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Neil

Happy birthday Holly! x

I owned an SX-64 in 1985 while serving in the U.S. Army. For me, it was a much better option than separate components. Barracks space was tight, and the built-in monitor and disk drive meant one unit instead of a desk full of gear and cables. When I moved, it packed up like a suitcase and went with me.

I will never grow tired of watching old hardware get resurrected.  Still really need to make it over there some time.  Thanks for sharing!

Hollie is a soldering wizard!

"Look at all these parts we saved..." hehe ;) Another great video, well done Neil and Co.

That was my 13 years old dream machine. Id just got a regular breadbin c64, and that portable version was what dreams were made of. Thank you for the memories, and for finally letting me see what it was really all about. My vote is to un-rob it and to chuck a Action Replay Mk5 into it for the full experience (and play Great Gianna Sisters on it)

I love these Trash to Treasure, I get that it is a huge job to do these, the work, the filming and the editing.. but, it's like being back in the cave <3

Fantastic 3rd video on a machine prob 99% of us never seen

Dont touch that cable! Lovely rainbow, you must be so proud...pride even  lol ;)

Happy belated, Holly! 💛

Happy birthday Holly 🥳

12:05 The Hyperion! One of the first IBM compatible portables. Though not 100% compatible. Made in Canada too. I have one that I haven't worked on yet.

Replacement parts must be crazy hard

A buddy of mine was using a "Turbo Rob" ROM back in the day. I think he had a custom ROM chip on his 1541 and a parallel cable to connect it to the C64. I'm afraid I don't have any more information than that.

Brilliant restoration! I've been watching every part of this over the past months.

The cliff-hanger at the end had me so intrigued that I actually ran the video details through a paid LLM to do some deep-diving and cross-referencing. I figured it was worth a shot, as folks who are intimately familiar with this specific 80s mod are few and far between nowadays! Hopefully, this is accurate and gives you some solid insight.

During the AI's digging, it surfaced a Reddit post on r/c64 from April 2020 by a user (bassg33k) who bought an SX-64 with this exact same dual-boot setup. Given the rarity of these luggables, it is highly likely you have your hands on that self-same machine! When that user opened it up, the custom EPROM physically had a sticker reading "ROB'S SPEED DOS C64". (Electrosoft was likely a UK demoscene or cracking group, and Rob was the coder who put his own branding on the loader).

From what the AI gathered about hardware fast-loaders like SpeedDOS, they require two modified ROMs to work simultaneously: the KERNAL on the motherboard AND a modified DOS ROM on the floppy drive controller board.

At 8:08 in your video, you mentioned those bodged, spliced wires hook into "the modded floppy disc drive ROM" at the back of the case. Because a single front switch is meant to toggle both ROMs at the exact same time, those bodged wires are almost certainly the switching logic lines that run from the front panel to the floppy drive's EPROM chip.

Right now, it seems your front switch is successfully putting the motherboard into SpeedDOS mode, but the floppy drive is staying in stock 1541 mode. When you try to load a disc, the computer fires a high-speed command to the drive, the stock drive firmware doesn't recognise it, and the whole system hangs.

Since those spliced wires were hanging by a thread and you had to redo them, the switching signal to the floppy drive ROM is likely either disconnected, missing a ground, or simply not triggering.

Hope this helps get SX64 flying again in Turbo mode! From what I read the load times from the floppy with it enabled are staggering compared to stock.
It is an interesting bit of kit that deserves to be in your museum.

You could design and build your own cpm cartridge that works for this with a fast Z80 for giggles.

It deserves a Jiffydos license. But did you try a parallel connection for the Turbo Rob?

That Sausage Roll 😮🤤

Ive searched for many, many years and the only replacement keyboard cable Ive ever seen for the SX64 is the ribbon cable. I did see once where someone pulled the ribbon cable wires apart and formed it into a round one. In all the years Ive seen an original cable for sale only twice on ebay.
Why in the heck did Commodore made such a wonky keyboard connection??  Fortunately I have an original round one but everytime I use it Im fearful of bending or breaking the wonky connection.