Tag Archives: Retro Ruminations

Using a LumaFix64 with a RetroTINK 2X-Pro

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A couple of years ago I put a LumaFix64 into my PAL C64 and I was quite happy with the results, using a Sony PVM CRT monitor. You can read about that here. It does a good job of virtually eliminating those “jailbars” from the VIC-II output.

But lately, I am not using CRT displays any more, mainly because I just don’t want to devote the real estate to keeping them out. Instead, I’ve been using a RetroTINK 2X-Pro to scale the s-video (via Commodore4Ever AV Breakout) output from my C64s to HDMI.

I decided to add a LumaFIX to one of my NTSC units and do some actual comparisons. I already knew I was happy with what it does for the picture quality on a CRT monitor, but is it worthwhile when using an HD display through a RetroTINK? Here’s the video:

Note: it may be hard to see the jailbar effect clearly if you’re not viewing the 1080p stream.

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The WARP SPEED cartridge from Cinemaware is nice!

“Why limp along on impulse power when you can jump to Warpspeed?”

The Warp Speed cartridge was Cinemaware’s answer to the Epyx Fastload. I can vividly recall reading the advertisements for this cart but I never knew anyone who had one. I finally picked one up and figured it might make an interesting video to explore it.

Of particular interest are the fast I/O benchmarks. Here are the charts from my video. The benchmarking was done with the CBM Disk Transfer Benchmark tool. I’ll update the benchmarks on that page after I finish posting this.

The load speed is a decent showing, but, note the save speed. I think this is the fastest speeder cartridge for saving files that I know of. In order to get faster than this (for save speed), you need to use DolphinDOS.

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Getting Stereo sound from mono SID tunes on my Ultimate 64 (Retro Ruminations Video)

I recently acquired an Ultimate 64 Elite board. After I configured it for stereo sound using one of the internal emulated SIDs, and a real socketed SID, I posted a video to facebook showing it off. I got a few requests for screen shots of the settings, and thought a full video would be fun, demonstrating the actual sound as well as the settings.

Also, I have been planning to post short “ruminations” on my thoughts about Commodore and other vintage computing/gaming hardware. I figured this would be a good first video. Please use the YouTube subscribe button if you’d like to see more… and like the video, too!

Seen in this video:

Ultimate 64 Elite
Ultimate 64 A/V Breakout

SID file for this music: Bombo.sid (tune #2) (I prefer having it play back at NTSC speed.)