Oddly enough, I found myself with a bit of extra time and desk space to actually unpack some of my Commodore hardware from storage and set it up once again. This is the first time I've been able to do this, since moving out to the homestead three years ago.

I was somewhat concerned to see the state of my C64 hardware, as they haven't been in the best of environments during their three year hibernation. We could not afford to keep them in any sort of environmentally controlled storage unit, nor did we have the space in our tiny farm house to keep it with us. So, it had been exposed to some pretty nasty temperatures (both hot and cold). However, it was sealed up pretty well from air and moisture. But, when taking it all out from its packing, I was skeptical on whether any of it would be functional.

Remarkably, the only piece of equipment that seemed to have suffered any damage was one of my C64 power supplies. But, I do have spares, so for some reason, I was able to avoid losing my beloved Commodore 64s and associated peripherals. Thank the Lord! I just goes to show you how resilient this older tech. can be. You don't get this sort of quality from today's electronics. Even the dozen or so floppy disks I tested seemed to work just fine. Down right remarkable, if you ask me!

I don't have much space to spare for my C64 work station, but I was able to get my 64C, dual 1541-IIs, and tape drive all hooked up. And I had just enough space left over for my boxes of floppies, and room for my joysticks and 1351 mouse.

Unfortunately, being out here, off the grid, all we have for Internet is our cell phones. So, we only have the capability of connecting wireless-ly, via the cell phone hotspot. So, this kind of renders my Comet64 useless, as it requires a wired connection to the Internet. This is the same for my Flyer modem, if I want to access cloud storage. However, what I was able to do with the Flyer is connect it to one of our laptops, having it fill in as a disk image server. I think I'll do a video, sometime, on how I got all of that hooked up and running.

I'm not sure how much time I'll have to tinker with my C64 workstation this summer, but I'm so glad to have it setup and running again, never-the-less.

The other Commodore related thing that happened recently was that, as a birthday gift to myself, I went and purchased the C64 game, Soulless, from Psytronic. This will be my first game/software purchase for my C64 in almost twenty years! I'm really looking forward to receiving that in the mail. I will have to do a review of it, when I get a chance to sit down and play it.

It's really remarkable to me to see that, even well after thirty years, there are still dedicated C64 users and developers writing code and producing hardware for this amazing PC.