Making of Handheld Commodore 64 Project

Making Of / 20 June 2021

Hello, I'm here with another homebrew Commodore 64 Handheld project! It is a Raspberry Pi-emulated electronic assembly. It has it's own screen, it has two 18650 batteries inside that makes it work for 3 hours and 55 minutes in full load with gamepad activity.

You can see more info about this device in this video:


I used BMC 64 emulator on this device. You can find it by this link: www.accentual.com/bmc64


Here is the simple diagram of the components

First I combined these parts on my table and measured them. I modeled rough blocks of these in Solidworks and made a placement first.

Next by considering the port clearences and placement, I modeled a 3d printable case.

After modeling is done, I 3d printed the bottom part first and fixed the components on it.

For the controller part, I made a different approach on this one. I directly used a controller circuit which I detached from a very cheap gamepad controller (around $4). Because all GPIO pins on the Raspberrry Pi is used on IPS screen. So I needed to connect the controller with a USB interface. Instead of doing it with an Arduino, I directly used a gamepad circuit which was faster way :)







And fixed the screen to top part as well.


And we have the whole system cased!




And system works! (I know I work messy - P.S. no apricot seeds are used on this project)


The top part was 3d printed very bad because of some filament issues and placement. I tried to recover the bad surface by a 3d print surface finisher tool that makes ironing.


I know, it's not perfect but at least it can be sanded and painted later...



Tape loading!

The last ninja!

♥️

Dimensional reference photo (metric)

Some nature photos! In my childhood, some travels we do was sperating me with my Commodore 64. I wish it was possible for me to build this device in 1989 :)








And some renders! You can find the rendering project page by this link: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/GalrWW





I hope you like it! And thanks for your attention as always!