Welcome
Hello DIN Diners
On the menu today, I'm gonna be taking a look at a brand new cartridge for the Commodore 64
This jam-packed full of interesting features.
You could even say too many features
And don't get me wrong, I find it hard to knock any of these new products
Personally, I find it just incredible that these things are still even being made for the Commodore 64
So kudos to this team!
I'll be taking a brief look at all of them
But there's one feature in particular that really interests me
It's an updated graphic user interface for the Commodore 64
That originally appeared in an earlier version in The Final Cartridge III
But first I'm gonna have to find a way to get hold of one of these miniGANGCARTS
Excuse me.
Hi. Do you have the miniGANGCART?
What's that?
Ashley: A gang of carts.. mini
Ahh.. no.. it's like the final cart.
Ashley: Final? Right here.
No, not like it a cart. It's like a cartridge has for the Commodore 64
Ashley: You might have to order from Poland.
We have to get it from Poland? How do you know all this stuff?
Ashley: Um. Research.
Now I've heard you loud and clear
You guys are .. well ..nuts about Ashley
Ashley: No.. you're nuts.
So, I'll be you doing an upcoming episode called "Ask Ashley"
Maybe also incorporating 'Ashley Reacts' where we sit her in front of a Commodore 64 and ask her to try to load a game
I'll be taking questions to ask Ashley exclusively from Patrons and PayPal supporters
But if you're not already a supporter of our little Retro Channel here
Go on.. follow the link in the description, join the fun, claim your retro rewards
Impose your gentlemanly questions to Ashley
But now, from a great gal to a great GUI.. G-U-I
See as luck would have it, I was donated a miniGANGCART by my friend in Retro Joy Golf AKA Pete
It also came with this snazzy t-shirt
Rather coincidentally, featuring asteroids
Just like the t-shirt I was wearing was also Atari asteroids
I'll show you what that Asteroids is all about at the end of this video
And here it is
(American accent) The best cartridge for the Commodore 64
Play game, make fun
Design and realization by polish fans
Oh.. Polish
(different non-language) miniGANGCART cut absolute and projects is
Lessening bladder no minor eyes like Duncan town.. I don't know, I don't speak Polish
Now this whole user guide is in Polish
But I downloaded the English version
This seems to come in a VHS case
Comes with this neat little cheat sheet
And this is the cable to connect to a real disc drive
May be a little short, it has some pretty cool features I'll show you for that
And our SD card goes in there
So I bought a samsung one .. who is she?
And in it goes
Luckily I hadn't cut my fingernails lately
Do be careful because he could lose the card inside there
Now let's stick it in the hole in the port
Ha s these are rather snazzy LEDs
Here is the main menu and you can see the function keys immediately presented very easy to use
Ashley would be able to load these games
Press F1 for parent directory
F3 to run
And F5 is this fancy magic key
So what you can do is scroll up to any position in the directory and it's almost telepathic
Just hit F5 wherever you are
And it just does what you want it to do
Showing a directory
Unloading a full program
And you can press backspace question mark for help
Help me! I don't know what I'm doing
So let's try it just loading in game just using that F5 key
I'll kill you fried eggs! PEW
Now, as mentioned, there are a lot of features here
But let's get to the most interesting first
So this is an emulation of The Final Cartridge III
And it has these freeze options, which we'll show you in a second
But if you go to desktop
You get this
For this I think I'm gonna need my Commodore 1351 Mouse
But what do I do here?
The choice of appropriate option from the menu is done by setting the arrow on the appropriate command..
I think I get it now
You can see that this release, I believe was a Cena's release, and came out in January 2015
That's 33 years after the Commodore 64
Just incredible!
So it has its integrated version of basic but look at this
It has drop-down menus over the basic
Pretty standard two functions there
And basic Menu One, you've got all these options
Basic V2, this is where the fun ones are Auto for example, or also number your program
So you just type your lines of code
Pretty basic key code in this case
And it is auto numbers
It even has find and replace
And renumber so if you've run out of line numbers it will just renumber the whole program
And give you space to add some more fun
And then the shortcuts for loading files
Saving files
And a list of all the function keys that work differently in this version
Than in the main menu of the cartridge
and here's where things do start to get, perhaps, a little confusing
Having so much in this miniGANGCART
It's not so many, perhaps, after all
Who was it who said "Less it more but less is a bore"?
Maybe it's a good thing
So what?
But here's where things get really fun
The little apps that come with this
So let's try out the notepad
And we can save our file then just try loading it back in
Beautiful
Even print? hmm.. Try that in a second
But what's this Bold, Wordwrap , Proportional?
What witchcraft is this?1
You may remember my recent documentary about the Commodore +/4
But why was that discontinued? Was it really that bad?
Let's take an even closer look at it's main selling point.. that business productivity software
Yeah
So first up.. the word processor
Now I played around with this for a good few minutes
But there's just not much you can do with it.. there's not even any bold or italics
Unlike perhaps the Amstrad PCW that came just a little bit after this
But here's a computer that came out two years before the +/4 and it can make the whole file bold
Admittedly with the help of this cartridge
We can adjust our spacing.. line spacing
Let's try that printing
Now this Commodore MPS-1200 was very kindly donated to me by zippy Zapp aka Racer X
AKA.. well you get the idea
I actually forgot you had to load in one sheet at a time
For some reason we used to auto-feed here at Retro Recipes. Omnomnomnom
One thing that amazes me is when I print from my Mac to my HP printer
The printer can take like 30 seconds to just clean the heads and
But this.. this is still working with the original ribbon and it prints instantly
So I may do a little letter
Put that on eBay
And we're back to desktop
You've got DLINK and TLINK that will link a disk to become your project disk for notepad and other things
Can use a tape as well
And all the fun kind of utilities, we can change our desktop color, our pointer color, the speed of the mouse
And which port the mouse or joystick uses as well
And it also selected my 1351 mouse, which is very nice as well
We've gone for kind of Macintosh Grey here
We can even change key clicks and border colors and cursor blink in basic itself as well
If you want a more color-coordinated basic programming environment
I'm gonna go something a little more snazzy
We'll look at some other house in just a second
By the way, I know Kung Fu
Now what GUI would be complete without a calculator
And it works!
You've also got disk operations here
You can validate a disk, formatt it, initialize it, rename it, etc
Well, this is kind of interesting, TAPE, slow and fast
So this must be for the turbo function
Now funnily enough, I recently found this letter that I'd written to ZAP64 back in 1986
(1986 Perifractic voice) I'm writing this letter in the hope that computer hardware manufacturer might be reading
I was wondering if it's at all possible to link the good old C2N cassette player to a
cartridge in the back of the Conny and make it possible to load programs a lot
Faster by speeding up the C2N dataset and letting the cartridge store the speedy
Information in its memory buffer and feed it into the Conny in program format. Please. Let me know
Yeah, well you get the idea. So apparently I was a bit of an inventor back in 1986
Well, this doesn't exactly speed up the cassette
But it does offer turbo function
Which works in a similar way to perhaps compressing a zip file does today
So let's just demonstrate how the slow version works first
Ahh.. That's better
And then to test the turbo function, I'm just going to try saving a regular program here that I've loaded
Press record and play on the tape
And now we can load it back using fast load
Now I won't bore you with the full process
But in my test, it was about 7x faster using the fast turbo option
Pretty Nice!
But perhaps one of the coolest features of the miniGANGCART itself is its native ability to fast load disks
You can use pretty much any disk drive you can throw at it
This here is a Commodore 1581 using three and a half inch disks
So let's load up in Linux
And yep, that really was that fast, let's see that again
Now it took a while after that to decompress in the computer's memory
But I've got to say, that disk fast load is pretty cool
Another thing I really like about this is it uses an original, old-school ceramic EEPROM
It stores everything in its 8MG
And this is similar to the EPROMs used on the Voyager Spacecraft
That's how retro it is
If you wanted to design your own PCB like this I recommend PCBWay
They offer full assembly service
And as we all know, PCB stands for Polish Cartridge Board
Doesn't it?
And back in the GUI here, we've got a whole host of utilities thrown in for good measure with this new version
(1986 Perifractic) Clearing the disk? Wait, don't clear my disk
Cancel that
This one's really useful.. it's a Cassette Azimuth Alignment tool
Now my cassette is aligned, so I'm not gonna risk messing it up
But you just put a screwdriver in the head alignment screw slot
And you turn it until these lines get as straight as they possibly can
Exploding..wait, no!!
aww
Here's some of the other tools ..
.. apart from me
There's even yet another version of Basic
The amount of Basics on this cartridge is not really very basic
There's even a sprite editor
Now there's a ton of other utilities built natively into the non-GUI side of the miniGANGCART
Even a disc head alignment tool
You know, it's really hard to know how to rate this cartridge
This isn't really a review as a result because reviewing this would be like reviewing everything that's on it
Wait.. Flappy Blue which are just so varied
Which are just so varied that it wouldn't be possible
If there was a rating for cramming as many programs as possible in
Then you have to give this 5 out of 5
That said most of this stuff, if not all of it, is available just to download and put on a SD to AC card
But some of those native features, like the fast disk loader, are pretty damn cool
It's a built-in Asteroids game
Written by one of the creators of this cartridge, Wegi
Don't have any coins on me
Breath mint
Hey it accepted the breath mint
Well, I'm gonna have some fun playing this game!
And then maybe I'll load some more disks, really really fast
But what do you think about this cartridge?
Is it a case of less is more?
Or is there no such thing as too much when it comes to new products with a Commodore 64?
Comment below and Cheerio!
I'm Polish.. like a little bit Polish. We'll go together. Come on, let's go