C64 Keycaps For Everybody

October 28, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 9 Comments

If you’ve got an MX-style keyboard and want some retro charm, you might like a recent project from [Levente Szabadkai]. It’s a set of C64-style keycaps that you can print yourself at home!

The project started as an attempt to produce a set of C64 keycaps for an Ajazz 75% keyboard layout, but [Levente] kept pushing until it developed into a universal set. The keys have C64 legends, plain legends, or blank, and work for ANSI boards from 60% to full size. There are a few ways they can be printed. — you can do two-color printing with an FDM machine, or you can print the caps alone and fill the legends with paint, either in FDM or resin.

As a part of this work, [Levente] had to obviously create the glyphs to print upon all the keycaps. He thus decided to release that as the C64 keyboard font, in fact. It’s available in TTF and OTF formats, and you can preview the font in your browser, if so desired. It includes the function key labels, the 63 PETSCII graphic font legends, and various symbols, punctuation, and selected accented letters, too.

We’ve seen lots of vintage C64 parts recreated from scratch. It’s been at the point for a while where you can build a new machine with what’s available off the shelf. They said Amiga would never die, but it’s the earlier Commodore that really lives on today…

C64 Hardware Simulator Isn’t (Just) For Playing Around

October 15, 2026 by Tyler August 10 Comments

If you want to play old Commodore games, there are C-64 emulators available for just about any platform– but most of them are so high level, they’re really meant for just that: playing games. [antirez] has a different goal with his c64-hw-sim project— it’s a lower-level emulation that simulates every chip and every connection on an ASSY 250407 motherboard, and all the chips on it, too. Ever wondered what happens when a specific chip is missing, or a random pin is shorted to ground or forced high? You can do all that in software, with no risk of harming antique hardware.

While that might be a fun bit of faffing about for a certain sort electronics sadist, the real utility is to learn about the hardware, both in the abstract and to help you troubleshoot a board you might have. It’s likely that many given failure modes reproduce the same effects– lots of things can knock out the display output, for example–but at least if you’ve reproduced a flaw in software you can try testing the hardware to see if that’s the cause of your problem. Assuming the simulation covers your hardware issue, anyway.

There’s cycle-accurate chip emulation for the processor, CIAs, SID and VIC-II via code by [Andre Weissflog], a.k.a. [flooh]. Meanwhile analog circuitry in the video, audio and power sections are not simulated so not everything fault will be replicable here. Still, it might be a neat tool– just don’t try and run any games on it, because even on high-end modern hardware it only runs at about one-third speed. That’s fast enough for diagnostics, but not so much for Maniac Mansion, never mind Elite.

Speaking of Elite, did you know the source– both of the port and the original– is available with comments? If you want an emulator you can play, you can get it on everything from microcontrollers like Teensy to your personal computer.

Thanks to [Salvatore] for the tip!

The Commodore 64 Keyboard Font, For Everyone

October 7, 2026 by Jenny List 29 Comments

There are some classic fonts which appeared in one place and became almost iconic, yet never made it into the digital age. The font on the Commodore 64 keyboard for example, with its its slightly narrow letters. If you’ve been yearning to see it again then help is at hand, because [Levente Szabadkai] has traced it from photographs and made it available as a vector font in a variety of formats on GitHub.

As you might expect, it’s an uppercase font only, as the hardware never sported lower case letters. But it doesn’t stop there, because it also contains the various punctuation and other marks, all the PETSCII glyphs, and the function keys. There’s even a Commodore logo for that key down in the left hand corner, but we’re guessing you’ll have to assemble CLR HOME yourself. We can’t help noticing the cursor arrows are solid in contrast to the outlined ones on our 64 here, but we’re guessing there may be some minor differences between models.

So download the font, and make all your stuff look like a 1980s home computer keyboard. And in case you are wondering why you find so many keyboard fonts familiar, we’ve talked about the Gorton font in the past.

Running Apple ][ Software On A Commodore 64 — Silently

September 5, 2026 by Al Williams 8 Comments

The computer business in 1984 was a bizarre mix of hobby-level companies, a few small companies that had made it big, and a lot of big companies starting to take notice of personal computers. Plenty of money followed, which led to strange products and even stranger ads. [Such Bad Tech Ads] reveals a very bad ad from that time for a product we have barely heard of: the Spartan. The Spartan’s job was to convert your Commodore 64 so it could run Apple ][ software. The ad campaign had, inexplicably, a mime. We think. Or maybe a clown. Hard to say.

On the face of it, the Spartan might not be a bad idea. In 1984, there was plenty of Apple software. Well, relatively, anyway. But a Commodore computer was far cheaper. Other conversion kits like the Intel Inboard/386 managed to find some success in the market later. The problem, outside of strange ads, was one of timing.

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Amiga And Commodore, Back Together (Sort Of)

August 6, 2026 by Jenny List 39 Comments

The story of Commodore, the famous manufacturer of home computers, is a murky one at best. Commodore fans will decry their woeful marketing and dismal product roadmap, while former employees such as our Hackaday colleague [Bil Herd] have shone a bit of light on the goings-on behind the scenes. The company’s final demise in the collapse of the German company Escom scattered its parts to the four winds, but now we find a potential return to clarity.

Amiga Corporation, holders of much of the Commodore and Amiga IP, have reached agreements with Commodore International Corporation, the recently formed face of the Commodore brand, and Hyperion Entertainment BV, who have been behind a series of Amiga developments over recent decades.

The press release provides a fascinating map of the Commodore and Amiga ecosystem as it stands in the 21st century, something which has sometimes eluded fans. As we understand it the rights to the 8-bit IP reside alongside the rights to the Amiga IP with Amiga Corporation, and it’s these 8-bit rights, or at least the software and documentation within them, that have been licensed to Commodore International Corporation. Meanwhile in a separate agreement the rights to continued development of AmigaOS 4.x remain with Hyperion, while the AmigaOS 3.x versions for the 68k Amigas will revert to Amiga Corporation at the end of 2027.

As far as we can see then, this should enable Commodore International Corporation to produce their line of 8-bit Commodore 64s and other machines, while Hyperion continue to serve the AmigaOS 4.x community. The interesting part comes in the AmigaOS 3.x versions, for which Amiga Corporation say they will continue to direct the development and evolution. Does that mean we’ll eventually see a 68k Amiga of some kind licensed through a company such as Commodore International Corporation? It’s an interesting prospect, and a story we’ll follow.

New File Manager Is C64’s Answer To Norton Commander

August 3, 2026 by Tyler August 17 Comments

Norton was always a PC company — Norton Commander, the file manager that launched a thousand clones, was only ever available for DOS, like the rest of the company’s offerings in those days. If they’d decided to port it to the C64, though, it would likely look a lot like [retro3872809] aka [Chicken 64]’s Multi Floppy Commander with Turbo, available on GitLab.

As you might be able to see on the screen shot above or in the demo video below, the application provides an 80-column interface with a split view to show a pair of floppies side-by-side. Not that you’re limited to two floppies, however. The software is happy to swap between all the drives on the bus, to the C64’s maximum of four. All four drives will be usable since the file manager lives on a cartridge.

All drive models are supported, though not all have turbo. As a file manager, it looks like it has the normal functionality you’d expect: renaming, copying, moving and deleting files and directories. You can also launch programs or print disk listings, assuming you have a printer attached to your Commodore.

Said Commodore perhaps needn’t be vintage, as they’re selling new ones again, but if you want a disk drive you may have to fix it yourself.

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C64 Finally Gets The SRAM Corporate Wouldn’t Pay For

July 8, 2026 by Tyler August 35 Comments

If you think RAM is expensive now, try putting yourselves in the shoes of a Commodore engineer, circa 1981. RAM was eye-wateringly expensive by modern standards, and Jack Tramiel wanted 64K of the stuff for the next computer — hence the name, Commodore 64 — but he didn’t want to pay for it. The solution was to use cheaper dynamic RAM over the more expensive static RAM that later took over the market in the kilobyte range. That’s a small problem for retrocomputer hobbyists, because while we’re complaining about the price of gigabytes of the stuff, you can’t buy new DRAM chips that fit a Commodore at any price. That’s why [Fabio Battaglia] aka [hkzlab] came up with an adapter board to fit easily-available SRAM chips onto aging C64s.

Nothing lasts forever: not cold September rain, and not DRAM chips. Heat damage? Internal corrosion? There are probably multiple failure modes, but someday the old stock of chips will run out and the retrocomputer community is going to be ready for it. [Keith Olson] sent us a tip on a video by [The Retro Shack] about this very problem that serves as a good demo of what you get when you put SRAM into a C64. (Thanks [Keith]!) That said, the adapter board on offer is only good for C64s with the 250407 motherboard. If yours is different, you may have to modify the board. But hey, it’s open source, so go ye and do that thing. Let us know via the tips line if you do.

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