Stuff and Things.

[rubber_jonnie]

A big thank you to @PhilC for the C64 breadbin model he kindly sold me, but not only that but his generous inclusion of some rather interesting PCBs for me to build 😁

PXL_20230607_185912364.jpg

[Icky]

Uh-oh :)

[rubber_jonnie]

Uh-oh :)

Yeah, I know...

[rubber_jonnie]

@PhilC

I have to say the image quality on the C64 is fantastic, this is composite via my RetroTink to HDMI:

PXL_20230608_094528270.jpg

I need to test the keyboard and have a bit of a general clean, but it's already looking way better than the image from my C64 C.

[stephen_usher]

Amazing! No chromatic jail bars!

[rubber_jonnie]

Amazing! No chromatic jail bars!

It really is pretty impressive, clean as a whistle and I can dial up the brightness on the TV if I need to, but otherwise amazing.

BTW did you ever fix the jail bars on yours, I can't recall?

[stephen_usher]

No, it seemed like it was just an artefact from that revision of board and VIC-II. It was slightly better in s-video.

The design of the PAL video circuitry is silly in that the chroma and luma aren't fully separated with the chroma feeding into the luma line via, from what I remember, a resistor. This is totally unlike the NTSC circuit which has them completely separate.

[PhilC]

@rubber_jonnie yes it looked nice here on VGA. I did send you a pcb for a Lumafix board as well I believe but you might not need it?

[rubber_jonnie]

No, it seemed like it was just an artefact from that revision of board and VIC-II. It was slightly better in s-video.

The design of the PAL video circuitry is silly in that the chroma and luma aren't fully separated with the chroma feeding into the luma line via, from what I remember, a resistor. This is totally unlike the NTSC circuit which has them completely separate.

I'm not very up on C64 board revisions, but this is the one I have here:

PXL_20230608_104645361.jpg

So not sure how closely it relates to yours. Interesting that it has no box around the VIC II.

[rubber_jonnie]

@rubber_jonnie yes it looked nice here on VGA. I did send you a pcb for a Lumafix board as well I believe but you might not need it?

Honestly, I don't think the Lumafix will be needed, at least for now. Obviously I'll need to test some more, and I also need to put some heatsinks on the custom IC's I think too.