A mostly merry Southern Hemisphere Commodore Christmas

A merry Christmas and happy holidays from the Southern Hemisphere, where it's our year to be with my wife's family in regional New South Wales, Australia. One of my wife's relatives had an "old Commodore" in their house and asked if I wanted it. Stupid question, yeah?

So they brought over, in their original boxes, a Commodore 128D (PAL) with Commodore 1802 monitor, Commodore MPS-1250 dot matrix printer and a separate box of magazines, circulars and boxed software. Let's fire it up!

Composite and hard reset mods for the Tandyvision One

I still have my literal first home computer (the Tomy Tutor), and it so happens I also have my literal first game console: the Tandyvision One, Tandy Radio Shack's label variant of the Mattel Intellivision Master Component.

In another happy coincidence, my first console, like my first home computer, was also an early 16-bit system: in this case powered by the General Instrument CP1610, famous for its use of 10-bit "decle" instructions stored on specialized ROMs in Inty cartridges. This was a family system and did lots of two-player duty with my father and sisters. Although I still have nearly all of our old cartridges, even the manuals and controller overlays, nowadays I play with a Cuttle Cart 3 and an Intellivoice speech synthesizer module.

Like my original Tutor, this is one system I'd never part with, so if I were going to make some tweaks to it this would be the unit. We're going to do two mods in this article, neither particularly complex but nonetheless handy: composite video and sound outputs for improved quality and flexibility, and a power cycle hard reset button for convenience and less wear on the power switch. Some drilling and soldering required but not very much.