Show HN: C64 Ultimate Toolbox for macOS

2 points

2 months ago

My wife got me a Commodore 64 Ultimate (https://www.commodore.net) for my birthday, and it became an obvious hassle to have to keep an entire monitor connected to it just to tinker with it. When I found out the Ultimate FPGA board has built-in support for streaming the video and audio data over the network, as well as a REST API allowing for file and configuration management, I set to work on an app to remotely control my new device.

- View and hear your Commodore 64 Ultimate or Ultimate 64 device over the network, with a fully configurable CRT shader so you can dial in just the right retro feel.

- View and manage files on your device, including support for drag and drop folder/file upload, as well as the ability to run and mount disks, create new disk images, and more.

- BASIC Scratchpad is a mini-IDE in the app where you can write BASIC apps and send them directly to any of your connected devices to run.

- Keyboard forwarding allows you to interact with your device with your computer keyboard, includes a keyboard overlay for Commodore specific keys your keyboard definitely doesn't have.

- Visual memory viewer and editor, along with a terminal-like memory viewer and editor for debugging and tinkering. - Built-in support for recording videos and taking screenshots cleanly.

- Fully native macOS AppKit app.

Here's a rough and ready demo video I recorded and sent to App Review for the 2.0 release which was approved yesterday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2wJO2wOGm8

Please note again this app only works with Commodore 64 Ultimate or Gideon's Ultimate 64 devices. Ultimate II does not have the data streams feature to power the display.