I celebrated the 1000 subscriber mark by digging through a large free Commodore 64 collection that had been picked up through Freecycle and donated to the makerspace. I brought the boxes home and went through them as-is, partly to see what was there and partly to spot hardware or software that might be worth a closer look later. Collections like this are great because they show how one person actually used a system over time instead of just dropping a single machine in your lap.
The first box was mostly hardware. I pulled out a Commodore 64 breadbin with a broken keycap and its original power brick, which I set aside rather than test since those old supplies are known troublemakers. There was also a matching dust cover, plus two 1541 disk drives. One drive had the more familiar mechanism, while the other had the older style mechanism and a user-added switch to change between device 8 and device 9 without opening the case.
A few of the smaller items were just as good. I found a compact Power Stick joystick, several original manuals, a Commodore 1650 AutoModem, and a custom cable I couldn’t identify. There were also several cartridges, including Super Expander 64, Magic Desk I, Epyx FastLoad, Quick Brown Fox, and a MIDI interface for the C64 and C128. One odd board looked like some sort of kernel ROM expansion, but it had been bent up badly and I left that for later.
The software box had a lot of boxed titles and utility packages. I found HESware Paintbrush with its cartridge, Graphics BASIC, HESMon 64, and a stack of game boxes and manuals. Some of the games were still in nice shape, and Beyond Castle Wolfenstein was still sealed. There were also loose manuals for titles like Frogger, Choplifter, Omega Race, and a few others that turned up elsewhere in the collection.
A lot of the boxed software leaned toward productivity and communications rather than just games. I found Music Calc, terminal software on cassette, another modem, inventory software, a stock market simulator, and Microsoft Multiplan for the Commodore 64. That Multiplan package still had the disk and the large manual, and I checked an old Ahoy! review to confirm it sold for about $100 in 1984. There was also a video acquisition package called ComputerEyes with the hardware, manuals, and software disks, which looked like a good candidate for a future standalone episode.
The last box was a disk drawer packed with loose floppies, cartridges, and a few printer supplies. Some cartridges had been stored in the drawer for safekeeping, including Trashman, Jumpman Jr., MasterType, Omega Race, Choplifter, and Congo Bongo. There was also a printer ribbon cartridge for several systems, including the Radio Shack DMP-110. The drawer itself showed water damage, and a lot of the disks and sleeves had clearly suffered from moisture and heat.
Even with the damage, there was a lot to sort through. I found utility disks, office software, public domain disks, communications software like CompuServe Vidtex and QuantumLink, and a badly warped 1541 test/demo disk. Some labels suggested copied software, while others were original commercial disks with intact labels and packaging. I didn’t try to catalog every disk on the spot because there were simply too many of them.
By the end I had gone through a huge C64 haul with multiple computers, two drives, cartridges, manuals, boxed software, and a drawer full of disks. Some of it needed cleanup or repair, but there was more than enough there to keep future Commodore episodes busy for a while.
— Aaron
Links
Timestamps
00:00 – Intro
01:00 – Backstory
02:51 – Box 1 – Hardware
15:15 – Box 2 – Boxed Software
33:42 – Box 3 – Loose Disks
41:18 – Wrap Up