My Commodore 64…and The Stand…

I have recently begun putting together a Commodore 64 system in order to have actual 8-bit Commodore hardware with which to compare my C-One. I’ve rather enjoyed playing with the C64, having never really been an 8-bit Commodore user. Impressive hardware. At any rate, I have always really liked the Commodore 1702 CRT with its separate chroma / luma inputs and sharp screen image, so that is the screen I chose for the system. I went with old school, brown 1541 floppy drives to match the display, but grabbed a C64C (new case design, beige rather than brown) because I could not determine with comfortable certainty that the older, brown C64s on eBay were rev. 3 units and had 8-pin video (with separate chroma/luma). The lot looks rather nice on the desk, but the 1702 was awkwardly situted, sitting rather low on the desk and making access to the rear C64 interfacfes difficult. I got the notion to try and remedy the situation.

I have just completed a project that took entirely too long and generated far too much of a mess in the house. I decided to build a rather simple monitor stand that would hold the screen at the proper height and angle and leave clearance for easy access to the rear interfaces of the C64. The stand is an exact fit for the 1702 and is made out of pine, with acrylic polyurethane (3 coats) used to finish. After plenty of corrective sanding, it’s complete and in place and let me turn this into a much nicer looking this and this. Thought I would share for those interested.

It is a much smaller scale job than my last real woodworking bout, which also was an effort in support of vintage hardware.

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4 Responses to My Commodore 64…and The Stand…

  1. telengard says:

    Heya, glad to see you are coming over the the “dark side”. Very nice C64 setup. Be sure to try out Telengard and Space Taxi! Looks like I missed you in #c64friends (was afk). Also, I got a subscription to Retro Gamer for christmas and it is just a great magazine, a little slanted towards the UK scene, but great nonetheless.

    take care

    ~telengard

  2. blakespot says:

    I’d gotten some comments that the images on the 1702 screen were a little vertically stretched. I just, tonight, went into the 1702 and found the v. height pot thanks to a hand-drawn schematic on the net and shrunk it down a bit. Better now, to be sure.

  3. blakespot says:

    The aforementioned hand-drawn schematic of the 1702 mainboard is here:

    http://staff.washington.edu/rrcc/uwweb/1702/LAYOUT.GIF

    There are other 1702 schematics in the master directory here:

    http://staff.washington.edu/rrcc/uwweb/1702/

    For those on a similar mission. :-)

  4. Pingback: Brief Encounters of the Home Computing Kind | Byte Cellar

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