When the Commodore 64 came out in 1982, it was an engineering masterpiece. It had capabilities far exceeding other personal computers, and it was all down to two sophisticated chips inside the C64. The VIC-II, the C64’s video chip, had sprites and scrolling all built into a single piece of silicon. The SID chip was a complete on-chip synthesizer. These pieces of silicon made the C64 the best-selling computer of all time, but also thwarted efforts to emulate a complete C64 system on a microcontroller.
[Frank Bösing] just succeeded emulate an entire C64 on a Teensy 3.6. The Teensy uses an exceptionally powerful microcontroller, but it’s a labor of love and code.
The inspiration for this project comes from a reverse-engineered SID chip which was ported to the Teensy 3.2. The SID chip is the make-or-break feature of any C64 emulation, but the Teensy 3.2 didn’t have enough RAM for the newer versions of reSID. With the release of Teensy 3.6, [Frank] figured the increased amount of RAM would allow for a full C64 system, so he built it.
The new C64 emulator uses a Teensy 3.6, with an extra little “shield” (or whatever we call them) to provide connectors for the controllers and the Commodore IEC bus. There’s audio output, support for USB keyboards, and support for an SPI IL9341 display or a regular VGA display.
The entire development of this Commodore emulator has been documented on on the PJRC forumsand all the code is finished on GitHub. It’s fantastic work, and as the video (below) shows, it’s a real Commodore 64 that fits in your pocket.
