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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