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Comment by gmiller123456 | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised some of the C64s still work. I had to return mine (for exchange) many times. I remember seeing huge signs at the return counter that said "NO RETURNS ON COMMODORE EQUIPMENT". As a kid it didn't set off any alarm bells. But apparently quality wasn't a goal at all. I remember seeing a talk by a former employee where he saw a stack of C64s and a sign that said "bad". He walked by the same spot a little later and someone had shipped them. Apparently the 1541 drives were even worse. I could never find one to buy, as anytime they were in stock people would bring theirs back for exchange, so not a lot of motivation for stores to stock them.

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MOS chips are notorious among system restorers even today. Commodore's power supply design that made the most common failure mode one that increased the voltage output so it fried the attached machine is another stellar design decision.

That said, Commodore sold a ton of hardware in the 80s. There is a cottage industry around getting C64s up and running again, and since they're so plentiful and well known it's almost always possible to fix them. There are replacement chips for everything on the board, even the weirdo custom stuff like the PLAs. Everything on the C64 has been reverse engineered and well documented.

And with the whole industry around small ARM microcontrollers, you can get a small 64-bit RISC computer with more memory than any C64 that emulates a dozen different variations of an audio chip.

> I'm surprised some of the C64s still work.

The C64 PSU are notoriously flimsy but the C128 PSU is known to be exceptionally good (and not to be mistaken for an Amiga 500 PSU: physically they look the same but the pinouts are different and shall fry your machine!).

My C128 (the one I had back when I was a kid) still worked last time I tried it: during the Covid 2020 lockdown.

Not only it still worked, with the sound and everything, about 2/3rd of my 5"1/4 floppy disks were still working too (I know that that won't last though).

Obviously the disk drive was still working (a 1570 in my case, a weird hybrid between a 1541 and a 1571).

>The C64 PSU are notoriously flimsy

Gross understatement. They should not be used under any circumstances, as the design is not safe.

Left alone C64 PSUs will fry C64 after C64 with high voltage until someone puts a stop to this by destroying the PSU (knife to the wires).

First of all, the later "short board" models (including C64C, most popular in Europe) run much cooler, which makes them less prone to failure. Second - we got pretty good[1] at fixing the faults.

[1] https://www.pictorial64.com/

It's likely the actual problem you had was with the epoxy-encased "wedge" PSU model. Most of them have lasted fine through decades of use but there were some batches that kept giving people problems.

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