Just received my Ultimate Elite 2 in the mail and my first few days with it have been a complete blast. This product is amazing!
Installing it in my C64c case was easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy. I plugged it in to my monitor (with the HDMI port the Ultimate Elite provides!) as well as finding one of my gazillion USB-C cables to power the beast up, and near-instant-presto. I have a killer retro computer with a lot of bells and whistles under the hood! The system did require some setup with downloading firmware and gathering up ROM files for the system. Once it was flashed, it was ready to go!
The system comes configured for USB, Ethernet, Wifi, HDMI, USB-C Power, SD card reader as well as the traditional serial, video, and joystick ports from the original 64 design. The power switch is now a three-position toggle that allows you to do several functions, including calling the U64 menu and system reset.
For my setup, I did not run Ethernet - instead, I relied on the wifi capability. This really was cool! I was able to FTP into the system from my PC and transfer my gobs of warez-galore to the SD card of the U64. This also worked well for searching for more warez using the built-in Assembly64 module. Below you can see me searching for Hardball, selecting the full D64 image on the ‘net, and selecting “Run Disk”.
The U64 permits two-SID chip configurations for stereo SID capability. While I have two installed in my unit, I have yet to test this capability out. That said, the sound reproduction is flawless (expected since I am using MOS 6581s in my system), and the built-in SID player is convenient! I downloaded 25 MB of SID files and through the U64 menu, selected a song and it instantly plays.
The configuration possibilities of the U64 seem endless, and operation of these features seems straight-forward. The largest problems I experienced was switching between the SD card operation to my external disk drives and vice-versa, often resulting in “Device not found” errors because of improper configuration setup on my part (failing to turn on or off the “Drive A” setting of the U64).
I LOVED the Software IEC functions of the unit. You can go anywhere on your SD card and set a mountpoint for SD2IEC operations. The significance of this is allowing sub-directories to be the root folder for software that is expecting it. Really worked nicely for my BBS software package!
Really cool stuff noted:
- Call up / Search for software from the internet and select “RUN” - Boom!
- FTP services! (and for ethernet users, remote desktop services/streaming!)
- Configurable drive operations from SD card, attached peripheral (including SD2IEC), USB
- Easily switch between PAL and NTSC
- HDMI!
- Built in copier, SID player
- Print-to-file operations
- Easy ROM switching
- Multi-disk games are SO easy now! Flick of the switch and select the next D64 image
- Works seamlessly with D64,D71,D81 files
Some things I noticed:
- JiffyDOS ran fine for the C64 kernal, but attempting to use the 1541/1571/1581 JiffDOS ROMs caused failures with operation
- Having my SD2IEC plugged into the cassette port caused my HDMI display to go whickity-whacked
And the ultimate test for the Ultimate, playing Project Firestart. A good day indeed.
