basically, I had one C64 that worked for the most part, but had to "warm up" for a bit, or else the 1541uii would fuck things up pretty bad and/or I'd just have some garbage chars build up on the screen. I asked around a bit and people thought it might be various things; bad caps, bad PLA)/CIA's, bad traces, etc.. so I took a look and replaced a cap or two, but generally no dice. However, while I was at it, I took my non-working unit that I've had for a long time and did some "debugging" there as well. Turns out in the 2nd unit, the power switch was bad, but the internal fuse was good, and the board looked to be in great condition. So, I soldered the switch leads to bypass the switch, and lo and behold, it booted! But the graphics were pretty messed up and it had some crash bugs.

Long story short, I spent the evening swapping chips between the two boards and testing stuff, and it turns out the board from the 2nd unit along with the VIC and PLA from the first unit worked like a charm (minus the power switch always being on, but I don't mind just unplugging the machine as I do that when I'm done using it anyways). So now I have a C64 that works pretty well, and a spare parts unit :)

As for effects, all I really did was get a framebuffer going in Rust and tried out some precalc/table things. I don't really want to spill the beans on what exactly, but it might turn into a future C64 and/or Gameboy routine that should be pretty cool. We'll see. :)