EVO64

I was a competitive kid athlete right up until 14, when Osgood-Schlatter disease in both knees benched me for good. Stuck at home with restless energy and nowhere to put it, my parents bought me a Commodore 64 — and the timing was almost unfair in how perfect it was. School had just started teaching us BASIC, and suddenly I had endless hours to go far deeper.

I fell in completely — the C64's architecture, the quirky custom chips that made it special, and 6502 assembly, which you simply had to know to do anything serious with its graphics, sound, and interrupts. I spent years building my own games and demoscene productions, making friends on BBSes and trading software in person and through the mail. That machine didn't just occupy a sidelined teenager; it became the gateway to my entire career.

I figured I'd put the C64 back in its box for good by my late teens. Then, in my 40s, the nostalgia hit hard — right as I realized how astonishingly capable hobbyist maker tools had become. I found the online forums where people shared their builds, mostly faithful reproductions of the original 80s hardware, and that's where I met Dr. Stefano (Auroscience).

We noticed the same thing at the same moment: people would build a perfect reproduction, then spend a small fortune turning it into a Frankenstein of add-on boards — patching the original's bugs and bolting on new features. We were sure we could fold the best of all that aftermarket innovation into one unified, elegant board: partially pre-assembled, fully modern surface-mount, yet 100% compatible with the original hardware, and beautiful at every level of production.

Dr. Stefano conceived, engineered, and laid out the PCB — a genuine feat of design. I was co-developer on the product side: ideation throughout, plus the entire public-facing identity — the brand, the marketing, the full documentation set, the website, and the builder community. (I couldn't resist getting hands-on, either — I wrote a Multi-SID address tester in 6502 assembly, my first since 1992.) It took six-plus prototype rounds before we landed on a board we were both proud to put into the world.

EVO64 — the “Evolution Commodore 64” — is a ground-up, surface-mount reimagining of the C64 mainboard that synthesizes the community's best enhancements into a single, fully-integrated board, while staying backward-compatible with original MOS chips.

It runs dual SIDs (any variant or clone, mono or true stereo), an integrated ClearVideo64 circuit for the cleanest possible composite and S-Video, switchable PAL/NTSC support spanning every VIC-II ever made, a Multi-ROM EPROM holding up to eight kernals, a custom CPLD-based PLA the team named “QAPLA',” and optional vacuum-tube and Korg Nutube audio preamps for the SID purists.

A premium DIY product lives or dies on support, and a small team can't be online around the clock. So as the builder community grew, I gave it an always-on assistant: EVO64's Discord bot, grounded in our own documentation, answering hardware questions 24/7 with a retro persona and guardrails to stay on topic. The current version runs GPT-4o with a Pinecone retrieval layer over the manuals I'd written.

That bot was one of my first real builds with LLMs — the project that started the itch. In a real sense, everything else on this site grew out of it.

Family and a demanding career mean I've had to step away from EVO64; I can't give it the time it deserves anymore. But the kid who got benched at 14 and found a whole future inside a beige breadbox couldn't be happier with where this landed — the public attention and the kind reviews over the years made every late night feel worth it.

Mostly, it just feels good to have given something back to the Commodore community, after everything it gave me.