Personal Account: Childhood Commodore 64 Catches Fire During Use

I flew back to Italy for the Christmas holidays, as I usually do. Here I have my childhood c64, on which I learned how to program, and which in the last few years I took to refurbishing.

Now it works like a charm, and of course I also added some bells and whistles, mostly stuff that allows me to easily transfer programs from a PC (a kung-fu cart and a pi1541) - so this year I thought it was time to actually do something with it!

I decided to write a small program, something that would make use of the hardware I had added, and maybe even show off some of the capabilities of the old machine.

Suddenly, I noticed a faint smell of burning plastic. At first I thought it was just the normal smell of old electronics warming up, but it quickly became stronger and more acrid.

To my horror, I saw a small plume of smoke rising from the back of the computer, and then a tiny flame appeared near the power supply area.

In the end, the damage was mostly contained to the power supply area, but the motherboard had some scorch marks and the plastic casing had melted in places.

The most likely culprit was a failed capacitor in the power supply, which had probably been weakened by age and finally gave out under the load of the new hardware.