Supposedly a real *DX64* (the prototype double-drive version) lurks in Germany in a lucky someone's collection. It's not a hack, either (there's a few of those out there too). Awwww, c'mon. Wizball brings a smile to everyone's face. Actually, there is some resentment of Commodores in some quarters. Besides the usually friendly rivalry between Spectrum and 64 owners, I've encountered some real vitriol when I bring up 64s to certain other classic computer groups who shall currently remain nameless. I suppose their justification is that the C64 crammed their system out of the market, and as a Mac user, I do have *some* sympathy :-), but still ... -- ----------------------------- personal page: http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ -- Cameron Kaiser, Point Loma Nazarene University * ckaiser(a)stockholm.ptloma.edu -- Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong. -- Oscar Wilde

--- CLeyson(a)aol.com wrote: Sure thing. I never had that problem personally, but I can see how it could be a concern. I always liked the PET/C-64 partially because the custom chips afforded a feature set at a price lower than other machines (like the Apple ][) They were far from perfect (I couldn't *afford* a disk drive for my PET and the C-64 drive was the slowest on the planet), but I liked them once you finally did get whatever you were working/playing on into memory. As for failure modes, the single most common thing to break in a C-64 is the PLA (82S100 chip) - a totally dead machine (that's been verified to have good power) probably has a dead PLA. Next to that, I think RAM was the most common thing to go, but that wasn't 1/10th as common. I was never into Atari, but I was recently gifted with an Atari 800, two disk drives, tape drive, comm interface, parallel dot matrix printer, acoustic coupler, all tech ref manuals, digitizer tablet, box of software *and* the receipts - my friend paid about 80% of retail (according to the Atari glossies in the box) and it was still in the region of $3000! It's a gem of a set - all the goodies you could imagine, all the docs and paperwork. About the opposite from the typical thrift store experience... my friend is a retired engineer - he aquired and kept *everything*! -ethan __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Check out Yahoo! Shopping and Yahoo! Auctions for all of your unique holiday gifts! Buy at http://shopping.yahoo.com or bid at http://auctions.yahoo.com