The CMD SuperCPU, separating fact from fiction, Part III

I think there'll be two more parts to this trilogy of blog posts regarding the SuperCPU for the Commodore C64 and C128, and this is one of them. If you have read my other posts, you will know that I hold this piece of kit in high esteem, but more on that at another time. Firstly, let's consider some other fictitious accounts that have seeped into the wider consciousness and have became broadly known as factually accurate. And we'll start with the Maurice Randall debacle.

Before I begin here, I am going to point out that I have no vested interests in defending Maurice. I am however interested in the truth. I found him to be very personable when I spoke to him on the telephone, and he was obviously very knowledgeable. He took the time to help out where he could when I had questions or other issues with not just my CMD hardware, but my C64 too. Yes, he did kind of just disappear with who knows how many thousands of dollars worth of orders, some people already waiting many months or years before he vanished like an old Oak table. A few may have sadly passed away whilst waiting for an order, and will certainly have done so by now, and without compensation. But it is not true that he delivered nothing. I have a CMD JAZ HD drive, and had a copy of Wheels 128, and some spare SCPU parts from him, and I wasn't the only person to receive at least partial or full order from Maurice. Therefore, it's a matter of plain English that any quantity of orders that Maurice shipped, even if it was just the items to me, is still greater than zero. So whilst I gave up a long (long) time ago of ever seeing the item of mine that he had, it seems to me that the people who get most vexed about the whole Maurice situation are those who didn't actually order anything from him in the first place, and therefore didn't personally lose out.

What I suspect happened is that whilst the orders weren't enough to sustain Creative Micro Designs, inc. in 2001 when it moved to the PC market, it was too much for one man to handle by himself. As well as the GEOS software that he was developing and supporting, and the CMD HD firmware upgrade that he was working on, he had his own business to run. He very likely became overwhelmed (and quite quickly), and at some point around 2004 or 2005 he reported that his workshop that housed his CMD stock was flooded. This is pure conjecture from me here, but if he didn't have suitable insurance, or the insurance company didn't pay out, this would have been pretty cataclysmic. Now I'm not saying that I believe that his Commodore workshop was flooded, but something definitely happened that put him in a situation that he just couldn't do it anymore. He stopped answering the phone, and responding to people's mails. This was indeed a sad event for all involved. Again, I am not here to defend Maurice, but I don't believe that he was a villain, or that he deliberately set out to defraud people by selling C64 and C128 hardware. Anyway, time has passed, and time also heals, so we move on.

There's something else that's factually incorrect about the SCPU that I want to adumbrate, but let's talk about what it's like being a SCPU user first. As I've owned both the SCPU 64 and 128, and owned a SCPU from the late 1990s, I know that the best version to use is definitely the SCPU 128 even if you own a C64. This is because the chips are beefier and better handle timing differences between PAL and NTSC machines, as well as discrepancies between the various models themselves. And by the time CMD launched the 128 model, it had worked out all of the bugs and issues prevalent in the earlier versions of the SCPU. But there are two issues that won't easily go away. One is power, and the other is heat.

Regarding the power issue, a flat C128 or any version of the C128-D usually has a sufficient power supply to run the SCPU and even SCPU with an REU if your PSU is good. But the C64, well aside from the original PSUs being known as "Bricks of death" now, even good ones don't work well over a few hours (sometimes less). So the power issue is the most pressing; you will need a heavy duty power supply to use this upgrade, and especially so on the C64.

It is sometimes pointed out that CMD did not make a heavy duty PSU for the C64. This is not actually true. CMD did not ship a heavy duty PSU with the SCPU as standard, that bit it true enough, unless you purchased one with your order of course. But the CMD Heavy Duty power supplies (which had both C64 and C128 versions) only worked with 120V outlets, and this wasn't much use to users in Europe as the common voltage here is 230v. Now today that might seem a little strange, but back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, having multi-region power supplies that could accept 120v or 230v wasn't really that common. Although it didn't feel like it at the time, they were simpler times back then.

So the heavy duty power supply problem was a European one (unless you have a C128, but of course most people did not have), and whilst Commodore Scene and Protovision offered their own PSU solutions, these were made to order and prohibitively expensive. The Commodore Scene PSU could power all of your computers and drives though, as well as IDE drives if you happened to own an IDE64 cartridge. Who knows, maybe if more people in Europe had been purchasing CMD hardware, CMD may have made a 230v PSU. But that clearly wasn't the case.

The heat issue may also cause some unpredictable behaviour, and over time residue will build up on the contacts of the edge connector to the computer. I've found that cleaning this with 70% alcohol solution every so often does help. And whilst you may take the lid off the SCPU whilst running it (so that the RAM does not run too hot), I now superstitiously always wear an anti-static wristband if I do. The best solution is of course to to heatsink the chips and have your whole computer system running in a well aired and cool environment. Anyway, hopefully any future compatible SCPU-like device will not suffer from this flaw, or the power issue mentioned above.

In my final blog post [about the SCPU], I'll briefly summarise three of the most likely best known software for the SCPU platform: Protovision's Metal Dust (which I once reviewed for a magazine called Retro Gamer), and AmiDog's MIPs recompiled versions of Wolf 3d and Doom. Until then.