If you’ve got an MX-style keyboard and want some retro charm, you might like a recent project from [Levente Szabadkai]. It’s a set of C64-style keycaps that you can print yourself at home!

The project started as an attempt to produce a set of C64 keycaps for an Ajazz 75% keyboard layout, but [Levente] kept pushing until it developed into a universal set. The keys have C64 legends, plain legends, or blank, and work for ANSI boards from 60% to full size. There are a few ways they can be printed. — you can do two-color printing with an FDM machine, or you can print the caps alone and fill the legends with paint, either in FDM or resin.

As a part of this work, [Levente] had to obviously create the glyphs to print upon all the keycaps. He thus decided to release that as the C64 keyboard font, in fact. It’s available in TTF and OTF formats, and you can preview the font in your browser, if so desired. It includes the function key labels, the 63 PETSCII graphic font legends, and various symbols, punctuation, and selected accented letters, too.

We’ve seen lots of vintage C64 parts recreated from scratch. It’s been at the point for a while where you can build a new machine with what’s available off the shelf. They said Amiga would never die, but it’s the earlier Commodore that really lives on today…

If you want to play old Commodore games, there are C-64 emulators available for just about any platform– but most of them are so high level, they’re really meant for just that: playing games. [antirez] has a different goal with his c64-hw-sim project— it’s a lower-level emulation that simulates every chip and every connection on an ASSY 250407 motherboard, and all the chips on it, too. Ever wondered what happens when a specific chip is missing, or a random pin is shorted to ground or forced high? You can do all that in software, with no risk of harming antique hardware.

While that might be a fun bit of faffing about for a certain sort electronics sadist, the real utility is to learn about the hardware, both in the abstract and to help you troubleshoot a board you might have. It’s likely that many given failure modes reproduce the same effects– lots of things can knock out the display output, for example–but at least if you’ve reproduced a flaw in software you can try testing the hardware to see if that’s the cause of your problem. Assuming the simulation covers your hardware issue, anyway.

There’s cycle-accurate chip emulation for the processor, CIAs, SID and VIC-II via code by [Andre Weissflog], a.k.a. [flooh]. Meanwhile analog circuitry in the video, audio and power sections are not simulated so not everything fault will be replicable here. Still, it might be a neat tool– just don’t try and run any games on it, because even on high-end modern hardware it only runs at about one-third speed. That’s fast enough for diagnostics, but not so much for Maniac Mansion, never mind Elite. 

Speaking of Elite, did you know the source– both of the port and the original– is available with comments? If you want an emulator you can play, you can get it on everything from microcontrollers like Teensy to your personal computer.

Thanks to [Salvatore] for the tip!

There are some classic fonts which appeared in one place and became almost iconic, yet never made it into the digital age. The font on the Commodore 64 keyboard for example, with its its slightly narrow letters. If you’ve been yearning to see it again then help is at hand, because [Levente Szabadkai] has traced it from photographs and made it available as a vector font in a variety of formats on GitHub.

As you might expect, it’s an uppercase font only, as the hardware never sported lower case letters. But it doesn’t stop there, because it also contains the various punctuation and other marks, all the PETSCII glyphs, and the function keys. There’s even a Commodore logo for that key down in the left hand corner, but we’re guessing you’ll have to assemble CLR HOME yourself. We can’t help noticing the cursor arrows are solid in contrast to the outlined ones on our 64 here, but we’re guessing there may be some minor differences between models.

So download the font, and make all your stuff look like a 1980s home computer keyboard. And in case you are wondering why you find so many keyboard fonts familiar, we’ve talked about the Gorton font in the past.