Won a C= SX-64 auction today!!

[vwestlife]

Doubtful. The PC was so entrenched in the business sector by the time an Amiga laptop would have been viable, and there was little to no competitive business software for the Amiga by that time either. It was strictly a hobby machine for the most part.

On the other hand, Atari had some modest success with their "STacy", a (very heavy) ST laptop. However, the ST architechture was probably easier to downsize into laptop form because it used all off-the-shelf components, whereas the Amiga used a bevy of custom chips, which would've needed to be further developed and integrated in order to reduce size and power consumption.

 

[Maverick1978]

Just a word of caution to you SX-64 owners... be careful of plugging peripherals into the User Port that are powered by the system, you can blow out the transformer on the system's power supply and then nothing will work. Ask me how I know.

Thanks for the tip! I had read about the power supply being rather stingy, but the only plug-in that the articles mentioned NOT to use was the RAM expander cartridges (which I wouldn't want to use in this anyway - they would stick out WAY too far!)

The only thing I really plan on using in my SX-64 would be cartridges, primarily FastLOAD, but probably Jungle Hunt and a few others as well (I love the SID sound effects in Jungle Hunt!)

 

[geoffm3]

On the other hand, Atari had some modest success with their "STacy", a (very heavy) ST laptop. However, the ST architechture was probably easier to downsize into laptop form because it used all off-the-shelf components, whereas the Amiga used a bevy of custom chips, which would've needed to be further developed and integrated in order to reduce size and power consumption.

Well, not completely all off the shelf components. A large part was to be sure, but the glue, shifter, blitter, dma, and MMU were all custom Atari chips (of course not nearly as fancy as the Amiga's custom chips). I'm familiar with the STacy only insomuch as I knew it existed. I have yet to see one in person, and I even worked at an Atari authorized reseller/repair store at one point! I wonder how many they actually produced... must have been an extremely small run.

http://oldcomputers.net/stacy.html

It doesn't appear that they did much work on the front of miniaturization... the guts look almost identical to the 1040ST. The Amiga certainly would have been a similar story if they had. I think there was a third party company that tried to make an Amiga laptop sans custom chips (you supply those).

I have seen two Commodore laptops before... a 286 and a 386. They looked like very nice machines, so it must have been well within their capacity at the time to make an Amiga laptop.

 

[carlsson]

The STacy is considered one of the rarest Atari computers you can find, probably even less common than the Falcon. Thus I would have to object to "modest success" if relatively few machines were built and sold. On the other hand, perhaps a lot were sold but most were recycled years before people started to consider them collectables.

 

[vwestlife]

The STacy was replaced by the much smaller and lighter ST Book. One web site claims a production run of about 1000 units, but that is probably optimistic.

The closest Commodore ever got to an Amiga laptop was the Amiga 600. It was not well received by Amiga enthusiasts, because the Amiga 1200 gave you a full keyboard and better expandability for not much more money. However, if packaged together with an LCD and battery pack, the 600 would've made an Amiga laptop with about the same size and weight as the Atari STacy.

 

[carlsson]

The issues with the Amiga 600 are it is too small for a numerical keyboard and it lacks some of the expansion slots from the 500. On the other hand it comes with onboard IDE and PCMCIA connector. If I recall correctly, it was lauched 1 - 1.5 years ahead of the 1200, in parallel with the Amiga 500+ that uses the same chipset as the 600, but packed in a regular 500 case and more backwards compatibility.

I suppose Commodore was leaking so much money that not even the most imaginative manager could find support to launch a laptop. One could also ask what the market had been for a floppy based video game, or perhaps the margins were so slim it hadn't mattered.

 

[tezza]

The issues with the Amiga 600 are it is too small for a numerical keyboard and it lacks some of the expansion slots from the 500.

I remember reading that the numeric keypad was used for some of the more popular games, yes? This was one of the reasons potential buyers showed less interest in the 600.

Tez

 

[carlsson]

Not sure. The only game I can think of is NetHack. Surely there were more, probably strategy games and alike. On the other hand those usually took so much space that it was painful to play them on even a moderately expanded Amiga 500.

Oh well, we have strived quite a bit from the original topic now. Sorry.

Back to the SX-64, if anyone has an array of utility and freezer cartridges it can be interesting to see which ones work reliably in a SX. Personally I've tested an Action Replay Mk VI which went berzerk when trying to access the internal floppy drive. However the Final Cartridge III works like a charm with my NTSC SX-64. Since the AR is a PAL cartridge, there could be some problem with timings but I don't own a regluar NTSC C64 to compare with.

 

[vwestlife]

However the Final Cartridge III works like a charm with my NTSC SX-64.

Same thing here with mine.

And I'd actually like to retrofit SX-64 ROM(s) into my standard C64, because its screen colors (dark blue on white) are much nicer to look at and easier to read than the standard C64 "lost at sea" colors (cyan on blue). The Final Cartridge III sets the BASIC colors to white on dark blue, which is also much nicer, but as soon as you hit Run/Stop+Restore or the reset button, the C64 switches back to its default colors.

 

[geoffm3]

Same thing here with mine.

And I'd actually like to retrofit SX-64 ROM(s) into my standard C64, because its screen colors (dark blue on white) are much nicer to look at and easier to read than the standard C64 "lost at sea" colors (cyan on blue). The Final Cartridge III sets the BASIC colors to white on dark blue, which is also much nicer, but as soon as you hit Run/Stop+Restore or the reset button, the C64 switches back to its default colors.

I am partial to the Cinemaware Warp Speed cartridge. Works pretty good on the SX-64 too.

 

[carlsson]

If you're up for chip replacement, it should be quite simple to hack the Kernel ROM with different default values for the VIC-II chip. I suspect a SX ROM won't work right out of the box anyway, so you could just as well make or find an EPROM adapter and burn your very own custom C64 Kernel. The data field begins at $ECB9:

00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ; D000-D007 sprites 0-3 X/Y
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ; D008-D00F sprites 4-7 X/Y
00 9B 37 00 00 00 08 00 ; D010-D017
14 0F 00 00 00 00 00 00 ; D018-D01F
0E 06 01 02 03 04 00 01 ; D020-D027 border background aux sprite colours
02 03 04 05 06 07 4C ; D028-D02E more sprite colours

It means if you patch address ECD9-ECDA = offset 1CD9 in an 8K ROM image, you could change default colours.

 

[vwestlife]

If you're up for chip replacement, it should be quite simple to hack the Kernel ROM with different default values for the VIC-II chip. I suspect a SX ROM won't work right out of the box anyway, so you could just as well make or find an EPROM adapter and burn your very own custom C64 Kernel.

I know for a fact that a standard C64 ROM works fine in an SX-64, but the resulting default colors are not very legible on the internal monitor.