You need completely steady hands, eagle eyes or a stereo microscope, a really good tweezer to grip the tiny resistors, a soldering iron with heat control and a good quality soldering& paste flux. I had& none of them. After 2 hours of agony I could only solder one (1) resistor into place. Then when I accidentally touched the one I soldered when I was trying my luck on the second one, the first one came off… Complete with the original resistor on the DTV board. Talk about pain.

I left everything on the table and fired up my a1200 to normalize the levels of stress hormones in my blood.

The other day I decided it would be much easier to take the original resistors out and solder new ones in than to try to piggyback them. And here it is, the turning point:

Spiff's page says these resistors should ideally be 165 ohms. What I had in hand was the 220 ohms resistors I prepared for the easy fix. The ones on the board where 680 ohms, so I decided to try my luck. 220 ohms is much closer to the ideal value than 680. I soldered them in and as I thought it was much easier.

The result is as anyone can guess, not as good as the original fix, but is much better than the original buggy board. It would have been much better if I had resistor with a closer value to 165 ohm. So I dub this fix Half a Spaceman Spiff's Ghetto Color Fix, or HaSSGCF.

So the moral of the story boys and girls is, it's much easier to replace SMD's than to solder them piggybacked if you don't have right tools.

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