The last weeks I invested some freetime to get my C64DTV upgraded. The biggest thing I did was adding a SD-Card based Floppy emulation. This nice thing is driven by a microcontroller and called MMC2IEC. Another thing which I have planned for my DTV was, to change the Commodore standard kernal to a patched one and to modify the bootup behavior. There are some useful tools like dtvboot from Daniel Kahlin which will make an “interactive” startup process possible. For that you have to re-flash the DTV and mine was equipped with an unsupported flash chip. But I had luck, Daniel was just working on that and supplied me with a first pre-alpha version of his updated DTV-Flash, capable to deal with SST-Flash chips. I tried it and it worked perfect for me. Now my DTV comes pretty close to a real Commodore 64.
I also added a color fix, you have to solder some additional resistors onto the board of your DTV because the video output is really terrible without.
After that I started to get bored and thought using the 80 column mode on my Commodore 128 is something which is really essential to me. Unfortunately I own a Commodore 1084S-D2 which is not equipped with the capability of working with digital RGB. I hav to solder a special cable with some resistors and diodes which will “convert” the digital signal to an analog one. I was surprised how well this is working. After years of abstinence I was able to boot CP/M again. This was a kind of MS-Dos feeling using it, because it looks pretty similar. Many of you know, that Microsoft took a lot of “inspiration” for MS-Dos from CP/M. Time for me to get some cp/m software and start programming in Turbo Pascal 3.0 again. I love this retro feeling.