The DiskFreezerX is a project that aims to capture bit cell exact information from floppy disk drives as a standalone device. On Lallafa's blog you can follow the project, and at the moment the hardware is working. The device is made out of several modules: Processor board with a SAM7 ARM processor. IO board with an SD card slot. Floppy adapter module. And a 256 KiB SPI memory module.

Edition 51 of the English pdf, text, seq, d64 and html magazine is now available. In this edition the following: C2N-II, Aries One, Snapshoter, cbm264.com, New C64, XSane, Jim Slim, Escape, Yes VIC can, C64copy, IceFileSystem, Amiga Immortal CD, 1541U-II, New Masonicons, Monitor switcher, TOSEC, C and A magazine and Protovision. Reviews: Strokeworld, Cascade, Its Magic, Ice Guys, Bomb Mania, Metal Dust.

Always wanted to play a game to the end? On this web page you can find out how to do it. At the moment there are 378 walkthroughs of games available. The latest addition are Elvira 2 and Runaway. There is also a discussion forum and you can send in your own walkthrough.

Roboteralarm made a web page where you can transform images into Commodore 64 images. The web page is in Beta stage but you can drop a jpg or png image on the C64 screen and the image will be converted into a C64 image. You will need a modern web browser such as Chrome, Safari5 or FF4 that is compatible with "canvas". Roboteralarm is now working on gamma boost for the color palette and PDF creation.

After the Retro-Link.com forum, there is now also a blog page. This blog will concentrate on Commodore, Amiga, other platforms, retro-computing, the 1980's, and other topics making up the retro world. A few examples of the blogs are: Notacon 8/PixelJam Demoparty and the EasyFlash mini-review.

Edition 50 of the English pdf, text, seq, d64 and html magazine is now available. In this edition the following: Jim Scabery, CardSwipe, CBM-Command, X1000, Snapshoter, SID Sample pack, Viva Amiga, CBM psrg Studio, DirMaster, Amiga games that weren't, Commodore programming, Back to the past, Sideways SEUCK and a review of the SC3 Arcade party 2011 by Robert Bernardo.

Return magazine is a German print magazine about the 8-bit computers from A like Atari to Z like the ZX Spectrum. In this edition: M.U.L.E., Archon, Metroid, Dan Bunten, Commodore SFD 1001. Bubble Bobble, Allan Alcorn, Atari Cosmos - The Third Dimension, Nähen und Stricken mit Nintendo, Games People Play, SEGA 8 Bit Zubehör, Forth statt Basic: Jupiter ACE, Computersprache FORTH, News, Termine and Veranstaltungen.

Arthur Jordison released version 1.0.0 of his CBM prg Studio. The program CBM prg Studio allows you to type-in a BASIC or machine code program using a Windows environment. In this version many new features and a faster edit control.

Fabrizio Gennari released a new version of Audiotap, a program which creates TAP files from audio and plays TAP files to audio. New in this version: New pulse detection algorithm. Support for triangular, sine and the usual square waves. Experimental support for C16 semi-wave files. DMP files (DC2N) can be read.

64COPY is een DOS en C64 emulator bestand manager gemaakt door Peter Schepers. Het programma kan worden gebruikt voor het omzetten van emulator bestanden. Deze versie brengt vele verbeteringen voor de disassembler en de GCR conversie. Er is ook een ROM/EPROM conversie toegevoegd voor het branden van EPROM's.

Subchrist Software released a new version of CharPad. With CharPad you can design tiles for Commodore C64 games or demos on a Windows computer. New in v1.8: Per-Tile-Cell colouring mode. Tile area clear, cut, copy, paste. Extended collision materials. Tile size change without data loss. Tile "Safe Swap". Tile tidying

The web page C64.com interviewed Al Rubin. Al was one of the game programmers from the company Datasoft. He worked on the games such as O'Riley's Mine and The Games: Winter Edition on the Commodore C64. He later worked for other companies like Epyx and Electronic Arts. Visit the C64.com web page to read the whole interview.

On the web page Mingo’s Commodorepage you can find a comprehensive collection of Commodores. You will also find a game-, tools-, demo- and Easter eggs- database , many manuals, historical timeline of Commodore systems and operating systems and much more.

The Polish magazine Commodore and Amiga Fan released the third edition of the games special. In this 52 pages pdf magazine the following articles: TFX, Flimbo 'sQuest, BoulderDash and an interview with Thomas Lewandowski.

A new edition of the Commodore Free magazine is available. In this English pdf, txt, d64, html or .seq magazine the following articles: Competition Pro 25 years, AMC, Starglider 2, AmigaOne X1000, Turbo Demo Card, VICE, Retro Gaming Newsletter, 8-Bit Central, DotBasic, Interview with Lukasz Dziwosz, What is Midi and Back to the past.

TOSEC has been updated. TOSEC, or The Old School Emulation Center, is a group of people dedicated to the preservation of games and other programs for home computer and console systems. In this update: 37 new, 107 updated and 9 removed.

DirMaster is a Windows-based GUI tool useful for the management of emulator formats such as: .d64, .d81, .t64, etc. as well as archival formats such as .arc, .sda, .lnx, etc. New in this version: .lbr unpack support. Print Sleeve function. Installs and uses the "C64 Elite Mono" TrueType font. The emulator integration has been improved and numerous other user interface tweaks and bug fixes.

Arthur Jordison released version 0.3 (beta) of his CBM prg Studio. The program CBM prg Studio allows you to type-in a BASIC or machine code program using a Windows environment. The program you make can be converted to a .prg file which you can use with an emulator or real C64 or VIC20. In this version: Programs are now project based. Tabbed MDI. Syntax highlighting.

Payton Byrd released a new version of his CBM-Command program. The CBM-Command program can be used to organize your Commodore diskettes. The changes in this version are: Added double-buffering when displaying the directory (C64). Changed the algorithm for displaying the directory in a panel. This greatly speeds up the scrolling of long directories, especially on the C128. This program is available for all 8-bit Commodore computers and disk drives.

In this English pdf, txt, seq, html and d64 magazine the following: Editorial, News: Sideways SEUCK competition, Contiki 2.5, Commodore Server, PixelJam, TigerDisk #171, Amiga OS4.1 video. Interview with Mirkosoft, CDTV Multimedia, Programming by John Fielden and Back to the Past.

Ian Gledhil is working on a program to make archiving of cassettes easy. His program will read (mono) WAV files and convert them into .tap files. These .tap files can be used in Commodore 8-bit emulators like CCS64 and VICE. The program will work on a Windows, Linux or Amiga computer. At the moment it is still under development and the program can only be used with the command line, but a GUI is planned for the future.

C&A Fan is a Polish .pdf magazine. In edition 7 the following: News, Play games in 1984, Commodore 64 GS, Interview with the founder of BIW, Silesia 4, History of the Amiga, LHA and more.

Luigi Di Fraia updated his program TAPClean Front End. It now offers a TAP split feature. TAPClean Front End is a extension of TAPClean which includes a Hex monitor, Disassembler, CBM BASIC untokenizer for PRG files and an interactive report of the tape contents. The program is available for Windows and Linux.

The VICE team has released version 2.3 of the Commodore 8-bit emulator. In this version the following changes: New accurate C64 emulator called x64sc. Disk-drive improvements. New reSID version. Many emulation improvements based on photographs of the real chips. CRT Emulation. True aspect ratio. Improved machine language monitor. Improved accuracy of CIA interrupts. Added v364 speech emulation for the 264 emulator. At the moment you can download the source code, if you want the normal (binary) version you have to wait a little bit.

In this English pdf, txt, seq, html and d64 magazine the following: Editorial, News: Commodore Keytar, SCACOM Aktuell, 2011 C64-RetroInvaders calendar, dtv2ser 0.5, YC C16/Plus4 Special Edition, Plus 4: 256k Memory Expansion, ZTerm Terminal Client For C64, Chameleon 64, sd2iec Firmware and much more news. Interview With Alf Yngve. Build Your Own RGBI>S-Video Adaptor. Commodore 16 Programming. 1000 Kung Fu Maniacs. Back to the Past - Issue 7.

Zagon released the final version of his Exomizer. Exomizer is a program that compresses files with efficient decompress time and file size. It can produce stand-alone self-decrunching files for the following targets: Commodore VIC20, C64, C16/plus4 and C128, Atari 400/800 XL/XE, Apple II+ and //e.

CBM prg Studio allows you to type a BASIC or machine code program in using a Windows environment and convert it to a .prg file which you can run on an emulator, or even a real C64 or VIC20. At the moment CBM prg Studio is still a Beta version, and if you find bugs please send Arthur a message.

TOSEC has been updated. TOSEC, or The Old School Emulation Center, is a group of people dedicated to the preservation of games and other programs for home computer and console systems. Duncan Twain made many corrections to the C64 section and added 2 GB of data.

A new version of CBM-Command is now available. A new feature in version 2.0 is disk copying. CBM-Command is a disk manager for the Commodore 64, 128, VIC-20, Plus/4, and the PET/CBM computers. There is a native version of CBM-Command for each Commodore model range.

GameFAQs is an online archive of video and computer game information, codes, walkthroughs, hints, message boards, save games files, and of course, FAQs. There are special sections for the VIC-20, C64 and the Amiga computers.

If you visit the MOS6502.com web page you can follow the life of a Commodore Geek. Robby writes in his blog about his experiences with his Commodore computers, a few examples are: Bringing the C64 online, The Chess Grandmaster, HQ video playback on a C64, Be like Jean Michel Jarre and much more.

The new Retroinvaders calendar is now available. This calendar is available in English, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. In the calendar you will find lots of recent Commodore C64 games. There is also a calendar available for the Sinclair QL and a one with a compilation of Retro computers.

Last week we had a little riddle for the New Year. This week we will give you the answers. The letters or numbers of Happy 2011 are: H = 3000H, A = Amiga 2000, P = MPS803, P = Plus/4, Y = VIC-1541, 2 = 1802, 0 = MCS801, 1 = PET 2001 and 1 = 1571.

Michael Steil gave a presentation of reverse engineering of the MOS 6502 processor. Because there are no original schematics or a good descriptions of the 6502 the only way to get the information was to photograph the chip in very high resolution. From the pictures they made a schematic. The schematic was converted to a computer program that can emulate all transistors in the 6502. You can watch the whole 60 minutes presentation on Youtube.

We would like to wish all Commodore fans a Happy New Year. And for the real Commodore fans we have a little riddle. What are the Commodore devices on the picture that spell "Happy 2011". We will tell the answer next week.

Commodore USA has new Commodore products. The C64 is a PC with a mini-ITX PC motherboard with Dual Core 525 Atom processor and a Nvidia Ion2 graphics processor. The outside is almost identical to the original C64. The Amiga series A1000, A2000 and A3000 are PC cases which can be used as a PC or as a Media centre.

ZoomFloppy is an USB device for connecting Commodore disk drives to your PC. The ZoomFloppy is an improvement based on XU1541 from Till Harbaum. Nate Lawson and Jim Brain teamed up to produce a professional product. This controller will support IEC drives, IEEE-488 drives and a user-port connection for parallel speeder drives. At this moment the building and testing stage is under-way. You can follow the progress on Jim's blog.

KryoFlux is a USB-based floppy controller. It can be used to read a floppy, at low-level, and store the data from the disk. The features are: Low level reading. Save as raw stream, or export a specific format. The following formats are supported: Acorn Electron, Apple, Amstrad CPC, Archimedes, Atari 8-bit, Atari ST, BBC, Commodore 64, Commodore Amiga, MSX, IBM PC, PC-8801, Sam Coupe, Spectrum, E-MU Emulator II and many, many others. Parallel export support. Visit the Kryoflux web page for all the details.

In this English pdf, txt, seq, html and d64 magazine the following: Editorial, News: 1000 Kung-Fu Maniacs!, Blitterwolf Monthly, NJAD64V, Joyport switcher, Nova Master A1000SA, Kickstart ROM Replacement, HyperViper C64, Richard Joseph Tribute,CommVEx 2010, Hostile Breed, C64 TrueType, Commodore PET Synth, IBatch 1.0, WinUAE 2.3.0, Chuck Norris, 5ALAD, TPUG CD, Interview with Joan Malé and reviews of MCC-216 and Not Just Another D64 Viewer.

Brian Bagnall has released a new book called: "Commodore - a Company on the Edge". This book is a major rework of his book "On the Edge: the Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore". In Brian's new book there are 15 additional interviews with: Brian Dougherty, John Feagans, Andy Finkel, Bill Gardei, Neil Harris, Manfred Kapp, Dale Luck, Bill Mensch, Dick Sanford, Bill Seiler, Kit Spencer, Yash Terakura and Michael Tomczyk.

Always wanted a piece of software or hardware for your Commodore but it does not exist yet? There is now a web page that has a bounty system for creating new software or hardware for the Commodore. A recent completed bounty is a rewritten frimware for SD2IEC that makes GEOS possible on your C64 with an SD card for storage. At the moment there are bounties for making a Kernal Cartridge, JiffyDOS for the Vic 20, CBM-Command documentation and a Taipan version for the Commodore 64.

In this English pdf, txt, seq, html and d64 magazine the following: Viva Amiga, Catweasel AmigaOS 4, YAPE 10 Years, BASIC on Bails, Origyn Web Browser 3.30, The SEUCK Vault, ACID 64 Player Pro v3.04, ZoomFloppy, Commodore Programming, Interview with Sean (Commodore Computer Club USA), Retro Gaming News Letter, The Mensch Computer, USB-64 and DotBASIC.

In this English pdf, txt, seq, html and d64 magazine the following: News: ACE Commander 128, Pocket 1541, A conversation with Chuck Peddle, Bil Herd and Jeri Ellsworth, Maziacs, 64HDD, Morph Game, CBM-Command, Blu Manager, TargetD64, MiniGame Compo 2010, Interview with Payton Byrd, Will You Still Need Me When I am 64 and much more.

Style has released a Commodore C64 TrueType font package. This package provides five TrueType formatted fonts as well as Embedded OpenType (.eot) and Web Open Font Format (.woff) versions ready for use in your own website. The fonts contains all the C64 characters and additional characters to complete the ASCII set (left and right brace, caret, grave accent, backslash and tilde).

In this English pdf, txt, seq, html and d64 magazine the following: News: Amiga forever, SIDin, WINUAE, Silo64, BASIC Point, UFE, The unofficial CMD homepage, Commodore Scene VGA update, Interviews with Trevor Dickingson and Gregory Alekel.

The Commodore Info Page has reached the milestone of 200 Commodore sightings. And number 200 is a special one. In a episode of the Channel 4 computer-show, 4 Computer Buff's, you can see Jack Tramiel. He talks about the new range of computers from Atari. Other examples of sightings are: Airwolf, Buck Rogers, Derrick, Futurama, Knight Rider, MacGyver, Magnum PI, Miami Vice, Police Academy 3, Red Dwarf, Sesame Street, Star Trek, The IT crowd and Wayne's World.

The Pocket 1541 is a emulator for the 1541 disk drive. Pocket 1541 uses a SD card to store your data, supported formats are: D64, M2I, PRG, D71, D81 and P00. The firmware is based on the open source SD2IEC firmware. The device has four buttons and a LCD screen that can be used to navigate to the required files on the SD card. Visit the web page for more information. (The page is in Italian which you can translate with the help of Google-Translate.)

In this English pdf, txt, seq, html and d64 magazine the following: News, MorphOS 2.5, Spectacular Copy, C64SD, DIY Action Replay card, BaseEdit, Timberwolf,New Commodore Club, CCEE, Descent Freespace, Arcade Retro Gaming, X-MOTO 0.5.3, Loadstar #250, Frtis for MorphOS, MorphOS SDK, SD2IEC Firmware, A-EON and Varisys, The new adventures of Alfredo, Commander, Micromark UK, Interview with Björg Stojalowski and Ross Myer.

Steve Barker released a sprite editor for Windows. The name of the program is N.A.S.E. what means: Not Another Sprite Editor! The program can be used to edit sprites including: Undo, Redo, Flip XY, Copy, Paste, Animation etc. You can download the program from the Commodore Scene DataBase.

Payton Byrd released a new version of CBM Command. New features are: Support for the VIC 20 computer, requires 32K RAM. Support for Commodore Plus 4 computer. New color picker for the configuration program. 1581 Disk Image (D81) support. The program is still in Beta but you can download the program from Payton's Codeplex web page.