CMD Product review
Well this section is probably long overdue, but now that I've got quite a collection of CMD's hardware, I figure that I may as well review some of their stuff to let other people know just what it's like to have a souped up C64 - from someone not paid by CMD to endore their products or otherwise.
Sure, the basic C64 set up that most people has consists of ...what? At least the keyboard and a 1541 disk drive and that's about it for hardware. You need at least this for the C64 to be a game machine. The specs would be (In PC terms):
1Mhz 8-bit CPU, 64K RAM, 0GB hard disk space, 8 bit sound chip
Not very impressive, huh? Funny how so much was done with just this! Now consider...
20Mhz 16-bit CPU, 16MB Direct access RAM, 18MB RAMdrive (therefore 34MB in total), 4GB Hard Disk, and 8 bit sound chip. 3.5" floppy disk and parallel port capable and real time clock.
Well the above desciption is the most powered up C64 possible (and can possibly even be expanded further should the Hard Drive get replaced with an even larger one and something gets attached to the SCSI bus on it!). The only thing that doesn't change is the old SID chip, but I think the C64 would be worse off without it! Even still, some people have installed twin SID chips to achieve 6 voice sound by placing another sid on the chip board.
All the above is possible with CMD's C64 Hardware. This kind of system gives the C64 some really powerful capabilities. Not yet fully exploited yet, but the possibility exists.
I played with quite a bit of CMD's Hardware to develop my project on, so I've gained quite an intimate knowledge of their devices from the users point of view. It's here that I've decided to put some info about them on the net.