Undead Commodore 64 comes back for Christmas The Commodore 64 will rise from the grave before Christmas, according to the tiny company determined to reanimate the long-dead 80s icon. Commodore USA — the outfit that seemed to unveil a reincarnated C64 before failing to secure the rights to the name — has at long last signed an agreement with the rights holders, and …
Next they'll be reintroducing the ZX81 with all new components, what a joy it will be to work with that keyboard again :P
Seriously though how can anyone expect to cover costs let alone make money on something like this, its not like people will be lining up in their millions to buy this.
I know it's a bit silly, but I just want one too. And now I'm old enough to indulge my petty whims in a way my 12-year-old younger self could only dream of.
As an aside, I just spent £25 on a top-of the range 'educational' gyroscope after a similar 'fuck it, I want one, so I'm going to get one' moment. Even though I know the (hard) maths, I still think those things are one step from witchcraft.
Happy days.
It's difficult to sell C64 emulators because of the system ROMs -- Commodore Licensing don't own the copyright on them, and no-one knows who does. A few people have sold emulators and no-one has sued yet, but if someone works out who actually owns the copyright a year or two down the line there may be a sudden demand for a thick royalty cheque....
No mention of what OS it runs, but even if it comes with Windows 7, I bet you'll be able to run Linux on it, which will be first time a C64 case actually housed a decent OS. Lets face it, the C64's OS and BASIC were both awful and it was only saved by having good audio and hardware sprite support which, if you avoided using OS or BASIC calls (both of which were utterly dire as I said), did lead to some good games.
A better exercise might be to put a modern PC's innards inside a case that originally housed the best 8-bit OS and BASIC of all time - the BBC Micro! And one of the boot options would, of course, just boot into a BBC Micro emulation environment....
It's not like they had a lot with which to work. We may think of 64KiB as chump change now, but back in 1982, even 5K (the RAM in the VIC-20) was not cheap, and 64K (the RAM of the Commodore, and don't forget the ROM chips) was such that most systems didn't pack that much memory until RAM prices dropped later in the decade. If the BBC Micro had a better OS, it had more ROM with which to work it (32KiB vs. 20KiB for the C64). Both found their places, however, and I used a C128 as my first personal computer, so I'll let it go at that.
What I want to know is how they will adapt the C64's keyboard for the modern computing environment. After all, just for an example, modern PCs now routinely expect 12 rather than 8 function keys, and all of them can themselves be shifted, controlled, alt'ed, etc. And speaking of which, there's a whole bunch of other keys that are practically needed today.
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ISTR that 64-bit Atoms are available. Would it not be better for the modern machine for the masses to be 64-bit rather than 32? I think it might also be neat-o if it came with a well-configured Vice setup. Or one could get a whole bunch of stuff in Commodore Forever from Cloanto.
Paris, one well-configured vice.
Sweet indeed, thank you for pointing that out. I completely missed ElReg's link to the Intel specs. For some reason, I had a "Z" series stuck in my head as 64-bit. I will poke around to verify my recollection.
One thing I noticed at Commodore's site was they have AROS listed as an offered OS, but with no price on it. That is a little exciting, and one would hope it would help with exposure for the project. This little bad-boy with Commodore Forever and Amiga Forever would be fun.
Paris, fun little bad-boy.
Believe it or not, even the good old BBC Micro is not dead yet! There's a suite of them at the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley, where A level students are learning how to do *real* programming, without all the hand holding modern IDEs offer.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-10951040
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I don't think modern IDE's do hand hold. What they do is provide decent debugging facilities which are certainly superior to the way we used to debug code on the home computers from the 1980's.
The only way you could debug code from those days was to use print statements to see where the code was getting to, and to print out the values of variables. In terms of productivity, modern IDEs win hands down.
I remember debugging real time embedded systems by making use of whatever you could, and that regularly included the use of an LED on the circuit board, or a digital storage oscilloscope to examine an analogue waveform, interpret the modulated waveform as bits of data, then construct the actual packet's header in hex to work out what the f**k was going on! Ah, the good old days...
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> but then it would be a mac and the idea is to make something that doesn't suck
Not to mention CHEAP. Putting Apple hardware into a Commie chassis would be a travesty.
A travesty I say!
Since a Mac is specifically designed to fit in it's particular brick, there's no saying it's even possible. Whereas PC components of all sorts are cheap and plentiful. This is why modders have already pulled this off for themselves.
Parfisal: "Next they'll be reintroducing the ZX81 with all new components, what a joy it will be to work with that keyboard again"
I think they already did in the guise of the virtual "keyboard" on some flat thing called the "iPad" or whatever...
AC : "A hobbyist did this a number of years ago, hollowed out their old C64 and shoehorned the guts of a laptop into it for a bit of fun."
That probably *was* a big deal a few years ago. Now that every man and his dog has mangled a classic computer case in order to fit a generic low-end PC/slimline DVD writer combo inside, it's no longer novel.
Even that one (if it's the one J. Cook linked to) isn't impressive in retrospect. They didn't get the keyboard working- the one bit that would complete the illusion. However, that would require more technical skill than just sawing bits off the case and slapping some crappy old PC inside.
And no, you didn't get your C64 to run at "911 times its original speed", chaps. You got some off-the-shelf mini-ITX PC hardware tarted up with a non-functioning C64 case to run at exactly its normal speed.
Today Adam showed definite signs of both intelligence and emotion. He communicated with me much more frequently during his illness, explaining why he thought he was in such a sorry state and on occasions babbled on incoherently about his dog. Obviously malnutrition has affected his train of thought. He also told me about how sorry he was that I didn't communicate with him as often as I might and that he missed me ruffling his hair. I am deeply moved by such devotion, especially when I consider how badly I have treated him over the past few days. I resolve to take better care of him from this day on
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Just a bog standard intel job. Nothing to see here.
Now... if this "Commodore" had managed to persuade the evil that is SONY to shoehorn an something like an unlocked PS3 with a bit more ram into that box... Or some de novo design of their own. Anything to be different. Some other powerpc. Xenon... Arm/derivative ... whatever.
Now...
THAT would be something. Different, unconventional. A Total Geek machine. I'd buy that.
But they probably don't have the imagination or budget.
As it stands... this 'Commodore' Atom offering is extremely lame. In fact, I can't think of anything lamer than this.
To be honest, I perceive it as an insult to the memory of the C64. It amounts to the same as putting the same kit inside an Apple ][ case. Absolutely no respect at all, these young ones. Just cashing in on the legend of the C64.
There I've said my piece...
Oh wait, not completely, I'd like to take this opportunity yet again to flip Sony the bird. F@ck you, you bastards.
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There seem to be recurring stories in media.
For example, in car mags, every now and then Ford will show a coupe, and the car mags will exclaim "THE CAPRI IS BACK!"
And so it is with IT rags, every so often someone dusts off the C64 name and the headlines exclaim "THE COMMODORE 64 IS BACK!"
I own a DTV (basically a C64 in a joystick with games included), and unfortunately the joystick is very poor quality, so make do with emulators and a CD full of C64 games I found at a car boot sale.
Besides, didn't they do the "all in one" PC thing a few years back?
"Commodore 64 web.it" it was called, it featured a 486 chip, Windows 3.1 or CE on ROM, Lotus SmartSuite, a built in modem with Netscape Navigator / CE explorer, but it did also have a proper C64 emulator! :)
Been trying to find one on ebay for years....
I wonder if they can make it so that we can print the alternate pictures on the keys?
My first BASIC program (on the VIC - I had to wait for a while 'till I got a C64) was the flying bird one in the manual. Basically a print command, then a count to and another print command with a goto 10 at the end, but DAMN! I felt like I was in Tron!
for what most people would use that system for
dont forget any Gamer of any note at all would want a seperate keyboard and mouse, like razer or logi products to play any modern game.
for emulation and "casual" gaming, the ion2 is fine, in fact I had Race Driver Grid running on an ion1 system with an Atom330 2gb ram and a 320gb hdd.
the only downside is that the keyboard will have to be different , but I could live with that
I will put my name down for one :)
I kind of agree there. The new MINI != proper Mini.
But this C64 revival would be more like packing the engine and internals of a Toyota Yaris into an original Mini bodyshell. Not a proper mini as in no rubber suspension, no A series engine, no central speedo etc. but looks like a Mini.
Whereas the "MINI" comparison could be made against those "Commodore" gaming PCs, which like the large BMW hatchback, are an arbitrary naming exercise and an irrelevancy in the history of the original article.
google "mmbeeb" for the DIY version. It's just a user port connection and a few discretes
Or there are plenty of other ways to add modern storage media to the things. See
http://www.stairwaytohell.com/sthforums/viewtopic.php?p=27708#p27708
for a recent discussion of the various methods.
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Since the C64 has a SD card adaptor available for it, near instant loading is a reality.
Not sure what the point of this new unit is. I love the old beige bread bin, but reusing the case? I have a C64 and it sits next to my Acer Revo PC which ironically runs pretty much the same spec as they are looking to shove into a 64 case.
If you want a 64, go buy one one Ebay. If you want a small and neat PC go buy an Acer Revo. Or have both like me!
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I'm not really convinced there's a market for this item. It's clearly intended to be nostalgic and is aimed at people in their 30's and 40's that owned them as kids. But, we want them with the actual innards!
Creating a computer in the same case as a C64 but with totally different innards doesn't make it a C64!
It's being marketed as a C64 and so clearly aimed at the nostalgic market but the kids of today won't have that nostalgic feeling: they weren't even born when the C64 was around! So what's in it for the teenagers of today?
To make it nostalgic means it has to be able to play the original games of yesterday and will those games appeal to the kids of today when they're lacking the blazing 3D graphics.
Let's be honest, I love playing old games like PacMan, Defender but I get bored with them very rapidly now, they don't hold my attention like the Far Cry, Half Life 2.
If it's intended as a games computer then there are other consoles which already do that, so this new C64 needs to have some unique selling point, perhaps that's the price..perhaps not.
To gain a low price point requires a large market, the games console manufacturers in the past have regularly sold consoles at below the cost of manfacture in order to achieve market penetration and made up the losses in the sales - and higher than otherwise would be- price of the software.
Does anyone really think this nostalgic C64 is going to have as large a market as say a Wii games console?
What have they done?
They're taken one of my cherished childhood memories, and gave me a box full of LIES!
(Falls to the ground and looks to the sky)
WHY ? Sweet God in heaven, why do they torture me so? They pass a new C64 before my eyes, then tell me it doesn't play C64 games. How could a loving God allow this to happen? WHY ?
(collapses to ground after complete mental breakdown)
(fade to black)
Altman is just another unqualified quack, the likes of Bill McEwan and the jokers behind the Gravel, tarnishing the legacy of a dead company. It's disgraceful what this parade of starry-eyed amateurs has done to the Commodore name.
Jerri Ellsworth's DTV was the only product of any value released in a post Commodore world to bear the moniker proudly.
Seriously, what could possibly motivate these people to resurrect the brand, aside from the nostalgia a handful of silly geeks (I include myself) share? In its painfully protracted decline, Commodore was perceived as a joke in the marketplace, revered and cheered on only by those of us with the perspective and memory to care. To Joe Consumer, computer meant PC or Macintosh by the late 90s, which is as far back as his memory will go. (Ancient history in terms of computing!) What credibility does the brand have today, in a world that foolishly believes Steve Wozniak invented the personal computer, doesn't know an Amiga from a pile of old microwave parts, and just vaguely remembers the toy computer they got for Christmas in 1984.
Let Commodore rest in peace already.
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