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C64 DTV Hacking Checklist

May 22nd, 2007

I got meself a PAL DTV recently. These things are pretty cool out of the box. But if you want to get more out of your DTV, there are many hacks around the net. Here is a checklist of the hacks I want to make for mine. It may prove useful to some people.

I'll add my experiences doing these hack here somewhere when I find the time to do them.  

 

1- Fix the colors:

    PAL version of the DTV is cursed with a buggy video generator. White is not white at all, and some colors are very hard to distinguish. If you don't like your DTV with ghetto colors, try spacman spiff's easy colorfix: (scroll down to easy and better fix)

Spaceman Spiff's DTV colorfix

Note: I have tried this hack with limited success. You can read about it here.

2- Build keyboard and IEC (Disk drive) ports:

     DTV unit has all the needed pins for connecting a ps/2 keyboard and multiple daisy chained disk drives. If you are going to do any serious hacking you need these ports. 

Connecting a PS/2 keyboard to DTV

Connecting a disk drive to DTV 

    There's also a faster way to transfer homebrew software into DTV. Dtvtrans by Daniel Kahlin lets you transfer files from your PC to DTV using a special cable that connects your PC's parallel port to DTV's joystick port.

C64 DTV transfer cable & dtvtrans     

3- Install DTVMON & DTVBOOT:

    Now that we can transfer files to DTV and we made it into something more than a toy we need to get rid of automatic booting into game menu.  This software lets you configure boot behaviour, get screenshots, run a machine language monitor, run dtvtrans without entering the bootstrap code into basic and some more. It is a pretty useful piece of software by, again Daniel Kahlin (This guy just loves DTV, and we just love this guy) :

DTVMON & DTVBOOT

   You are going to need Kahlin's Flash utility if you want to write DTVBOOT to DTV's flash rom and believe me you will:

C64DTV Flash info


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3 Comments »

  1. Atilla Filiz says

    I have connected a 5V adaptor and a PS/2 keyboard port to my dtv. I’m planning to prepare a wooden box for my new computer and use the original case for my hand made joystick(to be done).
    The hard part would be to flash the kernel and use custom software.

    May 23rd, 2007 | #

  2. chancer says

    head over to CSDB to get demos for modded DTV’s … change the release type in search to “dtv” and you’ll get a list up. including some demos =)

    May 29th, 2007 | #

  3. Jim Qode says

    Nice tip chancer. Thank you!

    May 29th, 2007 | #

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