Ultimate 64
More info
- Creator
- Gideon Zweijtzer
- Type
- Motherboard (FPGA)
- Predecessor
- 1541 Ultimate
A new Commodore 64 motherboard with the entire original chipset recreated in an FPGA, designed to drop into a stock case.
Gideon Zweijtzer, who had already built the 1541 Ultimate, introduced the board in the late 2010s. The CPU, the VIC-II and the other chips are described as hardware in an FPGA rather than emulated in software, with cycle-exact timing as the goal; anything less breaks the demos that count clock cycles.
It has HDMI output, built-in disk and tape emulation from USB storage, and sockets for real SID chips, since sound is the hardest part to get exactly right. For many people it has become the way to run a C64 without waiting for forty-year-old capacitors to give out.