With some money I had left in my PayPal account, I decided to buy one of the EasyFlash programmable cartridges for the Commodore 64 from Sinchai.de
EasyFlash is a cartridge for the C64 expansion port. In contrast to traditional cartridges, this one can be programmed directly from the C64.
You can easily create various classic computer game cartridges, program collections or even a diagnostic cartridge to track down issues with your hardware with it. All what you need to do this is a C64, an EasyFlash, the software available here and an image of the cartridge (*.crt). As these CRT files may be quite large, a large disk drive like the FD-2000 or an sd2iec may be useful. For smaller drives EasySplit can be used to compress and split large cartridge images.
EasyFlash is not a freezer cartridge like the Final Cartridge III or the Retro Replay. And it’s no replacement for a 1541 disk drive like the sd2iec.
In the package, you receive the following parts.
As you can see, the PCB is professionally made.
45 minutes later, the board was fully assembled.
Once the board was made, I plugged it into my C64 and it worked! Once I had a quick play, I thought it would be wise to put the EasyFlash into a case. In my box’o’junk, I had a dead Simon’s Basic cartridge. I took out the faulty PCB, marked where I needed to cut out holes for the cartridge enable switch, reset button and activity LED and got hacking away.
Here is the finished result.
I have uploaded some high resolution photos to Flickr : EasyFlash 1.5 Photos
Come back soon to see this cartridge in action!