A ‘working’ diorama of my 1980s Commodore 128/64 computer room, with mirrored LCD display monitor and working 1541 disk drive lights. Driven by a Raspberry PI, custom circuit board, and VICE C64 emulator. Additional flavor added in the form of miniature floppy disks, game boxes, and wall posters / advertisements / game maps from my youth.
Let’s download, compile, and install the VICE Commodore 64 emulator on a fresh Raspberry Pi 4 install. We’ll make sure it works in a non windows console by running a Commodore demo program.
I needed a small display for my Commodore diorama that mirrors the output of my Raspberry Pi – I found one with this 1.3 inch ST7789 driven LCD display. Trouble was, mirroring this wasn’t as straight forward as I would have liked.
To make the miniature floppy drive LED light up when VICE is using the virtual disk image, we need to patch VICE source code and write some new code to pass instructions on to the PI and toggle the LED activity light.