Who wants a Commodore 128 D?

[Marco]

I never knew the 128 came with an Amiga mouse, That said I don't really know much about the pre-Amiga stuff beyond what I've read on the net.

Anyway, says it's in America so it'd be NTSC, shame.

[Marco]

That and the C65 has absolutely no software, no OS (beyond the Basic CLI) and wasn't even finished.

Personally I prefer the normal 128, the D(CR) reminds me too much of an old clone. I think the rarest would probably be the 128CR - a wedge 128 with the DCR motherboard and chips, minus the integrated 1571, read about it on one of those obsessive C= fansites, can't remember if it was released or just prototyped.

[Marco]

@ Boing: to the best of my knowledge it goes like this:

The 128D was the second revision of the 128, they changed it to the desktop form-factor and put a 1571 inside the case, which was plastic and had the carry-handle. The plastic case hadn't a snowball in hell's chance of being legal in the US due to the FCC regs (they later exported their crazy regulations to us via the EU IIRC).

Anyway to sell the 128D in the US they repackaged it in a metal case to meet the FCC interference regs and also made some motherboard revisions to reduce costs including integrating the 128D PCB with the 1571's PCB (hence the 'CR' in the name) producing the 128DCR. It also featured the max 64K of video ram and a different VDC.

This new cheaper board couldn't fit inside the wedge case so they prototyped a version called the 128CR which had the mobo revisions to reduce cost and improve the video capabilities but removed the 1571 bits of the board. I have no clue if this version actually made it to production though. Further they made a few mockups of a wedge 128 with a built in floppy, might have been a 1581, not sure. I think Zimmer's site has the pics - some had a deck-loading mechanism, very retro. None of those were actually real though I don't think.

[Marco]

boing wrote:
 And what is this "wedge case" you guys speak of?   I know of the case for the very original C=128 (the A500 and A1200 were rather similar to this case).  And I know of the later A1000-styled case with the handle, keyboard garage and embedded 5.25" floppy drive.  So what's this "wedge case"?

As in a 'wedge' of cheese, or a 'wedge' doorstop, you know a triangular wedge.

I was refering to the normal integrated keyboard version 128 by its shape. I just use that word to describe the shape of keyboard-integrated computers with a vaguely triangular side-profile like the A500, A600 and A1200, the Atari STs, the Acorn A3000, A3010 and A3020.