From: "Robert Bernardo" <[email protected]
Sent: Friday, October 29, 2004 9:34 AM
Subject: C64 DTV on sale November 26!
The C64 DTV is coming your way on November 26 (2004)! How has this information been corraborated? The creator of the device told me so!
C= ladies and gentlemen, may I present to you the creator of the C64 DTV 30-games-in-one joystick... Jeri Ellsworth. In a long phone call tonight, Jeri revealed to me that Tulip/Ironstone has given permission to reveal some details (but not all) of this reincarnation of the beloved Commodore 64.
So much information to sort... well, here goes.
Designers/engineers/troubleshooters of the C64 DTV - Jeri Ellsworth, Jason Compton, Adrian Gonzalez, Robin Harbron, Per Olofsson, and Mark Seelye. Heroes all!
Production details - 250,000 C64 DTV's have been produced or are in production at the Mammoth Toys factory, one hour outside of Hong Kong. Presently, only NTSC units are being built. 30,000 units are going to the warehouse of QVC, the television shopping network.
Vendor details - QVC has the exclusive rights to sell the C64 DTV until the first of the year. (After the first of year... unknown) QVC will start selling the units, starting on November 26. On that first day, QVC will advertise the DTV as "Today's Special Value", which means an ad for
it will be shown once an hour. Estimated price - $25 US, though QVC will set its own price. Unknown whether QVC will sell the DTV from the QVC website.
Note: QVC is looking to sell the DTV against a backdrop of a classic C64 keyboard and original boxes of the DTV included games (see below). If you have good-looking boxes of the games, then let it be known, and your boxes can show up on t.v.!
DTV game details - All games have been legally obtained and modified for use in the DTV. Games are from Epyx, Hewson, and others. The games are: Championship Wrestling, Cyberdyne Warrior, Cybernoid, Cybernoid II, Eliminator, Excelon, Firelord, Gateway to Apshai, Impossible Mission, Impossible Mission II, Jumpman Jr., Paradroid, Pitstop, Pitstop II, Ranarama, Silicon Warrior, Speedball, Summer Games, Supercycle, Sword of Fargoal, Tower Toppler, Uridium, Winter Games, World Karate Championship A, World Karate Championship B, Zynaps, (games split out from others) bull-riding, flying disc, sumo-wrestling, and surfing.
DTV details - Exterior color unknown, though pre-production models were black. Two firebuttons, four function buttons. Battery-powered, using four double-A batteries. Lifespan of batteries in the unit -- long (Jeri says that she has used hers for 5 hours without any sign of the batteries
weakening.) Composite video-out. Paper box, no plastic "blister" pack. No second port for connecting another joystick. Warranty unknown at this point.
Nitty-gritty details - The DTV board is roughly the size of a playing card. Under what look like 3 blobs of epoxy on the board lies a custom ASIC chip at .35 microns. The 6 volts of battery power is regulated down to 3.3 volts on the board. Jeri emphasizes that the ASIC is very compatible in terms of being a C64. The DTV is hard-coded to run at 1 mhz.. There is 128K RAM and 2 meg of ROM. 256 colors available on-screen. Single SID sound with the 3 voices and "volume" mixed
externally. The solder pads are there on the board; in other words, enterprising hackers can solder on a serial port in order to connect a Commodore-compatible drive and can attach a PC keyboard.
Trivia details - Jeri spent hundreds of hours developing the ASIC for the C64 DTV. In her quest to get the C64 DTV just right, she traveled to China and stayed there for a week, making daily journeys between her hotel in Hong Kong and the Mammoth Toy factory, working usually until 10 at night. While in China, she tired easily of the food. The people with whom she had contact spoke English well. Many women had top engineering positions at Mammoth Toys.
She also went to Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada for a few days to partner up with Robin Harbron, who worked on converting the games for the DTV.
Psyched to buy a C64 DTV,
Robert Bernardo
Fresno Commodore User Group
http://videocam.net.au/fcug
>>>>"RB" == Robert Bernardo <[email protected]:
Just to clarify: Jeri created the hardware, Robin and Adrian did the main programming, Jason did the documentation, and late in the project Mark and I were brought in to help patch games. Game fixing consisted of finding good copies of the games, then stripping any cracker intros
and trainers, uncrunching them, patching the startup routines, and then fixing any in-game issues, like remapping keys to the DTV buttons and NTSC fixing PAL games. In a few cases we were able to use originals (like the Pitstop cartridge dump), but for most games we had to
start with cracks found on the net.