Soulless a new game for Commodore 64 and advice for fixing my C64

[Dave Farquhar]

Breadbin C64 (1983)- This worked perfect until the other night. I turned it on and the "Ready" screen boots up all scrambled in multi colored characters then freezes, or says "?out of memor Error in 0" and freezes or just doesn't boot at all! It worked perfect a week ago.

That's almost certainly one or more bad memory chips. Get a few 4164 chips, try piggybacking them on chips until the problem goes away, and then you've identified your bad chips. Clip those chips out, de-solder the pins, solder in sockets, drop in new chips, and it'll be good to go.

Breadbin C64 (1983)- This one has never worked for me. Usually it will not boot up. If it does boot the screen will be all scrambled in multi colored characters like the unit above. If it does manage to boot up to the "Ready" promt, everything will look normal, but it will just freeze. Also I opened it up and the SID chip was a socket type and was missing. A missing SID chip shouldn't affect the systems boot phase should it?

You're right, a 64 will boot without a SID. It could be a power supply issue, but if it's not that, it's not obvious to me what the issue is. Tougher than the first '83 box.

Breadbin C64- (1982)- This one used to work perfect then started to give me all sorts of problems with both audio and video so it has been packed away for several years. I pulled it out again and gave it a shot yesterday and amazingly the video portion was perfect, but the sound was crazy. The music plays, but its all the wrong notes and real chaotic sounding. I opened it up and there are a LOT of socketed chips instead of soldered. Thats pretty cool as I assume it would make it easier to replace any bad ones. It is also a 5 pin video model. The RF output looks fantastic, but the a/v cable for Luma/Chroma only gives me black and white on my commodore monitor. What gives?

Sounds like a bad SID chip. You might try swapping in the chip from the first breadbin, if it happens to be socketed. Regarding the video, the 5-pin is cable is composite, so switch your monitor to composite mode (or use the composite jacks if it has two sets) and you should get color.

C64c (19??)- This one loads fine and sounds fine. But it outputs to a black and white picture with some static. I don't have an 8 pin video cable so I am having to use the RF cable and the picture is pretty bad. I have tried several different RF cables and get the same results. If I could fix this issue it would be a perfect working unit. Any ideas?

The 5-pin video cable will still work in 8-pin 64s, so that would be the quickest route to getting a working unit, I think. Give that a shot.

Hopefully this will be enough to get at least one of your units up and running.