Final Cartridge III 101% cartridge

If you use a Commodore 64, you will quickly encounter that the storage devices are so slow that you don't have much choice than to get a fastloading solution. The first utility cartridge did provide exactly that, but quickly started to offer more and more features to improve the usability of a Commdore 64. They started to offer hot-keys, BASIC expansions, machine code monitors, freezers and more. The Final Cartridge III became available when the sophisticatedness of utility cartridges did reach its peak in the 80s. The Final Cartridge III had the first widely used out-of-order fastloader, that could speed up a simple 1541 floppy drive no less than 15 times. Scrolling in BASIC and machine code monitor, useful BASIC extensions, and advanced backup mechanism and an innovative GUI made the FCIII possibily the most advanced utility cartridge in the golden age of the Commodore 64.

For modern 21th century usage of the Commodore 64, a Final Cartridge III still is one of the best possible expansions regarding improving the usability of the machine, either through a dedicated cartridge or emulation. A Final Cartridge III is a great combination both with original floppy disks, or with an SD2IEC SD card reader.

The Final Cartridge III 101% is a clone of the Final Cartridge III. Its purpose is twofold: First, it attempts to be a very well designed clone of the Final Cartridge III. The Final Cartridge Cartridge III has been cloned before, but until now, clones did simply replicate the original circuit. The Final Cartridge III instead, tries to improve the circuit:

• The Final Cartridge III 101% is a flashable cartridge that allows you to install your own firmware on the cartridge. In fact, you must install firmware yourself before you can use it. For example, you install the original firmware, the Final Cartridge III+ firmware, or my improved firmware. GEOS instead of the FC3 desktop? No problem. And of course you can decide to install another firmware anytime you wish.
  Note that The Final Cartridge III is one of the few utility cartridges for which source code is available. However, until now, unless you built your own cartridge it wasn't that easy to use modified firmware. With the flash capability of The Final Cartridge III 101%, the availability of source code becomes much more useful!
• The Final Cartridge III 101% offers 256KB of flash memory, four times the 64KB capacity of the original FCIII. This allows for much larger firmwares, allowing for more complex extensions to the C64's operating system.
• The freezer button on the original FCIII works well, but is not fool-proof and there is a small chance it fails and crashes. The Final Cartridge III has an improved freezer circuit that avoids this issue.
• Because of its backup function and its usefulness for cracking software, FCIII was feared among software publishers. A good thing about the FCIII is that if you use its kill function to deactivate it, it actually disables its hardware and is almost completely undetectable, while it retains all of its freezing and backup capabilities. However, it could still quite easily be detected, because the IO1/IO2 ROM wasn't disabled. The Final Cartridge III 101% fixes this and is completely undetectable after you use its kill function.

It is not possible to turn a Final Cartridge III 101% into a brick by flashing wrong firmware. If the cartridge fails to start after a firmware upgrade, flip the switch located on the cartridge and flash again with correct firmware. The cartridge has been produced on an ENIG (gold) plated PCB for long durability.

Final Cartridge III 101% Firmware

Like discussed above. You can use the Final Cartridge III 101% with any FC3 firmware, but it is ideally combined with my improved firmware. This firmware improves the original firmware in many ways. You can find my improved firmware on the Final Cartridge III 101% webpage.

 
The Final Cartridge III

New chips to design hardware for our beloved computers

The second purpose of The Final Cartridge III 101% is to demonstrate the use of Greenpak chips to build retro computer hardware. Many hardware makes use of CPLDs or FPGAs. These components are often costly, often cannot run on 5V. Chips that can run on 5V or are 5V tolerant are often discouraged by the manufacturer, often have difficult availability, and may require the use of outdated software.

GreenPAK is a series of programmable logic chips from Renesas. CPLDs consist of macro cells with product terms and flip-flops, GreenPAKs have internally componets at a slighly higher levels: Besides LUTs and flipflops, they have counters, pattern generators, delay blocks, pipe delays, oscillators, that the designer can connect. GreenPAKs have a very low cost, are at the moment easy to buy, and very good design software. They run natively on 5V and therefore don't need voltage regulation or voltage converters.

Final Cartridge 101%'s GreenPAK logic design

The Final Cartridge III 101% consists of just 3 chips: A flash ROM, a 74HC273 register, and an SLG46620 GreenPAK. (The original Final Cartridge III consists of 8 chips.) While in most cases, the use of programmable chips increases the cost of the device, in this case, cost is saved. The flash circuit on the cartridge is compatible with 5V and 12V flash ROMs and even a 12V VPP generation circuit, which is reasonably efficient, could easily be integrated on the cartridge without much components.

By demonstrating how to build Commodore 64 hardware with a GreenPAK, I hope to show the community a solution that, until now, has not been discovered by many in the retro computing hardware scene.

You will receive:

• Final Cartridge III 101% cartridge. The stumpy cartridge case with label is included.
• Hardware documentation for the Final Cartridge III 101%.
• Manual of the flash utility.

Please visit https://rr.pokefinder.org/wiki/Final_Cartridge for:

• Firmwares that you can install on your Final Cartridge III 101%
• Manuals for the Final Cartridge III.

The original Final Cartridge was a product from Riska Home & Personal Computer B.V. and later from TASC B.V. TASC was owned by Wil Sparreboom, creator of The Final Cartridge III. Full credit to him and the other developers, including Gerard van Assem, Nare Derksen, Uwe Stahl, Ton Peters, Jacques van Schajik and Patrick Mast.

The Final Cartridge III 101%'s hardware is completely different compared to the original Final Cartridge III and and isn't shipped with original firmware installed. It is therefore unaffected by copyrights of the makers of the original Final Cartridge III. Firmware and source code that can be found on the internet is under copyright. The makers of the Final Cartridge III are aware of this and have never objected.