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

Amiga 600 PDF Schematics @ Symbolengine

I hope you find it useful.

Amigaguide to HTML converter @ SymbolEngine

Commodore Amiga 1200 Schematics in PDF format @ Symbolengine

Amiga 600 Schematics also available.

Note: WOW! 1000 downloads in a month. I'm impressed :)

Pros

• Inexpensive storage
  SD cards are really cheap nowadays and they are easy to find. A 1gb sandisk that costs about 15$ holds all the HVSC archive and all my games and still have 500mb free space. 

• Really fast loading times
  Faster than 1581, 64hdd and ide64. Actually the only thing it cannot beat must be a cartridge =)

• Cheap, cheap, cheap
  Considering the other options, this is the most cost effective modern storage solution for c64. Shipping is also cheap because of its:

• Small size
  It fits in a standart C= cartridge case. It just needs to be slightly modified to make an sd card slot. It is pretty light so you dont have to put something underneath the cartridge for the fear of breaking the edge connector.

Cons

• Closed source and slow moving firmware
  Documentation is scarce. The firmware is being developed by a single guy, Oliver Achten. While it is a big feat of programming it slows down the process. 

• Mostly readonly access
  The only tool that can write to sdcard is a floppy reader. It reads the inserted disk and converts it to a d64 format file. There are no other software i know of  that can write on sdcard.

• No 1541 emulation
  And this means no fastloaders, no multipart demos. This is really a big downside. 

Last Words 

MMC64 from Individual Computers surely is a big step forward on the way to eliminating long loading times from increasingly hard to find media. Even though the hardware is working really well, I believe the available firmware is far from complete and  an opensource model should be considered for firmware development. All in all MMC64 was a great buy for me.

If you also happen to have a Retro Replay cartridge "MMC64+RR disk image mounter" allows you to mount d64 images from your SD card. Many games are known to work with this setup:

MMC64+RR Disk Image Mounter @ SymbolEngine
MMC64+RR Disk Image Mounter @ CSDB

If don't happen to have one fear not! For there is "Sasq's alternative BIOS" that can  load some ide64 fixed games.It's not as compatible as the former but what can you say?

Sasq's alternative BIOS for MMC64 @ SymbolEngine
Sasq's alternative BIOS for MMC64 @ NightMode

Download it here: Ascraeus Font Editor V1.2

I feel obliged to spit out an example of this powerful stuff. And when you see the power of scripting combined with assembler on a single source file, I believe you will never look back. This code below is the mandelbrot example that is in the zip file. 
It calculates the mandelbrot set and fills character memory accordingly

.pc = $0400
.function toRe(i) .return -2+2.7*[i-floor(i/40)*40]/39
.function toIm(i) .return -1.6+3.2*floor(i/40)/24
.function mandelbroot(re,im) {
.var zr = 0
.var zi = 0
.var iter=0
.for(;[zr*zr+zi*zi]<4 && iter<20;iter++) {
.var newZr = zr*zr-zi*zi + re
.var newZi = 2*zr*zi + im
.eval zr = newZr
.eval zi = newZi
}
.var colors = List().add($20,$0f,$20,$08)
.return colors.get(iter&3)
}
.fill 25*40,mandelbroot(toRe(i),toIm(i)) 

Edit: Kick Assembler now support user defines pseudo commands (Yeeeeaay! 16 bit operations with one opcode!) and DTV specific opcodes.

Impressive isn't it? Here are the links if I convinced you: 

• KickAssembler 2.25 Homepage
• KickAssembler 2.25 @ Symbol Engine

• Here is the original: Commodore 1541 Floppy Drive ROM dissasembly
• Here is my local mirror: Commodore 1541 Floppy Drive ROM dissasembly @ Symbol Engine

I learned that I needed kickstart 3.1 to run OS 3.5 or OS 3.9. They are modern operating systems for amiga. But they also need a fast cpu and tons of ram anyway. But Workbench 3.1 runs fine. MagicWB is out the question because it needs some fast ram, but MUI programs work fine.

CD-ROM
I also connected a cdrom to my amiga using a 2.5 => 3.5 ide cable. You also need a iso-9660 cd filesystem for amiga. I used AmiCDROM-1.15 from aminet. It worked fine. It mounts the cdrom as CD0: and you can access it just like any other device. Drive access speed is pretty good. You can also play whdload games and demos directly from cdrom. Which takes us to the subject of

WHDLOAD
Whdload is a harddisk installer system for trackloader games and demos that naturally dont have harddisk installers. It really is a breeze playing moonstone from the harddrive without all those long loading delays. Almost all A500 games work with whdload. Even the ones that exclusively need kick 1.3 work with internal kickstart emulation. If you get a not enough memory error, try booting with no startup-sequence. Of course no luck with AGA games and demos because almost every one of them needs all 2mb of chip ram and some of it is used by the operating system and whdload.

KingCON
This is a replacement for CON, which the console driver of your amiga. Amiga's default console is nice but it's a bit dated. And when you see nice features of modern shells like tab completion and scrollback buffer you cant help but want them on your amiga. This software does it all:

To be continued…