Editor’s note: it would make sense to think this dispatch was about the actual new Commodore 64 that just hit the market, given the title, but it is not about that. I might get one of those and write about it, if all the things in this story come to fruition first.
In February 2023, I drove down to the Dayton area in response to a Facebook group ad for a Commodore 64 lot. A woman named Brittney met me at the parking lot of her work and handed over a modified C64 console painted jet-black, at least one floppy drive, and various other accessories and disks. I don’t remember how much I paid, or what exactly was in the stash.
It took me an embarrassing amount of digging in my text messages and in Messenger today to even narrow it down to a date. I honestly thought it had been several years earlier, although I was fairly sure it was post-lockdowns. It’s on my mind because today, for the first time, almost two and a half years later, I finally fired up that Commodore 64.
(I already have a complete Commodore 64 rig in the basement, plus some spares, though my only working floppy disk drive — possibly the one from that buy? — went out of alignment a while back.)
This one spent most of the intervening time sitting on one of the industrial shelves in the garage. When I started cleaning up to fit still more CDs into that space, I came across it, as well as some other random crates of retro goodies, and dragged them all inside to the dining room. I was gonna spend the next day doing nothing but Commodore stuff. Really dig into the backlog of stuff I’ve accumulated. Start cataloging it, selling off duplicate items, finally make it a collection and not a hoard.
That was six months ago, and I’ve written “Commodore” on to-do lists almost every week since then. It took until tonight to drag the correct monitor upstairs from the War Room and actually get started.
I actually had yet another big Commodore lot I bought on eBay, which has “only” been sitting on the dining room table for a month or so. It came with a batch of cartridges for both the 64 and the Vic 20, that computer’s predecessor, so I took the Vic 20 games downstairs to test first.
A year ago, I was going full-tilt on War Room activities. I actually got the Vic 20 area completely organized, every scrap of memorabilia and minutiae logged into Excel and archived on shelves. A few months since the last time I fired it up, I just had to remove the dust covers and flick the switches, and my Vic fired right up, ready to play Omega Race and “Avenger” (the we-don’t-care-about-intellectual-property knockoff of Space Invaders the company released).
Right round when we started talking about the big push to do record shows and get the music selling business cranking, I stopped making War Room videos and wound up not even going down there for a while. My coding projects are dormant, my collection archiving is at a standstill. Getting a routine together that enables me to sell more shit and do creative things has proven as elusive for me as it has for just about everyone else with a day job.
I dunno if I’ve finally just gotten into a groove keeping up on the record show boxes, or if the prospect of reclaiming some turf in the house from encroaching inventory (more on that in a minute) gave me a second wind, but I finally got myself in front of a Commodore again, for the first time in ages, and it felt really good. An hour spent playing 45-year-old video games in the corner of my basement with my phone on a different floor of the house is a quantifiable life improvement over an hour of doomscrolling.
Then it was time to test out the 64 stuff, after a quick detour to go list the doubles I now own of the Vic 20 carts. (That’s another new move – dashing off to photograph 15 items and bang out their listings, rather than piling stuff up for some grim future marathon that oftentimes doesn’t end up happening.) E-commerce gods sated, I plugged the stock C64 from eBay into my current monitor and power supply, and it worked!
For forty-five seconds.
Then it froze up, and when I turned it off and back on, it stayed dark and dead.
I bought that lot for the software, so I wasn’t too fazed. There are two dead Vic 20 consoles in the garage; tomorrow, those and this 64 will be on Marketplace as a parts lot, for all the world to message me about (“I know you set it to local only, and said you won’t ship under any circumstances, but I have to ask, will you ship?”).
Undaunted, I grabbed the jet-black 64. I remembered Brittany having modded it in some way, but I couldn’t remember how, for the life of me. That’s why I was digging through my old messages, to see if a list of upgrades still existed anywhere. No luck.
I turned on the console, and lo and behold, a small cooling fan started whirring. This wouldn’t be noteworthy, except for the fact that Commodore 64s don’t have cooling fans. Mine does, though! Aside from the fan, the paint job, and easily the most responsive and satisfyingly clickety keyboard I’ve ever used on one of these babies, I’m not sure there are any other substantive modifications.
This still left me short a floppy drive, although I was able to test some of the 64’s notoriously wonky cartridges and play some Omega Race (most of the platform’s earliest titles were converted Vic 20 games). I wound up going back still further, to a stray disk drive I bought off a woman near the Indiana border for $10 on one of those mornings when I mapped out a bunch of Marketplace stops and made a Dora The Explorer adventure out of it.
(Disk drive… pile of CDs… weird lunch place! Say it with me!)
Like everything else, that $10 drive had been sitting in the garage, then finally moved to the basement, but I’d never so much as opened the box until today. I pulled it out, plugged it in, popped in a random disk of old public domain games, and…
Holy shit, it worked.
It didn’t even perform under protest, with a bunch of clattery noises and blinking lights, the way worn or dirty 1541 model drives are wont to do. It hummed almost to itself as it loaded in 1982 Star Trek in all its asterisks-and-pound-signs glory. It did its job without complaint, after at least three years in my hoarder stash and God knows how long in the attic of some old lady in Edon, Ohio.
I’m starting off the week with a fully working C64 rig on my dining room table, and a plan. Once I list a certain number of other media (working on DVDs and books this week, now that the show boxes are restocked), I’ll be devoting some time to going through stacks of old Commodore stuff. Whenever I get to fifteen salable things, I’ll stop, take pictures, make listings, file that stuff away. If it’s stuff I’m keeping, it gets catalogued and shelved.
But the primary goal is gonna be dicking around. I owe myself some goofing off time. I haven’t spent two hours on a fool’s errand trying to beat Pitfall II (The Lost Caverns) in quite some time. The problematic expeditions of Seven Cities of Gold have been becalmed in port back in Spain too long. It’s time to drink a bunch of coffee and play video games.
I toured two potential warehouse sites last week. I’m zeroing in on a plan to start moving the “store” part of my life into its own building after the holidays, preferably one with a garage door and with ceilings high enough to come up with some serious wall-to-wall CD shelving. It’s a financial risk, of course, but so much of my time is currently being spent working around my lack of space that the new digs will increase productivity, and sales, almost immediately.
But a lot of things will change here at home, too. As the garage empties out, my personal CD collection can move from unwieldy spinning racks in the War Room to the existing garage wall. I can even move a couple systems out there if I want, or set the game consoles up with their own couch out there, and even do it up as writer’s lounge or video production studio.
I’ll have more space upstairs in my office without as many stacks of product in the way. The War Room will become infinitely more usable. And there might, for the first time in decades, be some semblance of work time and home time (although I’m sure I’ll still do a lot of my actual job from here).
I’m imagining a scenario where I bring retro gear home, open the garage door, sort it right on a workbench, and test it that same day. And then I cook dinner and serve it on a dining room table devoid of disk drives or computer catalogs dating back to the age of “99 Luftballoons.” For the first time, I might actually have a realistic plan to make that all happen.