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The Commodore 64 Direct-to-TV or C64DTV for short, is a single-chip implementation of the Com

IMGA0335

modore 64 contained in a plug-n-play controller with 30 built-in games. It was released in 2004 by Mammoth Toys.

QVC offered the first 250,000 units and 70,000 were sold on the first day they were offered. K.B. Toys has them as well.

It is very rare today, going up to $60 on eBay and up to $1,000 on Amazon.

Controller Design[]

The Joystick has two action buttons and a control stick, simlar to Jakks Pacific's Atari TV game. It has A, B, C, and D buttons to access different catogories and a reset button to reset the game unit.

List of games[]

There are 30 C64 games by Epyx, Hewson, and Image Works.

  1. Summer Games
  1. Winter Games
  1. Pitstop
  1. Pitstop II
  1. Super Cycle
  1. Jumpman Jr.
  1. Impossible Mission
  1. Impossible Mission II
  1. Championship Wrestling
  1. Gateway to Apshai
  1. Sword of Fargoal
  1. World Karate Champion (AKA) International Karate
  1. California Games
  1. Alleykat
  1. Nebulus
  1. Paradroid
  1. Eliminator
  1. Cyberdyne Warrior
  1. Cybernoid
  1. Cybernoid II: The Revenge
  2. Ranarama
  3. Marauder
  4. Head the Ball
  5. Mission Impossibubble
  6. Firelord
  7. Exolon
  8. Netherworld
  9. Uridiam
  10. Zynaps
  11. Speedball

Hardware Modding[]

Since the internal circuit board has exposed solder points for floppy-drive and keyboard ports, hardware modifications of the C64DTV are quite simple.

Known hardware mods

Additional hardware

  • keyboard connector
  • external joystick (Port 1 and 2)
  • floppy connector
  • power unit connector
  • fixing the palette problems of the PAL version (to some degree this is possible in software by adjusting palette entries)
  • S-Video connector
  • user port
  • Original C64 casing and PS2 keyboard
  • Data transfer cable (Parallel port (or USB/serial port via DTV2ser) to Joystick or user port)
  • SD Card interface 1541-III or MMC2IEC

The board could be used as a System-on-a-Chip (SoC) embedded computer for control applications.

Limitations[]

The internal flash memory is accessible as device 1. However, software is not included to support write operations so high score saving is not possible. Also, flash devices used in the DTV are specified for a very limited number of write accesses only.

When adding the Keyboard-Mod, be aware that The F7 key does not work. There is a workaround, the "Keyboard Twister.

Software-Modding[]

The DTV contains software-flashable memory. A number of tools have been released to compile programs into DTV-compatible flash images and load it onto the DTV. People made their own game compilations, adding popular (sometimes DTV-fixed) games that were not in the original DTV, added boot menus to make homebrew software development easier or enable new features, for example transfer programs like DTVtrans for transferring data from PC to DTV RAM and vice versa via the PC parallel port (or USB) and the DTV joystick port.

External link[]

Gamester81 YouTube Review

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