buttons, put the board in place, and secure it back with the screws. Drill, carve, or use a Dremel tool to cut a hole in the DTV’s base that’s big enough to feed the cables through.

Plug the other end of the drive cable into your Commodore drive and turn it on. Fire everything up, holding down the keyboard K to boot into C64 mode. Insert your floppy and enter LOAD “$”,8. You should hear the drive spin, and the DTV should load the directory from the disk. Enter LIST to see the disk’s contents.

Cable-tie the internal wires together, to provide enough strain relief that you don’t accidentally pull them out of the board. Carefully route the wires out the hole, snap the base back on, then reinsert and tighten the four case screws.

You are now the proud owner of a brand-new, improved, 20-year-old computer. Ain’t it cool?

Now What?

If you just want to download and run C64 programs, pick up an XE1541 cable, which hooks a Commodore drive to your PC so you can transfer downloaded disk images and programs to C64 floppies. Find out more at sta.c64.org/xe1541.html.

If you’re an assembly language programmer, check out the free Turbo Macro Pro+DTV assembler at style64.org, which gives you access to the DTV’s expanded color palette and extra memory. You might also want to hack an S-video output to replace the sometimes-funky DTV composite video and separate the mono audio output into three discrete synthesizer voices. Or you might hack in a second joystick. For these and more ideas, check out the sites listed below.

C64 DTV Links C64 DTV Yahoo! group games.groups.yahoo.com/group/DTVTalk

DTV hacking site and forum

www.orrville.net/dtvhacking

Project 64 — C64 doc archive

project64.c64.org

Funet C64 software archives (US mirror)

ibiblio.org/pub/micro/commodore

Mark R. Brown was Managing Editor of <i>.info</i>, the legendary Commodore computer magazine.

Secret Software Tricks

When you turn on the C64 DTV, you briefly see the famous Commodore “Chicken Head” logo and a credits screen. Then the C64’s standard blue prompt screen appears, and the lines LOAD “*”,1 and RUN are entered, as if by a ghostly typist. The screen clears after this, and you’re presented with the regular game menu.

Interrupting the blue screen during startup will fork you over to lots of hidden extras. Hold down the left joystick button during startup, and you’ll get to the regular games menu faster. Quickly wiggle the joystick left and right during startup, and you’ll get to the C64 Mode menu, which offers six bonus games and “Basic Prompt.”

Select Basic Prompt (the left joystick button selects), and you’re in BASIC mode, a clone of the C64 blue screen and prompt, with the com-mand-line interface. From here, you can summon a joystick-controlled onscreen keyboard by holding down the left joystick button. To type, navigate around the keyboard, then release the left joystick to enter the character you’re on. Repeat as necessary. The SH (Shift) keys act like Shift Lock, remaining on (or off) until toggled back again. (The

Commodore 64 keyboard is quite different from a

PC keyboard. If you’re unfamiliar with how it works, visit the online manual at lemon64.com/manual, and refer to section 2.1, Communicating with your 64:

The Keyboard.)

From BASIC mode, you can list the programs in

ROM by typing:

LOAD “$”
LIST
To run the “Entropy/Electron” demo, a favorite
interactive art piece from the early “Demo Scene”
era, go to BASIC mode and type:
0 POKE1,55:LOAD”ENTROP Y”, 1
RUN
Then go through the screens by holding down
the A button while pushing the joystick up for a
few seconds each.

The C64 DTV also has numerous Easter eggs.

Here are two, and others are documented at xrl.us/ fmzm. To see Commodore legend Jim Butterfield drinking beer with a friend, type:

LOAD”1337”,1,1
RUN
Finally, speaking of elite, you can bring up a
picture of some members of the C64 DTV develop-
ment team from BASIC mode by typing:
LOAD”DTVTEAM”,1,1
RUN
The full team includes Jeri Ellsworth (manager),
Jason Compton, Adrian Gonzalez, Robin Harbron,