Teardown Tuesday - Commodore 64

This is really a part two of the series I started up on Sunday.The thing I did after booting up the old guy was to immediately take him apart! This isn't the first time I've done this so I was pretty confident that I wouldn't have any issues with this latest attempt.The beauty of the design is that after only three Phillips screws, you're in!The inside is so incredibly simple!This is a revision A board at that. Sweet!When I got the computer in the summer there was a murmur in the crowd wondering if it still had the SID chip or had it been harvested before the auction...Here it is in all its glory:The SID is the Sound Interface Device that made all the cool beeps and boops of the day. I remember one day making an analog-to-digital converter on a wire-wrap board when I was growing up. I eventually got the sound to play barely. It was the distinct sound of my mom vacuuming the upstairs hallway. (Even that was hacking the SID in a strange way... volume modulating the SID to do a primitive 4-bit digital-to-analog converter... It worked... once.)Next up: the can.Under the can is the VIC-II: The Video Interface Chip.No doubt it was in the can to cut down on interference from the relatively high-speed signaling that's required for video. The video colorburst is around 3.6 MHz and that would be required at least to make the composite output. The processor merrily is humming away at a mere 1 MHz.Speaking of which:Behold the brains of the C-64: The MOS 6510 processor running at a staggering 1.023 MHz. This is a variant of the venerable 6802 processor that gave life to the Apple II's of the past. It's virtually the same except it has a few extra I/O lines.An interesting thing I noticed is an odd wire that looks like an late change to the run:Looks kinda janky to me.  :-PAnd let's not forget the memory. 64KB of memory.How quaint.My computer at home has 16GB of memory now.But back then it was an expensive bit of kit.More later on with this project... I still have to hook up the floppy!LOAD "*",8,1Brings a tear to my eye...[smugmug url="http://photos.vec.com/hack/feed.mg?Type=gallery&Data=20297930_2VPqT4&format=rss200" imagecount="100" start="1" num="100" thumbsize="Th" link="lightbox" captions="false" sort="true" window="true" smugmug="true" size="L"]