I just received a C64GS; unfortunately I had to go through eBay but I didn't get such a bad deal. Anyway, although this one was advertised as not working, it is in fact fine and I'm not surprised - I've always regarded the BN/E motherboard as being extremely reliable. Anyway, I've been experimenting - taking it apart and examining the 4 in 1 game cartridge that came with it. That cartridge uses surface mount chips! I was very surprised to find two SMT LS TTL glue logic chips and a larger SMT ROM chip. That must make it one of the few Commodore 8 bit pieces of hardware to use SMT - is it the only one? Plugging a Magic Voice into the C64GS (!) produced a standard C64 BASIC V2 READY prompt. Although I can't do anything with it (no keyboard or serial port) I'm willing to bet it would function entirely as a normal C64. I think the Magic Voice contains an entire replacement Kernal for the C64, not just some new reset vectors. The power-on screen for the native C64GS definitely has the words 'GAMES SYSTEM' at the top for a brief moment before it goes into the cartridge loading screen. The question is, whether to modify it by adding a C128D keyboard connector... Richard - This message was sent through the cbm-hackers mailing list. To unsubscribe: echo unsubscribe | mail cbm-hackers-request@dot.tcm.hut.fi.
Archive generated by hypermail 2.1.1.