The Silicon Underground

The distinctive thing about the Commodore 64 was its custom chips. And while the VIC-II chip provided competitive graphics, the 64’s secret weapon was the sound interface device, also known as the SID. The Mastermind behind the SID was a young chip designer named Robert Yannes, who went on to found the synthesizer company Ensoniq. But the chips frequently fail today and the problem is getting worse. Here’s why 6581 SID chips can go bad just sitting on a shelf.

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What was the first CD burner? It seems like a straightforward question, but I had a hard time finding a straight answer. The first CD burner in the modern sense was released in 1991. And I think it was either Yamaha or Sony.

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I’ve seen a few YouTube videos where people mentioned installing CD-ROM drives in 386 or even 286 computers and getting comments about it. In this blog post, I’ll talk about whether CD ROM drives are an anachronism in a system that old.

And if you’re wondering whether a CD-ROM drive will work in a 286 or 386 PC, I can verify they absolutely do. Just load the same DOS drivers you would on a 486.

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The Commodore PLA is one of the most problematic ICs in the Commodore 64. Even in the early 1990s, Commodore parts dealer The Grapevine Group estimated 50% of dead C-64s were due to a bad PLA. In this blog post, we will explore what the PLA was, and we’ll investigate the gremlin that lurks inside some PLAs but not others.

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One of the indelible memories of owning and using a Commodore 64, at least for me, was the disk drive knocking and rattling loudly as your game loaded. This was the results of deliberately putting errors on the disk to make it difficult to copy. In this blog post, I’ll give you the straight talk on how big of a problem software piracy was on the Commodore C-64, at least in the United States, and what it led to, including the bad, the ugly, and the good. Not that the end justifies the means, but over time it did lead to some good things too.

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Disk copiers were long a taboo subject that mainstream computer publications didn’t like to talk about. But not here. In this blog post, we’ll talk about one of the most innovative and popular copiers of all time for the Commodore 64, a program called Fast Hack’em, by Basement Boys Software. We’ll also talk about the company’s connection to Nintendo, but let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves just yet.

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