Transplanting a Raspberry Pi into a C64 ======================================= Well, readers of my phlog may already have heard about my trip down memory lane while playing around with BMC64, the bare metal C64 emulator. So, i got a C64 C case with keyboard for a few very cheap bucks on ebay and inserted the Raspberry Pi running BMC64 into it, wired the keyboard to the Raspberry GPIO and got a bit of a retro kick of it playing old games and testing software of yesteryear. What i noticed while playing around with the breadbin was the (for me) quiet nice ergonomics of the keyboard (yeah, its a matter of taste...) and that it's somewhat sad that this computer form factor has somewhat died out (yeah, the Pi400 exists, my dad has one... but i hate the keyboard and don't like the limited space inside the case) Second thoughts... ------------------- So, at one point i thought it was a bit of a waste... i had this Raspberry Pi 3 which had this quad core ARM CPU burning cycles to emulate a 6502... it felt wrong. I pulled a Sandisk 64 GB extreme plus card out of the drawer that was left over from another project and "burned" Raspbian on it. A problem was the keyboard... while i am pretty sure that it would be possible to somehow use the GPIO wiring that is used by BMC64 to also work with Raspbian i took the easy road and ordered a Keyrah V3 from Individual Computers. The Keyrah is an adaptor to turn the keyboard of various retro computers (VIC-20 / C64 / Amiga / Atari ST) and joystick ports into normal USB devices. Well, after i arranged everything in the case i ended up with a regular raspbian install, now the only things left where porting a few tools and creating a fitting xmodmap file for the not quiet standard layout of the C64 keyboard. Now that i have worked with this setup a while, i really like it. The keyboard - while no Model M - is quiet good and while everything (hdd, USB Hub and so on) of my various raspberry setups is normally scattered around the desk, this setup is finally a clean one. For now, i am happy with the result of this little side project. I have put the Modmap for the C64 keyboard into the Download section of my phlog.