ANSWER TO C64 TOWER QUESTION ============================ From filker@newton.physics.metu.edu.tr Tue Mar 7 12:40:49 1998 From: ilker ficicilar Subject: About C64 Tower Project Date: Sat, 7 Mar 1998 12:40:49 +0300 Organization: Middle East Technical University Hi, After reading some posts about C64 tower I began to write the below letter yesterday. I was about to continue on it, but I read some new posts about the subject a couple of minutes ago, and decided to send this unfinished letter immediately. This is because of the discouraging nature of the posts I saw. That is, you need no any other power supply or voltage converter, but the PC case's supply. The project is extremely easy. So, please just read this: Hello There, I don't check this c.s.c. group frequently. But almost always I found discussions interesting for me. Recently there were a C64 Tower question. Robert Norris asks if anybody knows something to make a C64 Tower reality. Lorax quoted an encouraging text atthe end of his e-mail. And Diego gave some information about me and my web-page. Diego also asked me when I will finish documenting the C64 Tower Project ( and he spelled myname wrong. One can call me Ilker (pronounced ill-care) not Ilfelr ;-) ) Actually I do own a self-built C64 Tower for one or two years. And belive me it's not a hard-to-do job. Trying to fit something into the tower case is what, the most annoying thing during the C64 Tower Project. You may need to cut corners of the boards, or you may need to reshape the inside of the tower. And you also have to be good at soldering. You need to much soldering for cabling the ports, keyboard, drive etc. But electronics part of the project is easy: only the 50/60 Hz. timer for TOD clock. ( I used a very simplecircuit using a 555 IC and a few resistors. It's not exact but who cares :-) ) Firstly, you should try powering up your C64 with +5V supply only. You can use red wire of tower's supply. If you have noticed there are cables inside the tower case with 4 wires: 2 black in the middle, red and yellow at the sides. Yellow one contains 12V. Their currents are about 2.8A - 3.6A . So, attach some wires to red and black. Then tie the black wire to the ground of the C64 board. And, tie/solder the +5V to the appropriate place (after the power plug, before the first resistor [means: I don't remember where] ). After this wiring. turn off C64 power switch, and turn on the Tower. Your C64 must run at this stage. But you can get no sound, no 9V from the user port, and no TOD clock timing. As you may notice, SID chip is not required to power up a C64. Now if you are happy with this setup. Put the board into the tower, read my article on C64 keyboard, and make some cables to attach ports to the back of the Tower, you also need some metals/tins with the shape of those metal things screewed at the back of case. I used deodarant cans for this purpose, and made holes for the interfaces, such as [TV, composite, chroma/luma ] , [audio in, digitizer in, stereo audio out], [ keyboard, at-keyboard], [serial port-1, serial port-2], [joystick port-1 , and port-2] . Note that in the previous sentence, each enclosed brackets donote a metal sheet. (You need more than one can :-) ) If you want to get sound from your C64 tower, you need to wire 12V also. This stage is also easy. Locate the one big capacitor near the SID first. Then, attach/solder the black and yellow wires to the appropriate ends of this capacitor. That's it. And for the TOD clock you should build and solder the timer. The timer needs hooked up to TOD pin of one of the CIA chips. ( you also need to cut a trace near the AC-DC converter, but I forgot which). ... to be continued. Ilker Ficicilar c068214@orca.cc.metu.edu.tr filker@newton.physics.metu.edu.tr http://www.physics.metu.edu.tr/~filker/cbm.html ---