The Compucase 64d was a housing for the Commodore 64 with one or two 1541 drives and was created in 1987 by the company Schmolz Unternehmensberatung GmbH.
I remember the adds in the magazines to have your Commodore and a drive build into a case.
In September 2014 I could buy a Commodore 64 with “custom housing made by a amateur “, So I bought it and discovered (as I expected) it was a Compucase 64d.
The Compucase 64d was covered with dust and did not start (and the previous owner connected the power cord for the c64 in the video port) .
After a quick clean and inspection, I found that the power switch didn’t work.
As the unit came with only one drive so I suspect that the power cord that was supposed to power the second drive was used to power a monitor.
A monitor has a degaussing coil that is triggered when the monitor is switched on and causes a high current to run at power on.
This current will kill switches that are not to suppose to handle that amount of current.
other issues the Compucase had was the missing it’s “feet” so all screws at the bottom of the housing made scratches on the table it was standing on.
The Compucase was expanded with a internal speeddos cable and speeddos rom on the Commodore 64 and Drive that was selectable on the front of the second drive bay.
There was also switches to disable the write protection of the drive and change the drive device ID.
A switch to disable write protection can be handy to write both sides, but you have to enable the write protection when you insert another disk.
This because the write protect electronics is also used to detect a disk change, and you normaly don’t want to write the buffer of the old disk to a new disk.
So I removed this option (there are some schematics that also work with disk changes).
so only the rom select and the drive device number switch was left.
I didn’t think it was done in a nice way, so I removed all switches and added a second drive to the case.
What I still want to do to this Compucase 64d is:
– Fix power switch
– add a better power supply (it is now a little circuit board with a diode bridge and a 7805 rectifier).
– add overpower protection on the 5 volt line.
– add a switchless drive ID selection for both drives (done by a latch on the mainboard of the C64)
– add a switchless rom select for all drives and C64
