Hey everyone and welcome back the Sawickipedia! Today we're gonna take a look
at the Commodore 64 brick of death. Now what I want to do is refurbish this
power supply and the good thing about these particular ones is they are not
potted, so they're not encased in a blob of resin, which means they are somewhat
serviceable. Pretty much what I'm going to do is keep the original transformer
and just replace the DC power supply with something like this, in this
particular case it's going to be a Mean Well 5 volt, 3 amp power supply which
cost about $20 Australian, but yeah that's a pretty cheap price to fix up
one of these. The other options you've got these days, I mean a lot of people do
have you know a couple of power packs, or wall warts as the Americans call them,
two of them encased in one box you know can also give you the same sort of thing,
obviously a 9 volt AC and a 5 volt DC power supply, but yeah then you've got
two things that you have to plug in simultaneously to get your Commodore 64
going. So I much prefer this option and the Mean Well power supply has over
voltage protection, over current protection, short-circuit protection, all
that kind of things so it pretty much negates the use for a c64 saver
kind of thing, which usually plugs in between the power supply and the
Commodore 64 itself, you know in order to shut off supply when it detects there's too
much voltage on the 5 volt rail. So yeah that's crack this thing open and
we'll swap out the parts and see how it goes. Yeah as I was saying these are a
lot more serviceable than the other power supplies. It's basically held
together by four Phillips head screws, a lot of the other ones are usually sealed
in a box so you know they're held in by a bunch of clips but you usually end up
breaking a couple of them just to get them open, and then you just met with a
bunch of epoxy sort of stuff anyway. But this one's a lot more user friendly
or a lot more maintenance friendly I should say. So I'll just remove anything
that we don't need at this point, be sure to keep all these screws together.
Get this out, yeah that's easy. I'll just desolder the mains cable going to
the transformer which yeah it comes off pretty easily, and yeah like I said I'm
gonna reuse this transformer because it's still in good working order so
there's no need to replace it with another one, it's gonna produce the same
result. So now I've got the mains cable off I just disconnect the secondary side
from the transformer that goes to a little circuit board, and yeah the two
that I'm disconnecting here go straight to the Commodore 64, so straight to that
nine volt rail, and everything else, this parts all pretty useless I'm just gonna
cut all these off, it's basically all rubbish here.
But you can see it's very simple circuit a couple of diodes do their
rectification, there's one filter capacitor, not much at all going on there.
All this stuff I'm not gonna use anyway so I'm just gonna cut it off at
the transformer side and then I'll just try and
maybe neaten those up a little bit
just so they don't short out to anything else cuz I'm not gonna be using those
other secondary windings. Alright so transformer is just gonna sit
back in the case like that, and power supply should fit nicely right next to it.
Yep just got to cut off these little
tabs from the bottom of the case because they're just pushing that power
supply right up into the top of the case just that a little bit too much, so just
cut these out and the power supply should fit snugly in between the last two rails there.
Alright so let's solder up the mains side of the
transformer and yeah I've just got a couple of shorter cables, all this
is gonna do is route around to the terminals on the DC power supply and
that's where all the mains voltage is gonna get a meet up, some of its gonna go
to the DC power supply and obviously some of it through the 9 volt
transformer. I'll just solder these in, that went in pretty easily.
Just add a little bit more solder. Yeah that feels pretty good.
Yep it also seems quite tight so we're ready
to rock and roll, just trim off any excess leads. Okay let's stick that in
place and we'll sort out the outputs in a minute.
Yeah what I'm doing is wiring the
transformer primary up to the mains input of the five volt DC power
supply, it's just the easiest way to connect it all. As I said the five
volt power supply does have its own fuse, but apart from that there's no other
fuses in this power supply, but there is one in the Commodore 64 that sits on the
AC line so that should provide a decent amount of protection, and I'm pretty sure the
transformer itself has a thermal fuse inside of it, so not too much to
worry about there. I'll just wire up the the outputs of the
five volt supply back to the Commodore DIN power cable and solder up the nine
volt outputs of the transformer to the commodore DIN cable as well. Yeah
obviously a bit of a heat shrink is always a good idea for these kind of things,
I don't want any of this shorting out.
It'll just sort of sit around there, and I might just fasten the output that
goes to the Commoder, fasten that down because everything is wired up perfectly
there, and really the only thing left to wire up is the the mains plug. I'm
just gonna use the terminals on the power supply to wire up the mains plug,
and yeah that those same terminals also go to the transformer on the other end
so it's sort of the easiest way to get everything wired together.
Just tighten all these down.
Okay everything feels nice and secure, nothing's gonna pop out,
short to anything else, yeah I think we're good.
Just trying to wrap the mains cable around the side of the transformer,
hopefully there's enough room in here.
Just have to watch out for that screw on the corner, and that should work perfect.
Alright let's fasten that down,
and the other side if I can pick up the screw. Alright feels good everything's
pretty secure let's see if the case fits back over the top.
Yes, like a glove! Nothing's rattling around or loose, just seal it back up.
Yeah everything feels pretty good inside, so plug it in and test it out I guess.
Okay we'll just check the AC side first, make sure our 9 volts is being output
correctly, it'll probably be around 10 volts, yeah just over 10 which is fine,
and check the 5 volt DC, and yeah that's perfect spot-on 5 volts. Ok so this is
the finished product I've cleaned it up a little bit, yeah it's got a brand new
outlet plug which is nice and modern compared to the old crappy one which is
just like a little figure 8 cable with unprotected pins. The modern one would
basically meet Australian standards, not that I'm that worried
about that kind of thing. So yeah in future I might have a look at trying to
replace one of these, well actually replace the internals of one of these, as
I said these ones are potted so the whole thing's encased in resin, so I'm
gonna try and get that out and see if we can use something like a 9 volt AC
transformer, and yeah another one of these power supplies, squeeze them both in
there and get another reliable power supply up and running. So yeah thanks for
watching the Sawickipedia! I hope this has at least helped you out, or has been
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