Casemodding… we sure were creative

When it comes to casemodding, we need to go a bit further back in history than what’s mentioned on Wikipedia, i.e. that it started when users wanted to overclock their CPUs and hence needed more cooling and bigger cases.

Indeed, we need to go to the era of the humble C64, the system of choice for many hobbyist and electronics whiz thanks to its amazing flexibility when it came to talking with peripherals.

Last year, I already wrote an article on this topic and showcased some truly great casemods for the C64. Digging a bit deeper into the vast C64 archives, I uncovered some more casemodding gems as you’ll surely agree. So sit back and enjoy these superb C64 “variations”.

The first case shown here has the C64 tucked inside a Commodore 610. Admittedly this design gives it a more “professional” look and has the added numeric keypad… a neat little bonus.

If we can modify the C64, then we can also modify its portable brother, the SX-64. This modification turns the SX-64 into a portable laboratory and it even allows for an easy switching of the needed modules (shown below), as the user port is put inside at the back of the “spare” floppy slot (note that all SX-64s had this “spare” slot. Only the DX-64 had two floppy drives, but it was only used at Commodore. Apparently the power requirements for the two drives called for a bigger power supply, which could never fit inside the case).

The SX-64 was always my dream computer as a kid and I sometimes made plans on how I would go ahead and build my own (which I never did). However, some people really built themselves a homebrew SX-64 out of a regular C64 and 1541 drive…

One of the craziest modifications (yes, as bizarre as the “carpentry-mod” and the “C64-car-mod” of last year’s article) has to be this one. Here we have not just a lot of switches and buttons on a checkerboard C64, we’ve got a whole lot of components on the inside as well.

We’re talking a 256K expansion, an EPROM with 6 different OSes, 96K of ROM, LEDs to signal activity on the user port, a modem and every chiptune artists dream: 4 SID chips.

If you wanted to brag with all the components you could tuck inside a C64, then perhaps the next mod would be more appropriate. Here, a C64 along with and EPROM burner, speedloaders etc. are put inside a transparent Plexiglas container for all the world to see and marvel. Yes, this would be the top “bragging” case I guess.

Do you have some photos or info on great casemods of your old computer system? Feel free to send them to me, and they’ll be featured in a future article on further casemodding.

Have a great weekend!