Like most Commodore 8-bits that followed it, the Commodore CBM/PET series of micro computers had at its heart a 6502 processor clocked at a perfectly adequate speed [for the time] of 1MHz. Indeed, to go faster on something that's now considered primitive hardware would surely be at best unnecessary and at worst complete madness? Well, not if you like to get relatively high performance out of such technologies.

Andre Fachat has created a 65816-based CPU replacement for the 80/82xx series CBM/PET machines, which, apart from speeding up the processor by an impressive ten times the stock speed (and more if you program it correctly), also has a 24-bit address bus and 16-bit registers, as well as an enhanced instruction set allowing more freedom than a standard 6502 processor, and better memory management too, potentially allowing access to up to a massive 16MB of RAM, though the hardware itself only has 1MB on board with a fully-programmable parallel FLASH-ROM at 512KB. Again, this may seem either unnecessary or rather puny: remember, though, that a typical PET had just 32KB of available RAM and 18KB ROM, so this is more than an improvement. It should certainly be a lot of fun for beleaguered machine-code programmers (and indeed BASIC programmers) to have a play with should you have a PET sitting around not doing very much.

Incidentally, the 65816 is the same processor used by some Commodore 64/128 accelerator cards such as the Flash8 and the CMD SuperCPU, and was also used in Nintendo's SNES and some Apple machines. Anyone for a Super Mario Land conversion using PETSCII graphics I wonder? To find out more about this exciting development, head over to tinyurl.com/Fast-PET.

Sticking with the Commodore for a moment, but this time the C64/128 and VIC-20 machines, www.CommodoreServer.com has recently announced the Comet64 Internet Modem which attaches to the user port and provides an Ethernet and RS-232 interface. This hardware will allow you to load software from and connect to the Internet (and presumably therefore a LAN) with the accompanying software. The website notes that "depending on software availability, you can view e-mail, chat, Twitter, Facebook, FTP, use CSIP (on CommodoreServer.com), WWW, or use just about any Internet protocol available today. The board provides what is known as Serial-to-Ethernet and works by sending commands to it to communicate on a high-level protocol (no need to use a TCP/IP stack or other low-level software). Any software that supports Serial-to-Ethernet may be used, so that's all good then, although I'd prefer viewing pages from the Internet with the 80-columns screen on the C128 rather than the 22 columns available by default on the VIC, but I don't suppose the latter would be too bad for Twitter and loading software.

Prices start from $66.99 USD (£43.60) in kit form excluding postage to the UK with the relevant software. For more information, head over to the site mentioned above.