Hello and welcome back to the 8-Bit Guy.
In this episode I’m going to attempt to build a case for my Mini PET.
In a previous episode I did a build and review of the mini-pet, which is a current product made from
all off the shelf parts, which when assembled will give you a fully functional Commodore PET.
I wasn’t thrilled with the keyboard, though, so I ended up building my own. Since then,
I’ve had the mini-PET setup on my desk and have used it almost daily for testing of the game I’ve
been developing. And, to be honest, it’s a little annoying having a board just sitting on the desk
like this. So, I started thinking about building a case for it. I thought about making it from sheet
metal like the original PET, but this proved to be quite challenging, although I did come up with
some concept designs. Then I thought about putting it in some sort of existing case PC case, but then
the same problem kept popping up, which is I’d have to build something custom for the keyboard
itself. But then one day it occurred to me that the PET keyboard would theoretically fit inside of
a Commodore 64 case, as you can see. But it would require dremeling the case up to make it fit.
Of course I have no desire to cut up an original Commodore 64 case plus I’m sure there’d be a lot
of angry people if I did such a thing. But, the good news is, you can still buy brand new
Commodore 64 cases. Now, this particular one was donated to me by Bo Zimmerman,
for the explicit purpose of cutting it up for this. And yeah, this is actually a brand-new
64 case made from the original moulds. And I think it was made just a year or two ago.
However, Chris, the guy that’s doing my 3D printing for me said that it would probably
be easier to color match if we had a black case. And he just happened to have a black case
that he was already using, but he offered to trade me for Bo’s case. So this is the
actual case that we’re going to be using. So, I’m going to get to cutting this thing up!
One thing Chris wanted was for me to save the badge. I’m not sure what this is made of,
as I think it’s an aftermarket badge. So, one technique that can be used to avoid bending or
creasing a metal badge is to use fishing wire, or in this case, dental floss. And there’s good
reason to remove this because for one, it won’t be a Commodore 64 anymore. And the second reason is,
I’m going to have to cut the plastic right through the middle of this.
And while the dental floss was working, it was going slow. And eventually I realized this
badge was very flexible so there was probably no point in even using this method. I wound up just
pulling it off like this. And then, of course, applying it to the other case. There we go.
So my friend Chris came over and he had already been experimenting with 3D printing some mounts
in a standard commodore case. And so this gave me an idea of where all of the ports
were going to end up, so I knew where to cut. Of course these mounts won’t actually
work for the final product because the whole board needs to move backwards
about a centimeter, which can’t happen until the case is cut up.
Of course, this is the case that we’re actually going to cut up. I started by marking the places
I wanted to cut with a sharpie. The idea here was that I wanted to cut the least amount possible,
but also wanted to leave some sort of vertical support in the back. So we’ll
keep the spot between the video and serial ports as structural support. So this spot
here is where the user port will go, and this spot here is where the cassette port will go.
And here we go!
OK, so the user-port section is all done, now time to file down the cassette port area.
And here we go, the rear modifications are complete. However, for Chris’s design to work,
we need to lower these screw stalks by just a bit. These currently measure 5.81
mm but we need to remove around 2 mm of height. And for that, the easiest way is
probably just to file them down some. And now we have 3.74 mm, which should be fine.
And now for the hard part. I need to figure out how this keyboard is going to fit.
Obviously, I’m trying to compromise between getting the keyboard as
centered as possible in the case, while also cutting the least amount of plastic possible.
So, what I decided to was to cut into the case over here.
And just like the rear pieces, I wanted to purposefully cut too little away. I’d much rather
have to come back with a file to get the last millimeter, than to accidentally cut too much.
And here goes the big chunk between that separates the function keys.
This is the largest piece of plastic I’ll be removing.
And here’s where I’m cutting into that section where that badge was. And there we go!
And now of course to come back and file everything down.
The filing actually takes longer than the Dremel.
And once all done, it was time to clean the keyboard up a little bit.
And now for a test fit. Does it fit? Yeah, I think it’s going to work fine.
At this point I sent the case and keyboard home with Chris,
who would spend the next few days designing and 3D printing pieces to hold everything in place.
Unfortunately, he had to remove the keys.
He’s experimenting with a top layer of parts that add strength to the board.
And of course a variety of little parts to mount the board to the case.
A few days later I got it back with the board already installed on his custom mounts. And
he’s even wired up some of the switches and ports and stuff. These will need to be soldered to the
board, though. On the side here, we’ve got a nice power switch. And a reset button. On the back,
this is the new power port, and the video port. And of course here’s our 3 card edge connectors.
As for the keyboard. Well, I have a jigsaw puzzle of parts here.
Before I could do anything, I’d have to remove the keys once again.
OK, so this goes on here like so. I’m guessing he would have done the whole thing in one piece,
but his 3D printer probably couldn’t make parts that big.
This grid piece goes on the bottom. And there won’t be a lot of clearance for the wires. So,
I’m going to use this ribbon cable. It’s pretty much the only way because I won’t
be able to see the solder points after the brackets are installed. Fortunately,
a ribbon cable keeps all of the wires in order so I won’t have to see where they are attached.
All right, so I’ve separated and striped the ends of the wires.
But this is still a real pain to do. I really need like 3 hands to do this.
But since I only have 2, I just poke a few wires through at a time, them cover
them with some electrical tape to hold them in place. Then, I can solder from the other side.
And since my eyesight has gotten terrible for seeing close objects,
I have to follow up each solder joint with a magnifying glass to double check that it is good.
And then, of course, I can cut off the extra wire. And here we are, finally all finished. I
did have to use another small piece of the ribbon cable because I was short 3 wires.
So, what about the other end of this ribbon cable? Originally I thought I would solder it directly to
the Mini PET. But, I decided it might be best to keep the ability to disconnect the keyboard,
so I am using the same pin header from the original project. Only this time
I’m covering the connections with heat shrink.
OK, so what I need to do now is take the board out because I need to
solder the power right here into that little spot. And then this is for the reset button.
And it has to go right over here and connect to the reset switch. But yeah,
all of that needs to be soldered from the under side so I’m going to have to take this board off.
Its very handy that this board has solder points for power. This saves me the trouble of having to
desolder the barrel jack or try to find a matching barrel connector. The reset button is a different
story. I don’t want to mess with desoldering it, and so I think the easiest thing will be to just
solder the wires right to the bottom of it here like this. That will actually work just fine.
OK, so all done with that. I can reinstall the board now.
I can just plug the video cable in here. And so that’s really all there is to the bottom part.
Now I need to figure out this jigsaw puzzle of keyboard pieces. So, skipping ahead a bit, I have
the keyboard pieces all assembled. Here’s what it all looks like put together. Now I’ll attach the
keyboard into the little header there. And then this should mount just like a regular keyboard
in a 64c case. It slides right in there like so. And then there are just two screws at the top.
And now I get to re-attach all of these keys.
And here comes the big question, does the top case fit correctly. And yeah. I think it does!
OK, time to plug it in and test it out! All we need is power and video.
And now I finally have a power switch on the MINI PET,
something I complained about in the last video about it. And it works! Unfortunately,
the brightness on the TV is too high, which is overexposing the camera, but it works.
Before I can demonstrate much else, I need to get my SD2PET adapter working. And the device
itself fits just fine. Unfortunately, the cassette port does not. This is only needed for the 5 volt
power, but it is nevertheless needed. However, a regular Commodore dataset actually fits fine
in this spot. So, the best solution here is to trim these wings off of the connector.
I’ll again turn to my handy Dremel for that. So, let’s try this again. Yeah, seems to fit fine now!
I’ve got the brightness turned down a bit on the TV this time. This makes my camera much happier,
as you can see. So, I thought I’ve give PETSCII Robots a test. One irritating problem,
though is that the screen is still not centered. That’s something I also complained about before.
Well, I do have a solution for this. My TV has a service menu. I’ve even
attached a label to the back to remind me how to get to it. Unfortunately,
it does turn the brightness way up when inside the menu. But the main thing I
need is to adjust the horizontal centering. And there we go, that looks a lot better.
You know, the funny thing is.. Playing this here like this, you might almost be able to
fool somebody into thinking it was a Commodore 64 simply connected to a black and white TV.
While typing in some BASIC programs, I kept thinking something wasn’t quite
right with my keyboard. Then I realize that I had the J and K keys on backwards. So,
no problem, I’ll just pull those off and fix them.
And one last thing. I think this computer deserves a name. So I designed it a little badge.
I made it up in white letters just like the 64c. Only I’m calling this one the PETSCII4.
I made the badge to fit what little area was left of the original badge location. And you know,
there’s a certain irony here. Commodore actually produced both the Educator 64 and the PET 4064,
which were both Commodore 64 boards inside of a PET case. And now I’ve done the exact opposite
and put a PET board inside of the Commodore 64 case. I don’t think that’s ever been done before.
So, this conversion isn’t perfect. For one thing the LED doesn’t work. However,
I can probably get it working eventually. I just need to find the proper resistor value and then
wire it in to the board. Also, I kind of messed up the case here in this spot by accident when
I was dremelling. It doesn’t hurt anything, but just doesn’t look all that great. And, of course,
originally Chris and I had talked about trying to fill in these areas on either side of the space
bar and between the number pad here so that it would be flush with the top of the case.
That was the main reason for going with a black case to begin with. But it proved to be just too
much trouble. Still, I can’t complain too much. I think overall this project worked out really well.
One drawback of this project, though, is how much money it cost. I mean, you could probably
buy a real PET for the same cost as building this device. But, on the bright side for me,
both the board and the case were donated, so my cost is not nearly as much as it’d be for the
average person. Still, you can’t deny that this is considerably more portable than a regular PET
and definitely easier to store as well. And since I have another PET game in the works,
this is probably going to spend a lot of time on my desk over the next year or so.
Oh, and while we’re on the topic of PETs, if you haven’t seen the new Wonderwoman 1984 movie,
which granted, it’s not like the best wonderwoman movie ever, but
there’s a lot of PETs in the movie and it’s worth seeing the movie just for that.
Now, there is one other thing I wanted to mention about this project. So, Chris,
the guy that did the 3D printing for me, he has put the designs up on thingiverse,
so you can download those and I will put a link down in the description for you. So, if you want
to build your own one of these, I guess you could if you’ve got access to a 3D printer.
Now, the way that would be best to do a project like this would be if we could get the guys over
at, and I’m probably not going to say this right, its either tynemouth, or tynemouth, or tynemouth,
or tynemouth, or something like that. Anyway, the guys that make the Mini-Pet board. Now if
we could get them to build a board that has the same footprint of a Commodore 64 board,
that way it would just fit naturally into a case like this without any modifications. Now,
that would be the best way to do it. And then of course, likewise with the keyboard,
if we get somebody to make a keyboard that’s PET compatible but has more or less the same footprint
as a C64 board, that would require either little to no modification to get that to work as well.
So, that would be the ideal way to do a project like this, but that’s probably a pipe-dream,
and probably never going to happen. Anyway, I’ve at least got mine now, even if it wasn’t the
easiest way to get it done. But anyway, that about wraps it up, so as always, thanks for watching!