My uncle ran a computer store in the 80s and I just texted him to see if he knew how much REUs went for. He has always been a Commodore fan (he even has a tattoo of the logo). He said that he can try and track down a price sheet from back then but he's pretty sure they were MSRP for 299 but most shops would price them at MAP which was 199.

The 32K EPROM socket can be used to add GEOS onboard to the REU for instant loading of the base GEOS application.

David, I bought mine from Best Products for $149.99. I do remember that the price had no catalog listing and when I asked them why they said that the price of dram was very volatile at the time. And, when they had to look it up it was listed with the jewelry department since it had to be where their program allowed them to easily modify the price.

I'm a 51 year old dude, probably your age also. I love going back and rewatching your older videos! Four, five, six years ago even. So much to learn & relearn, this is one of the great things to use KZfaq for! Lots of negative things about YT, and although I love Rumble & Bitchute, YT still "works" the best with a plethora of information!

I love how they even recreated 8-bit Sonic 1s broken demo. That's true dedication to the source material.

Several of the later Infocom games shipped with REU support which allowed pre-loading of data into RAM, greatly speeding up the time it took to process your turns.

Sonic is actually a port of the already existing 8-bit version for the Sega Master System/Game Gear. That being said, it's a near perfect port of it, and it even runs a bit better than the original version!

BTW, your opening theme song makes me happy every single time I hear it. It's everything I wish my memories of the 80s were actually like.

Yes, it's so interesting how there's now quite the cult following of the C64 that can finally afford to use these super accessories that we wish we could have had just as easily some 4 decades ago! And with people developing modern solutions for old machines, like being able to run flash storage on these computers, this is really a magical era for nostalgia, isn't it?

Great Video. I can help with the price. The REU listed for $149 in the USA when it came out but I got mine on sale at Toys R Us for either $109 or $129. I do know that later on they were selling them for $99 and that is when we picked up a second unit for our BBS. I still own my 1764 and the PSU is still in use on my 64C.

What is going on with KZfaq? An 8 Bit Guy video should be over 100k easily after 12 hours. Especially a classic vintage tech piece like this! I didn't even get a notification despite choosing that setting.

Sonic the Hedgehog port to C64 was a real shot in the arm to 8-bit retro game development world as it so viscerally made very clear what the REU brings to the table - exciting

My experience with the 1764 REU was discovering that my RAM disk was not as slick an idea as I thought when my C64 crashed and I lost the term paper i was working on at 2:00 AM in the morning on the last day of the semester. The old and dying refrigerator drew enormous current when it kicked on and my landlord's brother-in-law wiring job wasn't up to the task of supplying it and the rest of the house. Fortunately I only lost the bibliography but man it was a pain. Save early and Save often has been my motto ever since.

I absolutely never tire of seeing petscii robots on this channel. I think it's fascinating to see it evolve, and it really sets this channel apart because basically every device you review has a special petscii port that specifically shows off its features. It's not something you can really get anywhere else on KZfaq

My mother entered my brother and I in a draw in New Zealand, he ended up winning 1st prize which was a commodore 16. Mum had stressed to both of us if one happened to win then the prize was for the two of us so we were stoked. We had that computer for approx 6 months when to our surprise Dad went and upgraded to the commodore 64 with the tape deck, floppy disk drive & dot matrix printer. Along with all that we got some games on cassette and cartridge, I remember really liking 'Who Dares Wins' on cassette and 'Lode Runner' on cartridge. We did eventually get some games on floppy disk and they loaded fairly quickly. We had a lot of fun with this setup as it kept us entertained for hours.

Back in the early 90s, I ran a CNet BBS off a REU using it as a ram disk on a C128 in 64 mode with two 1581s. Had the BBS menus and doors stored on the REU and the message base on a 1581. Think I only had a 2400baud modem but even with that the REU made a noticeable performance boost for users. Within a few years, moved on to a A500.

The C64 was my first computer. I'm always blow away by how much good programmers could squeeze out of that thing! The quick dive into assembly instructions and clock cycles was really interesting. I'd love to see more of that.

Really neat stuff! Not going to lie, I really miss 8-Bit Keys uploads… I’m sure you are extremely busy with all you projects, but I’d love to see you messing around on old keyboards again sometime. Any chance of that in the future? Or have you moved on from doing that for the foreseeable future? Regardless thanks for all the amazing things you share with us all! I really did enjoy seeing you clean up an old keyboard and then writing some fun music for it!

I had one of those. I even had it all wired up with extra sockets and the glue logic (74series ftw) to make it a two megabyte reu, just at 15 I never came up with the money for the actual ram chips. There was also an update to software to properly use all that ram. This was more ram than pc-xt's of the time.

I don't know why, but I absolutely love this channel's intro music

Great video as usual. Just wanted to say that, after the fall of CMD, we were in an REU desert for ages! The 1541 Ultimate II was some relief, but it was very expensive for a long time, and might still be considered a bit of overkill. I think we are finally going to start seeing actual stand-alone REU clones in the next few years.

Love these behind-the-scenes looks at old technology, bravo 8-bit guy!

That Sonic port is insane! It looks and sounds a lot like the Master System/Game Gear version. Something that is simply incredible with how limited the Commodore hardware was for that sorta stuff. It's also really neat to see every version Petscii Robots get updated to use every obscure and weird expansion out there.

I like that you have actual good sound production levels. Love you show!

When I was little, we bought a brand new C128 system with a 1084s monitor and the 1760 REU. We used it primarily for GEOS in 128 mode, and mostly to copy applications from the various disks into the REU at runtime so it was faster and easier to run a bunch of things at any given time. Of course, we had to reload it every time we rebooted the 128, but it was at a time when you never expected instant gratification. You'd sit down, boot up and load GEOS, then after it was loaded, pop in our prepared applications disks and copy them into the REU before we started doing anything. I remember trying to use it in C64 mode and never really understanding why it didn't do anything but that was my pre-teen self having a very rudimentary understanding of computers and what they were capable of. I do remember that the cost of our 128 system including a printer was somewhere near a thousand dollars at the time, and this was somewhere between the late 80's and early 90's. I want to say somewhere around 88 or 89. It's been a long time, but I vaguely remember the REU cost somewhere between $50 and $100 depending. Most people didn't have them, I knew more people that ran dual disk drives than had an REU at the time. Then again, we bought ours on base, so it's possible there was some kind of special military discount so my prices may be faulty. Seeing some others mentioning around $200 wasn't out of the question, it would have depended on how and where you got it, too.

I had a Commodore, but never heard of the REU. What a brick! No, TWO bricks to power up! Happy computing!

The C64 version had the ability to add more RAM to it. There was a jumper that you had to either cut or solder together, I forget which. And you also had to add RAM chips to the empty spots. They had two rows of RAM chips. One was populated and the other was not.

Yea! RAM those days was something you never get enough

I can’t believe I’m exited to learn about obsolete electronics I’ve never heard of

i enjoy the production value of your videos. sound, video and editing is all 10 / 10.

Another use of the REU that is difficult to appreciate these days is for a larger backbuffer in compatible terminal programs for bulletin board systems. Not everyone can keep up with a blazing 2400 baud modem so being able to scroll back and read the buffer was useful. The bigger the better.

I had a 1750 back in the day. I used it with my copy of C-NET/64 where a lot of the BBS software would be copied on startup. It made the experience a lot faster and allowed for the floppy drives to be used for file transfer and message storage. I think I'd gotten mine for around $350 at the time, but I can't remember exactly.

If you were looking for avg price of the REO, check Internet Archive (Run Magazine, Issues 80+ which is 1991 time frame) - Issue 85 - May 1991 - From Software Hut In PA - REU1750 - $129, 1700- $49, 1764-$109. Many of the old magazines had stores advertising items.

I used the 512k REU on my C-4, putting the GEOS programs I was running there which made it highly responsive. I thought that was the greatest thing, and now I have multi-terrabyte disks sitting on my desk.

4:46 The branch instruction takes 3 clock cycles if the branch is taken, 2 clock cycles if it is not. The branch is taken for every iteration of the loop except the last. Also, if the addition of the X register to the addresses indicated in the LDA, X or STA, X instructions crosses a page boundary (where each page of memory is 256 bytes), those instructions will take an extra clock cycle to execute.

Actually that BNE will usually be _three_ cycles, not two. BNE is two cycles when the branch is _not_ taken and either three or four cycles when it is taken, depending on if it needs to cross a (256 byte) page boundary. In a loop copying several pages of bytes it will of course be taken about 255 times as often as it's not taken, and there will also be a bit of extra overhead for setting up the loop for the next 256 bytes to copy. That's a minor quibble, though. Overall, nice job on explaining (for those not familiar with this stuff) why DMA was so much faster than programmed I/O!

It was great seeing you at Game Fest in Austin. I’m glad the copy of Sonic I gave you was put to good use. Great video as always.

Using it as a ram disk was perfect for running a bbs, color64 bbs to be specific. Especially if you had lots of kids for it.

Glad to see a video about the REU, have had one lying around for awhile and have been interested in them for a long time.

I always love seeing your videos, I'm not the brightest person but I love learning what you have to offer. We are so spoiled of today's technology but I highly invested in all your videos. Keep them coming!!

6:20 "not sure how useful since it will lose its contents at poweroff" -- puts new meaning to the age old wisdom of keep good backups :P

Just curious, ever thought of going on a small tour to give technical seminars devoted to discussing techniques for vintage tech restoration? If you, LGR, techmoan, Tech Tangents, and your brother were to hold a conference panel I'm sure there'd be a great turnout.

I had one of the C64 units with 256K... I added my own 256K bytes of RAM to it for about 1/10th the cost of buying the bigger unit. Just took a little soldering. later one, I bought a third part CMD RAMLink drive, which was a similar device, except that it had it's own power supply, plus battery back up, and it used industry standard SIMMs of 1,2 or 4 MegaBytes. So, I had a C64 computer with 4.5 megabytes of non-volatile RAM Disk (almost like having a hard drive, as long as the power didn't go off for too long) Ran GEOS OS on it, which was awesome because could boot into GEOS as quickly as a normal C64 could boot to basic. You should try to find a RAMLink if possible, they were really great devices

The ozmoo zcode interpreter supports the reu, so all zcode based games can now use it to preload data, and in the upcoming release, for a scrollback buffer.

The fact that you know so much about this stuff is simply astounding. Thanks for sharing!

At the San Francisco Commodore Show, must have been about 1986 (?) there was a C-128 demo running off of a REU. It was a near-copy of the Amiga Boing! demo. It was very impressive on its face, but it wasn't randomly hitting different places, it was just looping a couple of cycles of back and forth. Of course, the Amiga next to it was doing the Boing! while using about 5% CPU and having draggable screens, while the 128 was running all out just to show it. Still, the marvel is not that the bear dances well, but that the bear dances at all.

Brilliant video, thanks. It must take ages to do all the graphics but they explain everything so well! Really enjoyed that. :)

Excellent vid! Thanks!! As always, you rock!

Ah, a seemingly competent port of the Sega SC-3000/Master System iteration of Sonic the Hedgehog. Nice. very nice.

You seriously make the most entertaining videos Dave! I one day hope to have enough spare time to make something for the C64, VIC or Amiga that could stand up to the best!

It's been my experience a lot of "expand whatever up to" was usually a euphemism for "we don't forbid it" :p

Super interesting! Thanks for making this video!

9:29 I think maybe those of us that AREN'T living in caves wouldn't know about it.

Hey man I love your videos! Keep up the good work!

Neat! Two of the three channels I've rung the notification bell for have uploaded on the same day!

Always great to learn from a new video

Great and informative episode. Thanks.

This is a fantastic topic for a video. Fascinating stuff!

I remember I had a REU for my Commodore 64 specifically for running the bbs software Color64. Color64 had modules that needed to be loaded up every time a user went to a different section. Without a REU the modules would have to load off the drive which would take time. With the REU no loading time as it was much faster. I remember some bbs's that ran color64 used hard drives for the C64 at the time and didn't need the REU since the drives were fast enough to load the modules. Good memories and good times!

Really interesting video, thanks! Never knew about this hardware.

I remember programing the C64 when I was 10 years old! It was amazing and so ahead of its time. Great video!!

I had one for my C128. Used it mostly as a RAM Disk for GEOS. Made it lightning fast. Just had to remember to save any files back to disk.

Great Video! Love learning about old and quirky hardware :)

Great to see ya Dave! Another cool video!

Great video David! Very informative!

“Let’s go back to 1985 and the introduction of the Commodore 128.” Oh I wish! But happily I still have mine from back then.

Really enjoyed this - thanks.

A wonderful topic for a video, Thanks.

Hiya David, awesome explanations for the technical aspects. Working on learning reversing now, and it's always fascinating to see that, while we may have more bells and whistles on modern systems, it's still fundamentally the same as back in the 80s.

8/5/22 Great review, I still own my Commodore 128 with the 1750 ram expander, 5 1/4 floppy drive, 1581 3 1/2" hard floppy drive, and a C=> monitor. I ended up buying my ram expander from someone on Q-link. and your right it was quite expensive, but I was a bigger user of the various GEOS programs making my computer very useable as a desktop along with my HP Deskjet 500 where I could DL a printer drive off of Q-link. All that you said was true about speeding up things when using the expander, plus I had a jiffy Dos chip installed to speed up the booting. Nice to see that there still are users out there still supporting C=> in 2022. The fact that the 128 was a 3-in-one computer where I used both the 64 modes and 128 modes spent a lot of fun time and useful hours while never turning the computer off without any power or heating problems for years.

Great timing! My last 24 hours involved having all my food stolen by a bear, chasing that bear for an hour through the mountains at 3:00am, and hiking 8 miles back out to my car with no food, only to find that my car battery had died. I was SO READY for a chill evening at home, and a new 8-Bit Guy video is perfect for that! It's really amazing to see the clever engineering here

Dynamite stuff always here. Thank you!

Every time you play a version of PETSCII Robots, I just get reminded of Ultima 6.

I always love when the 8 bit guy uploads. his videos are always interesting.

Thank your fot that lesson. I could learn something. And it was a great video as always. :)

I really like these technical videos.

Another awesome video thank you so much

I enjoyed the Memory Management explanation and your Tee Shirt

My first foray into chip-stacking was with a 1764 REU. Cut the power trace on the edge connector and gave it it's own power supp;y with a battery back up! Ran an unlisted Color64 BBS for a few off that and a CMD HD

0:10 ahh, the too-on-the-nose working title for Back To The Future.

I still have one of these for my C128D, and it still works! Made things work much more efficiently.

I love this channel. I won't pretend to understand lots of what's going on but I am learning!

Very interesting, funky product

Me shaking my head in understanding not know what your talking about I just enjoy watching your videos lol

Very glad to have gotten one of these (and the super power supply for the c64) as part of a lot before the craziness that is C64 Sonic drove up the prices. Also very glad that I learned a bit about 6502 asm so that I could understand the bit about the CPU cycles! Awesome video as always

I love these videos that get into techie addressing stuff 🤓 keep it up!

This is the content we need in 2022

Thanks for the video! I’m old enough that I could’ve owned a Commodore computer, but I just never did. I love the technology of old computer systems, and you do a great job of explaining it. Also, love the shirt! Classic poem!

Great stuff! Thanks for the history lesson

Thanks David, I completely forget that we supported the REU in Maverick. Thanks for showing this device off as it was a somewhat niche product probably due to pricing.

David I hope you and yours are doing ok in all the wet weather in your area. My family is thinking about you. I hope your recently-repaired home stays as dry and watertight as a drum. -Morgan

The video clips, this expansion enabled was impressive. The Dallas intro sequence for instance.

I literally just used the globe demo to test a fix I did on my old 1541 this afternoon! Wow, what a weird world!

Dear David, Thank you for sharing useful information about Reu. Unfortunately I don't have real hardware, but thankfully vice emulator give us this chance to have fun moments with reu specially watching nuvie videos

Great video, crazy how they got around system limitations back then

Once you brought up the surprising capabilities of this device, I was hoping you'd mention that you ported Petscii Robots to work on it. Great to see that! The jump in visual quality is impressive considering this is possible by just connecting a peripheral to a regular C64.

9:26 Oh Wait, it included Sonic in this video! Nice work David!

Wow you know something good job Sir

Petscii Robots is on so many systems now, it's almost like benchmarking software for retro systems 😁

Nice! Was my dream to have one back in the days.