Raspberry Pi Powers Commodore 64 Expansion Cartridge, Plays Doom

Commodore was a giant identify within the Seventies, ’80s and early Nineties. The vary of house computer systems has spanned many years, however one, the Commodore 64, is a little bit brighter than the others. Frntc aka Carsten Developed a cartridge powered by Raspberry Pi, RAD Expansion Unitemulates a RAM enlargement and gives a CPU enhance for the 40+ 12 months previous machine. And the basic that means of testing it’s, “Does it run Doom?” Sure it’s, however the Raspberry Pi does many of the heavy lifting. Nonetheless, the graphics and sound are because of Commodore’s customized chips.

The RAD Growth Unit connects to the Commodore 64 (or 128) cartridge port and makes use of a Raspberry Pi 3A+, 3B+ or Zero 2 W to emulate a RAM enlargement unit of the period. It additionally bypasses the principle MOS Expertise 6510/8500 CPU (working at 1.023 MHz for NTSC and 0.985 MHz for PAL) to ship the complete energy of Raspberry Pi’s Arm CPU. RAD can emulate 16MB of RAM, which is many instances the unique 64KB of RAM in a inventory mannequin. This implies the RAD gives the horsepower wanted to play a Doom tech demo, however we will solely see that because of the VIC-II onboard graphics chip.