C16 to C64 upgrade

… or another custom work for my Norwegian friend 🙂

Intro

Getting a good quality photo of a dye with just a USB camera “microscope” is kinda hard. I’ve gotta buy a decent microscope someday 😀
Below is my failed attempt to take a photo of a decapped CIA chip – 6522
Interestingly, it shows 0521R1 or 6521R1 … I can’t see it well after a few shots 😉

Why cut a nice C16?

Well, I had a broken C16 lying around for quite a while.





It was dead because of a fried TED chip and I didn’t have any working TED to swap it. My friend Alexander asked me to do a conversion of this unit. He wanted me to put C64 inside of a C16 case. I was like … hmmm … why not ?! 😀
Plus, I will be able to fit a C16 mobo inside a C64 C someday 😉

The plan

I had a nice, working motherboard from a C64 Breadbin – assy no. 250425.
The plan was to clean it, put radiators on the critical chips and then inject it into the C16s case. That requires serious case cutting here and there. Let’s see if it worked 😉

Case modding

First thing was to measure the C64 motherboard, mark the cutting lines and cut it with Dremmel.






After that, I had to work a bit with a file to get raw cuts nicely trimmed.


Here are some pics of the first test.










Motherboard cleaning

With the case modded, I could start working on the motherboard which required small refurbishing.
I’ve installed four radiators on PLA, CPU, SID, and VIC then tested them for quite a while to see how it performs.



RF modulator and edge connectors were treated with a rotary tool equipped with a lightweight abrasive rubber.















Additionally, I had to swap keyboards PCB since C16 has a different key layout.

Final tweaks and assembly

Here are a few shots of the final assembly after cleaning a keyboard and a case after previous works, plus a few other tweaks.












Outcome

Finally, some shots of a whole unit assembled.

Below you can see that I took the original plug from a modulator and moved it to a tape port.
















That’s it for today.

Cheers 😉

OUTRO

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