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hi i'm doug from 10 minute amiga retro cast and welcome to another episode of the chicken head chronicles now you'll notice the beautiful little machine i have sitting next to me is my gorgeous sx64 portable that i just love i'll put a link to my video where i found this device and fixed it and repaired it but last week i did a video on the kung fu flash from our friends the future was 8-bit you see the little guy right in there and it got me thinking how well would the kung fu flash work on my sx64 well the answer is it works just great works just fine on an ntsc sx64 but the sx64 well it's awesome got a built-in five-inch monitor got a built-in 1541 floppy drive works as a regular commodore 64. it has one little problem and that is the 1541 drive is hard set to device 8. now as we all know a lot of commodore games and a lot of commodore programs really want to run everything off of device 8 if they don't see device eight they don't run okay you try to run it off device nine device ten often times it can't find it so that led me to a little problem i can set the kung fu flash to device nine ten eleven twelve no problem at all but then half the things that would normally run just literally don't run anymore i cannot set the 1541 drive internally unless i go inside the sx64 and jump a couple of traces or cut a couple of traces um and then you can set it device nine or ten but you know that's a permanent solution now of course you can always set it through software with a with an open command but that's a little bit inconvenient to do every single time now one good thing that i will mention is when you do set the kung fu flash to device 8 it seems to supersede the drive on here so i can set this to device eight like for instance i've got uh carlton handy's awesome new run and gun game on here i'll put a link in the description for it i set it as device 8 and it just boots but now my 1541 drive is is disabled it just doesn't work anymore there are some programs that i use like microsoft multi-plan where i can save things to device nine or roy rigg's awesome hired sword game where you can save you can have a save game and you can tell it to save it to device nine there are times when i want a real disk drive in here so i put the note out on facebook a week ago about what people's favorite way of getting a switch so the sx64 can be switched between device 8 and device nine whenever i want to um now of course there's always a physical switch like i have in my 128 d where i got a little toggle switch i can switch between eight and nine and and that was certainly one thing that i was thinking of you know i just mount a little switch somewhere unobtrusively but one of my friends on the forums reminded me that our good pal jim drew now if you recognize that name it's because he's been in the community since like the late 80s jim drew's the guy that made the implant board which i'll show you right there for our commodore amigas that allowed you to put actual mac roms inside this board and have your amiga run exactly like a hardware type mac it even had some options for putting 46 chips and roms on there and running as a 486 which was kind of cool now jim drew never got out of the industry he's been with us for 30 35 years now making cool things for our commodore equipment he makes wi-fi modems he makes different kinds of boards and adapters so check out his website cbmstuff.com and you're going to find some really great stuff on there one of the things he sells is this little switch that mounts right inside of our sx64 and that's what we're going to be doing today now the cool thing about this is this gives us some extra options not only will give this give us the ability to semi permanently switch between device 8 and device 9 and be able to switch back and forth between them on a whim it also adds an actual reset option for resetting your sx64 and a rom switcher where if you have a separate rom like jiffy dos or something like that you can actually switch between your regular sx64 rom and your say jiffy dos rom let me show you a little bit about how this is going to work and then we're going to install it and see it in action again this is carlton handy's run and gun brand new commodore 64 game this little puppy is going to be in the running for the best game of 2021 on the commodore 64. and i don't say that lightly because there's been some awesome ones that come out so on our sx64 we've got this little door right here that opens up and gives us our brightness options and some vertical hold options and volume control it also has this weird button here it says reset but all the reset button does is reset the 1541 drive it's like running an initialization command push the button resets the drive that's all it does what this little treasure is going to do there we got a nice little picture of it is add features to that reset button where we can hold it for period of time and it will do different things like if you hold it for one or two seconds it will reset the machine if you hold it for like five seconds it will switch your device number from device eight to device nine hold again switch it back again hold it for like seven seconds and then it will change your roms so it's kind of cool that nothing is going to show up on the outside of the sx64 and you just do an instant press and it will i believe still reset your 1541 drive it just adds cool features and options to this reset button now let's get the sx64 open and see what we have to do to get this little guy installed now the first thing we want to do to take apart our sx64 is take out the screws here and on the opposite side here this allows these covers on the side to slide off so we'll put those in a safe location now we're next going to just need to remove these top screws here we do not need to replace the bottom ones because we don't need to get into the bottom side get those little guys out put them in a safe location and then on each side of the sx64 we're going to have three screws here and three screws in the bottom we only need to remove the top screws because we're just getting into the top of the case so let's get that open and yes those are my chickens clucking in the background if you can hear those girls now that quite easily removes the top of the sx64 case off put that in a safe location and now we can see inside the guts of the sx64 let's take a closer look now here are the lovely innards of the sx64 we've got our cartridge slot here this is the bay for the uh that's right above the 1541 drive here we've got our speaker here now this is a replacement speaker mine was dead on arrival so i snagged this out of a an old set of desktop speakers and just mounted it in there with uh some zip ties it works absolutely beautifully nice volume uh we've got a power supply back here we've got the actual crt over here luckily we won't have to get inside any of that now we're going to mount this little board where's my beautiful little board right here this is the user port right here and just to the right of the user port if you're looking at from the back there's a screw here and guess what there's a screw hole so we're actually going to take that screw out and just mount this little guy right inside here let's go ahead and take care of that let's take a closer look and see how perfectly that fits in there jim did a really really nice job i mean there's there's like just a perfect amount of clearance in there so our little reset board is going to work just fine inside of there now my particular setup did not come with the wires pre-stripped yours may but if not just use your magic little wire stripper here because we're going to have to do a little soldering and we'll just strip a little space for the for the wires here no problem at all now the first thing we're going to need is power and there's two places we can get power from right here or right here these both come from the user port so you can choose either one of these two points right here to get our power from and we're going to solder our red wire right onto there so i'm just going to put a little dab of flux on there and just do a little quick solder and we're going to see how that works out so we've got the red wire on there now the reason i'm not showing you the process of me soldering these is because i'm one of the world's worst soldering people i understand the theory of it but it just doesn't work right for me so it takes a really long time but let's move on to the next one next we're going to remove these two little wires here these connectors this is a reset line here we're going to take that off and then right next to it we're going to pop this little guy out and these are going to relate to the drive changing right here you have to kind of scooch this cable out of the way if you want to you could also just unplug it right back here there's a way to unplug this cable and get that whole thing out of the way if you're worried about it now our next little job is going to be this blue wire this is going to be what actually changes device 8 and device 9. if you look on here this connector here says serial is your iec connector and there's one large pin right in the center of it right there where my big clumsy finger is we're going to solder the blue wire onto that iec pin now take a look where we removed those two pin headers okay we're going to zoom in see where it says p22 right there just next to that right there this is the pad that we need to cut we need to cut from the left to the right and slice that little pad what right open and here's a cool little trick that jim drew put in his information sheets what you do is you take a little light like this incredibly bright flashlight light on there and now you can literally see the pads there it is right there now it's going to be easy to take our exacto knife and just zip cut that little guy and then we can make sure that it is cut open because we can see right through the board pretty cool eh okay you see how we can see right through that now we've got a nice clean cut there now if we wanted to we could take our continuity device and check continuity between the two and make sure they really are cut but that looks like a clean cut to me now what we're going to do is we're going to take this gray wire from our device and we're going to solder it to the bottom of the pin pad okay not the top you want to do it to the bottom and you want to be careful not to bridge it it's not going to hurt anything if you accidentally bridge it it's just not going to change the drive letter or drive number so i'm going to go ahead and solder this little guy on here and we'll take a look now this next part is fairly easy remember this little two pin connector that we took off a couple of minutes ago where we want to tin the end of the yellow wire of the new reset device and just shove that little guy right up inside the right hand button or right hand hole so we're just going to put it right up in there and then we're going to plug her back in jim does say that on some sx64s they actually have these wires reversed so if you turn on your sx64 and it starts resetting every eight seconds what you need to do is take this out of the right hand and instead put it into the left hand button so or the left hand hole so we're going to see if that works you see there's my little drive thing that's connected right there in my sloppy soldering job now if we were going to be using a rom switcher which we're not we'd use green wire for that we'd route it through here come out here to where our roms are down in here then down in here and we would uh solder it to our new rom that we're using but we're not going to be doing that so we're not going to do anything with this green wire and as a matter of fact i'm going to snip the end off so it doesn't accidentally short something and i'll just tie it up in there for the future in case i ever decided to go with the jiffy dos so in a nutshell let's take a look at what we did we mounted our little sx64 ultra reset right here we have a red wire that's getting power right here where i showed you we have a blue wire hooked up to the iec port here the center pin of the iec port we have a gray wire hooked up to the bottom pad of our switch our eight and nine switch right down there then we have a yellow wire stuck up inside that little connector right there and that's it this green wire we'd only deal with if we were using an actual rom that we're switching between which we're not now let's power this little guy up and see if it explodes well i never said that my life was perfect and there's always some excitement going on now the good news is yes everything's working fine the bad news is it took me about two and a half hours to figure it out so i got everything soldered in and everything appeared to be in place the the blue wire the gray wire down here the yellow wire i did have to switch to the other post like i told you i had to switch it from the right to the left so it wouldn't do resets but it would either not boot or it would boot and as soon as i tried to switch the drive letter it would just lock the whole thing up it just lock it up i power it down and i get a black screen so i freaked out so i triple check all of my soldering i re-solder everything into place the power the blue the gray everything resoldered double check continuity 800 times nothing so i take a break for lunch i sit down and i look at the i start reading through the manual online and you'll see the picture i'm talking about here i'm looking at the color of the pin of the cables that are connected to the actual sx64 reset board and i'm like well that doesn't remind me of the way that colors are on there i had red gray blue yellow green and i'm looking on this this list and it's red blue gray yellow green like wait a minute here wait a minute here that's twisted so i did this absolutely masterful work where i clipped a piece of the cable off the gray and the blue and twisted them together and the blue and the gray and twisted them together hooked everything back up powered it back on flipping works like a charm so jim drew when you're watching this it's cool man i mean i make soldering mistakes all the time we just had the gray and the blue wire mixed up now i thought about just taking the blue wire and putting it down here and the gray wire putting up there but the blue one would be a little bit short for that so that's why i thought okay i'll just cut them together here splice them together and then i'll just put a bead of solder on there and put a little electrical tape you know we'll be fine it happens the wires were crossed but now it works perfect let's take a look so no big deal we had a couple of wires crossed on the board itself the blue and the uh gray were swapped on the board itself no big deal we overcame it now the key to using this is how long you press down that reset button a quick press less than two seconds resets the 1541 drive as it always has a push button of about four to six seconds resets the sx64 about 7 seconds or so will change the drive letter changes the drive letter and then resets the the sx64 and 8 seconds or longer swaps between the roms which is something that we're not doing so let's take a look and make sure it works now we have this set up on a big screen because it's hard to see the little tiny screen here so let's take a look and make sure we're on drive nine which is what it's set for right this moment we're gonna take a look and lookie there list that out and it sees my contiki disk just fine now we're gonna i'm gonna reach over and i'm gonna hit this reset switch first i'm just gonna do a regular reset so i'll hold it for about four seconds one two three four and it just does a reset of the system the drive is still on drive nine now drive eight should not be existent yep device not present we're gonna switch it over to drive eight i'm gonna hold it in for about seven seconds one two three four five six seven it resets again we're going to load comma 8 and look at that it looks for drive 8. absolutely beautiful drive eight now we'll switch it back to drive nine and get everything put back together so now i can use my kung fu flash which i have loaded right in here and i can go into the menus let's take a look we're gonna hit the center button go into the menus and here's uh carlton handley's run and gun let's mount that as drive eight and we're gonna take a look comma eight and there's run and gun now let's look at comma nine it searches the 1541 and it finds my contiki stuff again there it is it's exactly what i wanted so i think this is going to be terribly useful i do plan on doing a couple of episodes on productivity software for the commodore 64. and i'll be using the sx64 as my test machine and i want to be able to save things to real uh drives but be able to load them from something like the flash floppy or an sd to iec from drive 8 this is going to make it perfectly possible on here for the little amount of money this costs it costs 20 bucks plus shipping for the the reset uh board that's completely assembled you can also buy it just apart and you can solder it yourself it's like 10 bucks or something like that but but i bought it completely assembled again there was a problem with two wires mixed up you know it happens i i know i would probably do something like that if i were putting a bunch of these together i just put the wires in the wrong place no big deal just double check it if when you get yours in just double check against the uh the online manual and make sure your wires are all in the right place and if they're not switch them out no problem at all this thing works beautifully exactly as advertised i'd like to thank my wonderful patrons for supporting me and helping me out i've got some new patrons that are going to show up in this absolutely beautiful list right here and uh thanks a lot guys you guys are the greatest if you want to join in patreon.com forward slash 10 mark you can join in the fun please like and subscribe tell me about your solutions for drive switches for your commodore equipment i'd love to hear about other options and especially other options on the sx64 but until next time this is doug from 10 minute amiga retro cast signing out to go play some run and gun look at this cute little screen just look at this