Chameleon 64 Unboxing and Setup #c64

I received my Chameleon 64 in the mail yesterday from Vesalia. I've been very eager to test this out. After reading on the forums that it is still in a very beta stage, I didn't get my hopes up too high. I know it will be awhile before this has full functionality. Once it does, it will replace several items I use with one device.

After unboxing it, I popped it in and hooked up a VGA monitor. Then! Nothing...

The screen flickered and filled with garbage. I cycled the power several times with the same result. My stomach dropped. This was a pretty expensive device, after all.

I didn't panic. I figured maybe this was fixed in the beta firmware or "core" releases. I installed ChaCo on my Win 7 laptop and plugged in the Chameleon 64. It found it immediately and within a few seconds, I had flashed my first core, bringing it up to BETA 3.

I then plugged it back into the 64 and Voila! It worked this time. I was able to jump into the MMC64 file browser and see files on the SD Card. However, the VGA output looked pretty bad. I have a standard wide-screen VGA monitor. The screen had ripples cascading down the screen and the screen was located down in the far bottom right of the monitor. I then tried a neighbors VGA monitor which is square and much older. It was a bit better, but not much. I'm sure this will all be addressed in future releases, so I'm not worried about that.

So far, that's all I've tested so far. I will keep you posted!

Here are some pictures of the unboxing.