Few questions about Turbo Chameleon.

Mendel

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AmiBayer
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1) Can it work as "just" a 1541 emulator or does it always disable the c64 internal cpu and whatnot?

2) Does it use the real sid hardware inside c64 when connected to c64 or does it emulate sid?

3) Does this basically turn my c64 to just a power supply with keyboard and joystick ports or how much of the actual c64 is actually used?

4) Is this a good thing to buy instead of the (currently not very available) 1541 ultimate? I want to use this with my c64 and pc crt monitor and I would prefer it to behave and sound like a real c64, without any emulation glitches. (If necessary, I can use crt tv with s-video cable instead of pc crt monitor if this alters the behavior.)

5) Does the recent Prince of Persia C64 version work with this cart?

6) Does Turrican work with this cart?

7) Do multi load games in general work?

8) What about scene demos?

Thanks for reading my questions!
 
oh well. I ordered one of these anyways just so I can see what it does as rewinding and loading tapes is not something I´m looking to do for all eternity :)
 
That's the one with vga output, is it not?
 
Yes, it has vga output. That´s why I´m thinking I might be able to use this with same monitor that I use with my amiga/indi aga setup
 
Yes, it has vga output. That´s why I´m thinking I might be able to use this with same monitor that I use with my amiga/indi aga setup

Do let us know how it works out for you. I was contemplating getting it, exactly because of the vga output.
 
Okay the vga output is a definite letdown. It´s almost as if someone put some kind of blur filter on it.

Another way to describe it: You know when pcs had graphics cards with only vga outputs, how there was sometimes big difference in 2d image quality between various cards? Well this looks like output from a bad 2d graphics card. Maybe its the ramdac, maybe rf filters, it looks like some cheap components are causing sub-optimal picture. Bland colors, blurry. I much prefer the s-video output to my tv, which looks much nicer, it´s colors more vibrant and pixels much sharper in comparison.

Using this thing just as a 1541 emulator isn´t perfect either. Most games that I threw at it seemed to work while some just load and then immediately crash (Mayhem in Monsterland being the most disappointing example of no go). Most scene demos that I tried seem to output corrupted graphics. Garbage pixels here and there.

Not particularly happy with it.If I get a chance to buy a 1541 ultimate, I´ll throw this chameleon thing away.

I know... it´s beta... but I thought long enough time had passed since release that it would be better. There´s not a single thing that is bad enough about this to make it a bad product overall... its all the issues combined. It´s still vaguely useful for loading up some games that I dont have on tape, for now.

I´d give it a score of 6 out of 10
 
That's a dissapointment :(

They are probably doing bilinear upscaling instead of just line doubling, which would look much better. I'm sure the 1541 emulation will get better, though.
Are they updating it regularly?

As a side note, I had a chance to connect my C64 to my Framemeister Mini via s-video yesterday, which looks really good. Not as good as on a 1084, but close :)
 
Looks to me like they update it somewhere along the lines of once a year.


9cht.jpg


I´ll do that ultimate <-> chameleon swap if you´re serious about it.

I´m looking for accurately emulated floppy drive emulation I can use with a memory card... which is exactly what the ultimate seems to do.

Now this chameleon thing has all kinds of features that I don´t really want or need and yet it doesn´t do the things I want it to do properly :)
 
The 1541u is awesome! :D


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk 2
 
have you not tried amiga core on it yet, there is I believe an optimized beta minimig port that gives 030/50mhz performance ?
 
To my understanding the VGA output for the real C64 is a secondary byproduct of the Chameleon. Have you checked the VGA output quality, when running it as standalone with the emulated C64 core?
 
I have never used the Chameleon so I can not comment. I can vouch for the 1541 Ultimate in that it is near damn it 100% compatible with all my .d64 images which includes a lot of demos.

With the tap adapter also you can preserve you tape collection also which I am in the process in doing.

Using the Easy Flash/SD2IEC combo on my 128 is fine but a lot disks which bash the 1541 in real life will fail.

Get a 1541 Ultimate you will never look back (y)
 
Hi

Hi

Perhaps out of context but I was wondering isn't any tape emulation on C64 ?
As the CFFA3000 for Apple //e which emulates everything why the c64 can only be emulated as floppydisk...

I own several C64 but always seeking a simple device being able to play it all (all formats possible).

Anyone could answer me about this particular problem once for all?

Thanks

Alex
 
@kenshigros:
Every game ever released on tape is available on disk & loads faster from there, so why bother with tape emulation?

To the op:
"2013-07-20: Summer break is over; production has started again."
(quote from www.1541ultimate.net)
 
Every game ever released on tape is available on disk & loads faster from there, so why bother with tape emulation?

That's not true at all. There are plenty of budget titles that were only released on tape. Codemasters, Mastertronic, Fire Bird, etc. only released on casette. Or are you referring to the program code being transferred to disk by users?
 
Okay the vga output is a definite letdown. It´s almost as if someone put some kind of blur filter on it.

Another way to describe it: You know when pcs had graphics cards with only vga outputs, how there was sometimes big difference in 2d image quality between various cards? Well this looks like output from a bad 2d graphics card. Maybe its the ramdac, maybe rf filters,

It's RF filters - Jens mentioned on the Chameleon mailing list that they put small capacitors on the RGB outputs in order to get it through CE testing.

However, bearing in mind the standard of your average TV set used with your average C64 in the 80s, the end result's probably not that far from authentic! ;)

---------- Post added at 18:09 ---------- Previous post was at 18:05 ----------

have you not tried amiga core on it yet, there is I believe an optimized beta minimig port that gives 030/50mhz performance ?

Nearer 40MHz than 50MHz I'd say, but yes. The beta core also supports up to 24 meg of Fast RAM, has a "Turbo Chip RAM" feature (which makes some 3D games much smoother, but a lot of others crash horribly!) and has software control of the built-in scandoubler, so it's possible to use it with a Minimig-to-Scart cable. (Something not yet supported by the C64 core - but I believe it's planned for some point in the [possibly distant] future.)
 
It's really a pity these things aren't on a more rapid update schedule. The distant future and maybe features aren't good enough to sell me on it.
 
@slk486:

I know there are tape-only titles, but cracking groups always made sure to make disk versions of everything, so no problem finding anything you want on a disk image :)
 
I´m going to sound like a crybaby here but why go for fancy features first before getting the basics done right? Being able to run different cores such as amiga is nice but I already have a real amiga with 030/50MHz and cf card setup so all in all... this product was just not the right thing for me. I want to use my c64 to run games and scene demos correctly, without bugs and without crashes. I made a bad purchase decision too hastily and have regrets about that.

It´s like I bought a tank to kill flies and I´m nagging about not being able to hang the tank on the wall like a swatter.

btw the chameleon seemed to run tap files that I tried without problems... so I guess that´s a plus.
 
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