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My Commodore 64 restoration journey – Part II

Drat! No power! When I hit the power on button the monitor reacted and made a slight buzz sound but the power indicator on the C64 wouldn’t illuminate and nothing appeared on screen. Time for research!

I found quite a few links for “C64 not powering on”, and found this video that really explained a lot. It was the first time I took a C64 apart, something I never would have done as a teenager in the 80s!

I physically checked the chips and there was no obvious burns or broken soldering so it looked like the circuitry was okay. Then they cracked out a multimeter and tested the DC voltage (among other voltages across the motherboard).

Since I didn’t have a multimeter, I really debated how much I wanted to take this. But a multimeter isn’t a bad thing to have for a geek, so I bought one.

After it arrived a few days later, I rewatched the video where they tested the DC input on the C64, so I followed suit. Sure enough, there was low voltage. about 4.1 V DC. I have a bad power supply (PS)!  Looking online apparently this was a common problem with original Commodore PS units.

I figured PS for these would be cheap, and lo and behold the cheapest one I could find was over $70! Now I’m stumped. Do I shell out $70 for a PS only to find the rest of the computer doesn’t really work?

After reading the order form it looked like I could return the PS so it was worth a gamble. I splurged and paid for the PS, anxiously awaiting its arrival. It arrived and I rushed to the garage, connected the PS, and turned it on.

Success!! The C64 powered on!! Nice!! I started hitting the keys and realized half of the keys don’t work. Drat!! All this way for a computer that’s not very usable!

Back to YouTube for help on keyboards……

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My Commodore 64 restoration journey – Part I

Hey all.

when I moved last year, my neighbor gave me as a parting gift an old Commodore 64 with a monitor, two disc drives, a printer, tons of discs, three joysticks, and even a dust cover (which, notably, was covered in dust). He said he didn’t even know if it would work, but he didn’t have time to try to figure it out. He asked if I wanted it, and I said sure!

I moved the equipment to a storage area in the garage, and I left it there until earlier this month. Then, I thought, I need to test it out to see if it’s worth salvaging, or if it’s just junk and I would have to get rid of it. Since it came with about 80 floppy disks, including lots of games, I definitely wanted to get it to work.

so I cleared off a space in the garage, hooked it all up, turned it on, and then, NOTHING. I had to research what to do.

 

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So far so good!

It’s been about 2 weeks since I started this instance, and it’s been running ever since. I haven’t caught a single error yet. I’m glad this cheaper instance is running well. Stay tuned!

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Happy New Year

Happy New Year, folks!

Looking forward to doing some more programming work in 2025. Stay tuned for more announcements!

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Last post of 2024

So as 2024 draws to a close, it’s been a big year for me personally. It’s had its share of ups and downs, but I’m still hopeful for 2025.

Looks like my t2.micro instance is still running strong, guess that swap file did the trick!

Wishing you all a great happy new year!!

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So now the t2.micro instance has taken over

My t2.small instance is now dead – looks like the bid price went up. Of course you can’t just up the bid price, you have to start all over again.

Luckily my t2.micro service started, but I had the same problem I’ve always had – after about 1-2 days, the database shuts off and I get an error saying “Error establishing database connection” and WordPress stops. A reboot fixes this issue.

So I tried a few things; First, I set up a crontab to restart mysql 4 times a day. I know this isn’t the right solution, but remember, people – I want this to be CHEAP.  That still didn’t work, tho’.

After some searching, I figured out that this instance has NO swap space. After enabling swap space it should run for a while now. Fingers crossed!!

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Elastic IP is back on the menu

In Feb, 2024, AWS changed their policy on Elastic IPs. For those who don’t know, an Elastic IP is a static IP address that doesn’t change. You’ll get a static IP with every EC2 instance you run but it could change over time. An Elastic IP never changes so your Route 53/DNS records never change.

Starting in February, Elastic IP addresses will now incur a cost whether the instance is running or not (they used to not charge if you had the IP address but the instance was shut down).

However, if you have a running instance, you’re charged the same fee regardless. So I got an elastic IP and attached it to this instance since my plan is to run the site full time regardless.

I’m debating on whether or not I should get a verified SSL cert.