I've picked up a couple of Commodore units, and I
don't know much about
them. I'm not really a home micro person, so I am a little out of my
depth here...
The first is a P500. I have the schematics, which also
call it a PET-II.
It's a 6509 (6502 + paging registers for 1M of RAM) based machine. Video
is a VIC-II, sound is a SID. There's 128K on board. BASIC/KERNAL is 3
EPROMs in a cludge-board on top of the ROM sockets. Rear panel connectors
are 2 joystick ports, IEEE488 (presumably for disk drives/printers/etc),
cassette, sound (RCA socket), RS232 (DB25, and there's a 6551 on the
mainboard), video out (8 pin DIN, like a C64), cartridge (again like a
C64) and mains in
Wooooohaaaaaaaaa!
So I'm no longer aloone with mine :)))
Questions :
1) Is it worth adding the extra sockets/chips for the next 128K of
memory? Will BASIC recognise it?
Jep, it will, but the additional memory isn't realy usefull in basic.
The Programm code has still to reside in the programm bank.
I would suggest you DONT add them - if you like to have a P500-
alike machine to play (and rebuld :), I would love to give you
a CBM 610 (B128) in exchange for the P500 (only minimal differences,
in fact the 6xx are 'production' versions of the P500 - so less
bugs (but still buggy)). There are even two (German) Books about
the 5/6/7xx machines including some in depth technical informations.
2) Any references on programming this thing? It
appears you can program
it so the VIC accesses one of the 64K DRAM banks rather than the 1K video
RAM (+ 1K*4 colour RAM). Anyone know how to do this? What about sound - I
guess I have to poke the SID directly.
Jep, but there has been also some libraries and basic extensions.
Servus
Hans
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Ich denke, also bin ich, also gut
HRK