So, I've looked at a few options and I've settled on the Final Expansion 3 (FE3) cartridge kit. I'm very comfortable soldering things together, and it makes things more interesting. I also purchased a budget temperature controlled soldering station because the cheap iron I've been using for years doesn't seem suitable to me for doing this project because there is a little bit of surface mount soldering involved.
Here are a couple of photos of the blank board.
One really cool feature of this board the serial ports that hang off the back. I can plug my VIC-20 serial port into the FE3 and use it's 512K of flash RAM (or an inserted SD card) as a huge floppy disk, and I'm told that I can even plug my Commodore 128 into it while it is being powered by the VIC-20, and use it as a floppy drive for that machine too! Very cool!
2 comments:
I put one of these kits together a few months back and really like it. I would recommend you run the FE3DIAG program to test everything. I actually learned that my VIC-20 has a fault even though it seems to run fine. Another VIC-20 board tested fine, so I'm going to have to figure out the problem with my original VIC-20 from my childhood. Hope you enjoy it!
Thanks, that's interesting. What sort of problems does the fault cause?
If my VIC has the fault you mention, I have a second newer VIC that I can try, but I've been avoiding using it because it has the newer C64 power supply. I've been meaning to test the output voltage on that one.
Thanks again.
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