Slimline replacement housing for C64 from Micro Accessories of S.A.

Not everyone liked the bread box shape of the C64, so companies like Micro Accessories of S.A. from the south of Australia (Adelaide) started to design new case shapes in collaboration with Peter Barker Tooling. Micro Accessories has been active on the market with C64 accessories for a long time, including the cartridge “Freeze Machine”. The “Slimeline” case is a slim replacement case and contains only one keyboard, and a C64 board had to be used. Micro Accessories licensed the design to British Evesham (Micros) Ltd., which produced it and sold it for 20 pounds. Since the replacement case is not officially from Commodore, the Commodore lettering is missing on the case and there is also no serial number, instead there is a sticker “Produced in South Australia by Micro Accessories of S.A. Adelaide Injection Moulders Peter Barker Tooling” on the bottom. Commodore itself kept the breadbin shape from 1982 to 1986 until the C64C (also called C64-II) got a case, which is very much reminiscent of that of Micro Accessories. However, one difference remains: the C64C has continuous ventilation slots, while the slimline version has 10 cm width rectangular surfaces on the left and right. There is also a recess for a reset button (for drilling through) and for D-DOS (for drilling through). D-DOS stands for Dolphin DOS, which replaces the C64-ROM with a new one and connects the parallel cable to the floppy drive to load data faster from there – even on the floppy drive a small board had to be inserted. Some housings had a DB25 extension (D-Sub 25pin) that stood out at the expansion port.

Pictures: http://imageshack.us/f/90/australischerc64mitverprr1.jpg/, http://silogomania.gr/inv/gallery/image/1007-commodore-64-micro-accessories-of-s-a/, http://www.stu-wilson.com/eveshammicros.jpg

• Original price: 19.95 British Pounds (approx. 24 €)