I figured this was a good a place as any to talk about a modified VIC-20 I resurrected from the ashes of several busted VICs a few years back.
I call it the Rally VIC.
- The case was a spare I got in a haul a few years back, marred with scuffs and gouges. So... I painted it silver and gave it racing stripes. Hence the name "Rally VIC"
- The Rev E motherboard I think came in a pile of unpopulated spares from ebay, and had mild capacitor damage.
- The 6502 and 6522's were pulled from a dead 1541.
- The keyboard takes the mechanisms from an NOS C16 keyboard, mixes in keycaps and a PCB from a damaged VIC keyboard, along with function keys swapped from a C64
- The KERNAL ROM is slightly modified to include a custom default color scheme and boot text.
- The 5V regulator was swapped with a modern switchmode regulator from ezsbc to reduce heat output. As such, it no longer needs the heavy heat sinks for the 5V regulator, and runs very cool even after several hours of operation.
It's by no means perfect, but it has character. The C16 key legends can make it harder to use BASIC at times, and as such I end up firing up this one far less than my other VICs. I've thought about adding some heat sinks for the chips, and I'd like to install an internal 8K RAM mod given to me by my friend, and fellow Denial user jbevren.
