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A bunch of photos from the Wisconsin Computer Club's Open House Show on January 20th, 2024 at the Portage County Stevens Point Library, in Stevens Point, Wisconsin. We'll be back here again soon enough, always a great show with a good turnout!
So I’ve got a working spare VIC-20 board (seen on the right), a C16 keyboard, and a slightly beat-up VIC that’s got depopulated board and a less than superb keyboard.
It might be time to forge an abomination.
Ah the Commodore C16! Built to be a cost-reduced business oriented machine, Commodore fumbled with pricing and marketing, which meant it mostly fought with the more capable Commodore 64. Hampered by it's limited 16k of memory and lackluster software library, the C16 and higher RAM sibling the Commodore Plus/4 both left the market not long after they arrived. Despite the faults, it has to be said that the C16 looks fantastic!
Surprise, it works!
Okay, so with a little bit of wire translation between the C64 and C16 keyboard matrix charts, I was able to get it to chooch. it’s a clusterfuck of wires, and many of the special function keys aren’t mapped 1:1, but you could type on this beast if you had to. With a bit of keycap rearrangement, I’m sure this would be a perfectly viable keyboard.
C64: 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 C16: 17 10 9 7 3 14 15 18 19 16 1 12 11 13 8 6
Commodore 64 vs. Commodore 16 keyboard
Archer 65-position Keyboard (Special Purchase!) aka how to offload your Commodore C16 keyboards when shit doen’t sell well.
It uh... It doesn’t chooch. Sure, there are some visible differences in keys and their arrangement. But internally, the C16 used a wildly different keyboard matrix when compared to its C64 and VIC-20 brethren. It goes to show just how different the Plus/4 line was under the hood. Which is sad really, because it’s in such nice shape. I’m the first human to lay a finger on it outside its bag in probably 30 years. Maybe I’ll find a way to give it life once more...
