David Crookes looks at how you can give a retro machine a brand new lease of life
We are constantly discarding the old in the pursuit of the new. A new phone comes out and suddenly the last one is old news, even though it's worked perfectly well for the past year and probably will into the next decade. A new update appears on the computer, and scores of us decide to upgrade for no reason other than the fact that it's there and we're curious. Developers of numerous websites from Facebook to Twitter make tweaks just to refresh things, usually leading to an outcry about an icon or something, but then we carry on as normal again.
It can be quite cathartic to take a step back from the relentless grind of always trying to be at the cutting edge, to look at a technology that predates the current trends and which seemingly offers you a sense of stability. If you think back to the days of the 8-bit computers (assuming you're old enough, of course), you'll recall a time when you could just turn on a machine, have it instantly boot and then stay in that state. There were no prompts for updates, no need to upgrade for years. It's refreshing to peer through those rose-tinted specs and even the most jaded of eyes will light with delight. And then the 'what ifs' hit you.
Steady can be boring. Sure, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, but change isn't all that bad - especially if you have a piece of tech knocking around that you haven't touched for ages but want to spring back into life. There are ways to take your Spectrums, Commodore 64s, Amstrad CPCs, games consoles and even peripherals to the next level, making them do things that your younger self wouldn't have considered doing for various reasons - perhaps cost or because you were worried about breaking something. Today, though, you may find the circumstances are just right and that modding is something you'd like to try.
Some practitioners of this techy art have made something of a name for themselves. Among them is Benjamin Heckendorn, who runs the website benheck.com. He has become a celebrity 'maker' thanks to retro computer and console mods which are impeccably carried out, his skills having been honed over the past 20 years or so. He thinks nothing of prising open a ZX Spectrum and getting stuck in, replacing the innards or adding fresh parts as he seeks to re-form or repurpose it. For a good section of the retro community, this is akin to murder, but get an old, broken machine, and this becomes a very cool hobby indeed.
With a bill of skill and ingenuity, it's possible to turn Commodore 64s into laptops or produce handheld versions of 8-bit or 16-bit machines, complete with screens. As Heckendorn shows, you can enhance the original tech and produce something unique and inspiring. Having snapped up original Z80 chips from eBay before wiring them to prototype boards using circuit designs obtained from worldofspectrum.org, Heckendorn's ZX Spectrum portable ended up being 2,000 times faster than Sir Clive Sinclair's classic, running at 2GHz quad-core rather than 3.5MHz. Games could be copied to the machine via a connected tablet, but the beauty of it was that it deliberately retained the loading times.
A quick look at his site shows just how prolific Heckendorm is. He's produced a battery-powered Colecovision Portable and a N64 portable. He's taken a NES and shrunk it down to a near Game Boy Advance Micro size. He's worked with PlayStations, combined a NES with an Atari 2600 (which is able to play games from both systems), and he's performed all kinds of magic using an Xbox 360 console. All of which, of course, takes a lot of time and patience and won't be for the faint hearted. In many ways it's like playing around with a Raspberry Pi but with far older tech and with perhaps less certainty about what you may achieve.
Basic Modding
Not all mods have to alter the physical form of a computer. There are some mods you can perform quite easily that simply build on what you already have. One of the simplest things you can do with an Amstrad CPC, for example, is expand the memory. Scouring eBay for a 256k Dk'tronics memory expansion would do the trick on a 6128, but you can take a cassette-based CPC 464 to 128k with a 64k pack - arguably the most useful of the two because it would allow your machine to enjoy the games that were originally made for the disc-based computer. It's also possible to hook a 3.5" drive to a CPC, which makes sense given that you can still get hold of 3.5" floppies far cheaper than you can the proprietary 3-inchers.
The CPC Wiki (www.cpcwiki.eu/index.php/DIY) lists a host of DIY projects you can carry out on one of Lord Sugar's finest machines. And as with many 8-bit computers, the CPC has a strong hobbyist fanbase, which began to form before the machines became obsolete, and has continued ever since. At CPC Wiki you'll find ways of connecting an Atari ST mouse and trackball to an Amstrad and figure how to get hold of ROM/RAM expansion kits. You'll be able to discover how to get a CPC to work with an LCD or plasma television.
But there are some more difficult mods that will expand the machine's internal capabilities. It's possible to replace the 1 6MHz crystal of a CPC with a 24MHz crystal so the overall speed of the computer is boosted from 4MHz to 6MHz. You can also convert the 464 Plus machines to a 6128 Plus. Yet the Amstrad isn't a special case, by any means: any computer can be altered. "You'll see significantly more mods if the computer is powerful," says Brian Benchoff, who writes for the website Hackaday.com. "The Apple II was a great machine for its day, but that was in 1979. The 80s brought us the Commodore 64, and that's still a very popular modding platform."
You can upgrade a Dragon 32 to 64k or slap an expansion board onto a ZX Spectrum to add a multi-ROM switcher, a SD card slot, reset button and Kempston compatible joystick interface (www.retroleum.co.uk/20150702/smart-card-make-over). You can replace the 6510 or 8502 CPU of a Commodore 64 with a 16-bit 65816 (www.baltissen.org/newhtm/10to816.htm). Indeed, fans of the C64 may want to try the IDE64 Project (www.ide64.org), which allows you to add an IDE drive, CD or SD/CompactFlash memory cards to a Commodore 64. It fits into the expansion port and offers a transfer rate that is 100 times that of the floppy drive 1541.
"Expansion slots in the Commodore 64 mean you can easily add Ethernet to your old machine," says Benchoff. "If you don't have the old Commodore disk drive, just grab yourself an SD card adapter. If you're more of a Macintosh fan, there are adapters to turn SD cards into huge floppy drives." EasyFlash is a cartridge with 1MB flash memory, which slots in the C64 expansion port and allows game progress to be saved or new functionality to be added. You can make one for around £20.
Of course, there may seem little point in modding machines; after all, we have far more powerful machines around. But it's fun and, as Leicester City fans will tell you, everyone loves a tinkerman. Playing around with a retro machine refreshes older technology that you may otherwise be looking to discard or stick in the loft, and there are loads of opportunities for anyone seeking a project. You can easily lose an entire evening scouring the web for new things to do, looking back over projects that people were performing back in the day. (Check out www.sentex.net/~mwandel/tech/index.html, for instance, for Matthias Wandel's C64 DIY projects.)
On top of that, the retro market is very well catered for, so if things go wrong, there'll be someone on hand who can steer you in the right direction. Even if all you want to do is return a machine to its former glory, you'll find replacement keyboards, drive belts and even spanking new cases created from the original moulds. It's certainly clear that there's still a lot of life left in those machines. "Any retro computer can be pushed as far as you want," says Benchoff.
"I've seen an Intel 4004 development system - a system meant to develop calculator software using a chip made in 1971 - get on the internet. This was an amazing kludge that used more silicon in the Ethernet-to-serial chip than the CPU, but it can be done. Apple Ms play movies. Commodores can browse the web, and Speccys can tweet. At this point it's not really that an 8-bit can approach the capabilities of a 16-bit or 32-bit system; any computer can do anything if you put in the work to do it. The only difference, really, is how fast it does it."
Cheaper Shapeshifters
Modding old machines has been a 'thing' for quite some time. Just under 20 years ago, Simon Archer wanted to own a Commodore Amiga laptop, so he converted his Amiga 600 into what he called Suzanne. Revealed in the October 1997 edition of CU Amiga Magazine, it was fitted with an Apollo A620 28MHz 68020 accelerator with 8MB Fast RAM and a CD-ROM drive. Other portables have been created too, from the SX-Amiga (built into an old SX-64 case) to Volker Mohr's portable A1200 in a wooden case. The A1200 has also been placed into a tower case.
But even smaller form technology has proven useful to modders. It is possible to grab an old mouse and make it Bluetooth enabled for no other reason than to get something that works well but looks rather nostalgic. Simply grab retro and modern mice and swap the circuit board and other internal parts. NES game controllers can be converted to USB (and even have Raspberry Pi Zeros inserted into them; slap on a retro emulator and you have a portable device you can plug into your television to play classic games). Floppy disks can come in handy too: how about making a pen holder out of some old unusable 3.5" disks? If this is your bag, go to www.instructables.com/id/Floppy-Disk-Pen-Holder
But back to 'proper' tech, and the Commodore 64 Direct-to-TV joystick has become a very popular device to mod. Released in 2004, it's a rather valuable bit of kit, fetching around £100 on eBay, but if you do feel tempted to open it up, you can be inspired by people who have connected a keyboard, incorporated an SD card interface, added a floppy drive and even inserted extra joysticks. In most cases, only basic soldering skills are needed, and it makes it a very good starter modding project for relative novices to try (head to jledger.proboards.com/board/4/dtvhacking for a good flavour of what's been done).
"I was very, very impressed with a particular mod for the Nintendo Entertainment System," says Benchoff, of a system you can pick up on eBay for around £30. "The NES had a small port on the bottom - an 'expansion port' - that was a holdover from the original release of the Famicom in Japan. This port wasn't used for anything, and for two decades was just a mysterious unused port on the bottom of the most popular game console of all time. About a year ago, someone came up with the idea of making this port do something. They made an NES Tweet through the expansion port. Most of the heavy lifting was done through a microcontroller and a tiny bit of RAM that serves as a buffer between the NES and the supporting circuitry." The mod can be seen at www.trapzz.com/?p=14.
Music To Your Ears
When it comes to modding old computers, you really are only limited to your imagination. A video emerged on YouTube in 2012 (www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kDhpFaf4EY), which showed how a Commodore 64 - infamous for its brilliant SID 6581 sound chip - had been turned into a bass guitar. Jeri Ellsworth showcased her device at the Maker Faire, whizzing around on roller skates as she rocked out some top tunes.
"The sound of the Commodore 64 sound chip is quite special," says Jesper Fiolm Olsen, from the band Press Play On Tape, which was started by a group of university computer science students more than 15 years ago in Copenhagen. "It is thin, but powerful and raw all at once. And slightly hissy and distorted in a way that our parents hated but we learned to love. The sound is still so distinct that fans of Commodore 64 music are able to recognize that sound chip anywhere it's being used, even if it just for a small effect in a piece of modern pop music."
David Terrill created a music-based mod on the C64 called Alpha, which adds a secondary sound chip. 1.4" audio, stereo input, audio feedback and more. It can be seen at www.bigmech.com/misc/c64mods/enclosure.html. Use it in combination with the MSSIAH Cartridge and you can turn your С64 or C128 into a MIDI synthesiser. It costs €49.95 from mssiah.com. Before you do, you may also want to dust off your old Game Boy. This 1 18.69 million seller can be picked up cheaply, and musicians love it.
Matthew C. Applegate, aka Pixelh8, has created software called Music Tech for the Game Boy, which allows him to use the handheld as a real time synthesiser. "These wonderful devices were a huge part of our lives, and we wanted them to shine again," he says. "The Game Boy was small and brilliantly designed, and it produces amazing sounds. It was simply us adapting our toys into a means of expression." The Game Boy has eight inputs - up, down, left, right, select, start, В and A. Applegate mapped these to musical keys, and it plays what are called chiptunes "to shake nightclubs to their foundations."
Of course, we can't discuss music without mentioning the Atari ST, which was also a favourite among musicians. There are loads of hardware hacks you can perform with this machine, whether you simply want to connect it to an Amstrad CM14 monitor, give it access to IDE mass storage or provide stereo output on the pre-STE range. You can also grab a Sega Mega Drive controller and tweak it for use on this computer. A good source for these kinds of projects is www.atari-wiki.com/index.php/Hardware_hacks
Revitalising Machines
By now you should be buoyed by the possibilities. Old tech can still give you a lot of pleasure and help you to learn more about computers as you configure them to do more than you felt they would achieve the first time around. At the very least, you should lend them some tender loving care and give them a good clean. Too many systems have yellowed over the years and look a tad grubby, but careful use of a chemical mixture called Retr0bright should bring them back to life.
Retr0bright needs 6% or 12% hydrogen peroxide solution, 4.9ml per 3.8I of tetraacetylethylenediamine and a UV light. Hydrogen peroxide was found to be effective in de-yellowing computers and consoles by the CBM Museum in Wuppertal in Germany, but the formula was devised by Dave Stevenson from Manchester. But be very, very careful. Hydrogen peroxide is hazardous and it isn't good on plastic that is already brittle. It may also cause longer-term damage, which will counteract any attempts at preserving your computers for years to come. So wear gloves and glasses, cover up anything valuable, and be very aware of the dangers. Happy modding.
The Breadbox
Lau 'MtnBuffalo' Brix runs the blog breadbox64, in which he shows how you can enhance your gaming experience on a Commodore 64 by modding it.
What was your first Commodore 64 mod?
It was a 'Switchless JiffyDOS mod' of one of my first breadbox machines. JiffyDOS is an enhanced Disk Operating System (DOS), which decreases loading times up to a factor of 10, and files written while in JiffyDOS are identical to those made on stock systems. To attain the faster reading and writing speeds of JiffyDOS, the original Commodore Kernal ROM chip on the motherboard has to exchanged (as well as the DOS ROM on the disk drive). This has several advantages, as it does not take up any of the rear side ports of the machine or require special cabling as other hardware fast loaders. If data cannot be loaded or executed using JiffyDOS, or if the cassette deck is being used, a simple switch is usually drilled into the cabinet to toggle the software on and off.
What motivated you to do it?
The motivation for the mod was the increased speed of JiffyDOS. Newer data storage devices for the C64, like the SD2IEC, supports JiffyDOS natively, and no further modifications are needed to speed things up. But to toggle the software on and off, a hole had to be drilled into my precious machine (getting un-scratched, not-partly-broken and non-yellowed machines is quite hard these days!). To circumvent the problem, a guy from Italy has made a little PCB containing both the original Commodore 64 Kernal and JiffyDOS. Pressing the RESTORE button during power up will boot the system into JiffyDOS. If nothing is pressed during power up, the machine boots into the standard Commodore Kernal. No need for drilling holes! The mod is quite easy and involves removing a large 24-pin 1C from the motherboard and replacing it with the small 24-pin PCB. The mod is finalised by soldering two cables to specific locations on the motherboard.
What's your favourite C64 mod?
I really like the 'SD2IEC mod'. The SD2IEC is a mass storage device that uses a SD card for data storage and interfaces with the IEC bus of the Commodore 64 (the same port as one would connect an 1541 disk drive to). The most common use of the SD2IEC is as a replacement of a Commodore 1541 disk drive. It doesn't emulate the disk drive completely like the 1541 Ultimate II does, but it reads quite a few ,d64 and .prg files. And most importantly, it supports JiffyDOS natively!
How important is the Raspberry Pi to the modding scene?
I actually did the C64 RaspberryPi mod on my site before I even got a real Commodore 64. The Raspberry Pi allows for an easy and cheap way to mess around with emulators of old computers and consoles without the hassle of actually buying the original gear and games; just getting an image out of an old gaming console using a modern TV can be a challenge for the average user. I guess using the Pi in an original case (like the C64 or any other retro computer) awakens something in people who were young in the 80s.
What can modding do for retro game fans?
I got back into the retro-gaming scene when I built a МАМЕ upright arcade machine a few years back. I found myself spending most of the time playing C64 games in VICE (a C64 emulator for playing games on a PC) and decided to get some real Commie hardware. I soon realised my passion was repairing, fixing, modding, collecting, hacking and so on.
The 'easy' part of modding the C64, compared to today's computer hardware, is that the components are big and easy to handle (soldering is quite easy), and fault finding can often be done with a standard multimeter, programming of IC chips can be done with cheap EPROMs and burners from China, and the C64 community is huge, so help is never too far away.
Changing The OS
Jorn Mika has spent more than 15 years producing an alternative operating system for the Amstrad CPC called SymbOS, which can also run on other machines. He talks to us about its development.
Back in the 1980s, Berkeley Software produced a windows-based operating system for the Commodore 64 called GEOS, which astounded many users. Similar projects were created for other computers with mixed success, but one, SymbOS, has been attracting attention from those still using an Amstrad CPC. The computer used its own OS in combination with AmsDOS, and it could also run CP/M, but SymbOS brings a great-looking GUI to the machine. It also works on the PCW and MSX, and it can be downloaded at www.symbos.org
What is special about SymbOS, and how does it better the CPC OS and CP/M?
SymbOS has some things which probably have never be seen on 8-bit home computers before. Its flexible Windows 95-like GUI is pixel-based and supports even updates of overlapped forms, but it's still faster than most other 8-bit GUIs done before. It runs in 2, 4 and 16 colour modes and supports any kind of resolution. You can run up to 32 tasks with eight different priorities; the execution of 24 applications at the same time is possible. There's even an idle task, which is used for measuring the free CPU time, and a task manager. Memory expansions aren't used as RAM disks like in the usual 8-bit OSs, for the whole RAM of up to 1MB is used for executing applications, which are relocatable to any place in memory. Last but not least, SymbOS supports all FAT file systems from FAT12, FAT 16 and FAT32.
Why the CPC?
Due to its flexible but still limited memory banking system, it was already possible to introduce a dynamic memory management with support of up to 576KB (later 1024KB) RAM for programs and data. If I had chosen the ZX Spectrum, the system had to be designed in a much more limited way. And if I had chosen the MSX or the Amstrad PCW, which have a more powerful RAM banking, it would be impossible to port it to the Amstrad CPC. The different screen modes of the CPC also forced me to build low-level screen drivers, which then made it possible to support any kind of resolutions and colours.
What do people need to run it?
SymbOS runs on a standard CPC6128, MSX2, PCW256 or EP128 (+floppy disk), but for such unexpanded systems, it can be more seen as a demo, as you won't be able to start more then three little apps at the same time or use nice features like desktop background pictures, screensavers and other extensions. You will have real fun with 256K or more and, of course, it's really great if you have something like a hard disk, CF or SD card attached to your machine. The best expansion for the CPC is still the SYMBiFACE II card, which now has a successor called X-MASS and X-MEM. For the MSX you have many different memory expansions and mass storage hardware, and even for the Enterprise there's an SD card interface and internal memory expansion solutions.
What is the future and your hopes for it?
One of the very interesting things is the network capability of SymbOS. Since last year, there's a network daemon available for SymbOS, which allow applications to connect to the internet even at the same time. So you can start a Telnet client, a messenger and a network game all at the same time, which all have their TCP/IP connections. My hope is there will be Ethernet hardware available for the Amstrad CPC and Enterprise as well (like we already have for the MSX) and that we'll see more network apps for SymbOS, as this a fascinating thing for an 8-bit.