

Introducing the New Commodore 64 - will_lam
http://www.commodoreusa.net/CUSA_C64.aspx

======
marcusestes
Cramming a modern PC into a vintage C64 reproduction really is a terrible
idea. But as an old Commodore / Amiga fanboy I have to admire Barry Altman
(CEO of Commodore USA) for attempting to reawaken the brand.

After the sad bankruptcy spiral and eventual shutdown of Commodore the
trademarks ended up in the possession of a company based in the Netherlands
called Tulip Computers (Now Nedfield) who makes commodity PC workstations. The
did a little cheapo licensing of the brand here and there but basically showed
no intention of breathing life into the brand again.

Mr. Altman appears to have incorporated Commodore USA with the sole purpose of
attaining trademark licenses and attempting to tap into the large and very
latent Commodore enthusiast market.

It doesn't feel like he's going to succeed. But I applaud him for trying. Now
that Steve Jobs' face has taken the place of Big Brother in that 1984 ad, it
feels to me that the landscape needs a new "creative computing" competitor.
The Commodore brand could be such a cool fit, if they only had a decent
product.

They should reproduce the 4000 / Video Toaster combo:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nymVNhy4dw8>

~~~
tesseract
> the landscape needs a new "creative computing" competitor

I hadn't really thought of it this way before, but there is one. Arduino.

~~~
drblast
Yeah, Arduino does have that same spirit.

The nearly direct access to the hardware was what made the C64 so cool. This
new C64 has none of that, unfortunately.

~~~
daeken
> The nearly direct access to the hardware was what made the C64 so cool. This
> new C64 has none of that, unfortunately.

Every PC has near-direct access to the hardware. There's nothing stopping you
from writing your own BIOS, bootloader, kernel, or anything else -- it's
easier than it ever was before. Many people (including myself) really do this,
and enjoy it.

~~~
URSpider94
This may be true, but the C64 booted into a BASIC interpreter with PEEK and
POKE commands, making it possible to read and write to all of the system's
memory, including mapped IO ports, from the command line. Plus, monthly
magazines like COMPUTE'S Gazette offered in-depth tutorials on just about
every sub-system, from audio to video to disk I/O. System-level programming
was incredibly easy on the C64 -- I was doing it as a teenager, whereas I have
yet to write a device driver for a Linux PC.

~~~
hessenwolf
I practically wet myself with joy the first time I changed the colours of the
border and main screen with, erm, peeks or pokes; I can't remember.

~~~
Maci
POKE 53280 and 53281. Values 0 to 15.

------
tesseract
The PC guts seem boring and will inflate the price. Why not do a reissue with
functionality closer to that of the original, based on the C64 DTV [1] which
cost $20 or $25 when it was on the market, and sell it at a $50-to-$100 price
point?

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C64_Direct-to-TV>

~~~
alanfalcon
Anyone who is interested in this stuff that hasn't heard Jeri Ellsworth's
Google Lecture about her life and her experience designing the C64 DTV
30-games-in-one joystick must watch this.

[http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1053309060448851979...](http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1053309060448851979#)

~~~
tomconte
You may also like Michael Steil's awesome "Ultimate Commodore 64 Talk":
<http://www.pagetable.com/?p=54>

Amazing technical overview of the C64, including the latest in demo effects,
in 64 minutes.

------
tomconte
OK, when in doubt about any C64 stuff, the only place to go is the Lemon64
forum, and this seems to be real...

IN 1982, BOTH THE ORIGINAL COMMODORE "C64" & DISNEY'S BLOCKBUSTER "TRON" WERE
RELEASED. ALMOST 30 YEARS LATER, THEY BOTH SIMULTANEOUSLY RE APPEAR ON APRIL
5, 2011.

[http://www.lemon64.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=37431&highl...](http://www.lemon64.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=37431&highlight=)

And if you are like me an Unbeliever, check out Disney's TRON partners page:

<http://disney.go.com/tron/index_flash.html#/partners>

------
Groxx
A terrifying website, with lots of renders, few _photos_ , and a non-
functioning store. That's pretty "meh" in my book, and it even gets a Raised
Eyebrow of Questioning.

~~~
adrianbye
maybe a smart MVP ;-)

------
defroost
From the FAQ:

"10. What is Commodore OS? Our new Commodore operating system, will be a
unique Commodore and AMIGA centric Linux distribution, that will grow over
time into something far greater. Commodore OS will not be your run of the mill
Linux distribution."

<http://www.commodoreusa.net/CUSA_FAQ.aspx#Q10>

Judging from the website's fondness for the long deprecated bgcolor tag and
animated GIF's, my confidence them producing such an OS is not particularly
high at this moment.

~~~
kwantam
I'm not sure I follow. Are you claiming that unless one is well versed in css
and html5, one is incapable of creating a decent linux distribution?

debian.org gives the lie to such a notion, methinks.

I suppose you might counter that the good old Amiga was a feast of multimedia
technologies, and that somehow the modern equivalent is a pretty web page.
Again, I'll disagree with you; creating a media-centric OS is a pretty far cry
from making a pretty web page.

Heck, a slick-looking commodoreusa.net page might turn off potential customers
who'd otherwise be drawn in by the nostalgia stirred by the "ancient" look and
feel. That was certainly my reaction.

~~~
defroost
Debian? debian.org is a million times more modern, with RSS feeds,
translations in around 30 languages, decent looking markup, etc.

I was just making an observation about the 90's style source code, and said
nothing about slickness, or prettiness. This seems a bit of an oddity for a
tech company, since one would have to search for hours to find anything
similar in 2011.

Of course, writing an quality operating system and coding a simple website are
nowhere near the same level of difficulty.

------
Udo
This is a lost opportunity. They could have revived the brand by putting out a
_new_ Commodore. Modern hardware, super-slim, "the keyboard is the computer",
inexpensive. Maybe with a very simple and fast OS, like a light Linux or BSD
or whatever became of the Amiga OS.

~~~
lucasjung
If you click around their website a little, you'll find that they're doing
more or less exactly that. Most of their products are modern "computers as
keyboards," and they say that they are working on a Commodore/Amiga-flavored
Linux distro with a heavy emphasis on emulation for backwards compatibility
with classic Commodore and Amiga software.

I'm a little skeptical about the "inexpensive" part, though. No prices are
posted, but from the pictures and specs I don't think that they've driven
costs low enough to tap into the netbook market.

~~~
Udo
> _If you click around their website a little, you'll find that they're doing
> more or less exactly that._

I tried to, but the server was overloaded...

------
daeken
If this had a SID chip (or multiple!) in it, I'd buy one in a heartbeat. As it
stands, it's just a straight up PC with... a C64 emulator.

~~~
tesseract
If your primary interest in the C64 is to play with the SID, why not forgo the
C64 emulator and form factor and use a dedicated SID based MIDI synthesizer
(e.g. <http://www.midibox.org/dokuwiki/wilba_mb_6582>)?

~~~
tomconte
I bought a HardSID 4U because I'm not a soldering kind of guy:
<http://www.hardsid.com/>

Awesome little box.

------
mambodog
I think this should have been re-imagining of the C64 as a first computer for
a new generation of hackers.

I'm thinking of a high-level, empowering, introductory programming environment
in the vein of Hackety Hack or Love2D (because lets be honest, kids want to
make games), running on a Linux with an easy-to-use desktop environment
(Ubuntu/Unity?).

The hardware would be netbook/mobile type stuff and internet oriented with SSD
storage, Wifi, and HDMI for video output. No optical drive. Oh yeah, and a
gamepad, the modern equivalent of the joystick.

I'm too young to have grown up with a C64 myself, but to me this would seem
like a more worthy spritual successor.

------
teach
How I wish I had a working 1541 disk drive! I've got scores of programs on
floppy disk that I wrote when I was 11-14 years old that I'd love to read
again.

I doubt the disks are still readable, though. They haven't always exactly been
stored properly.

~~~
noonespecial
I found my old C64 in my parents basement. Just before I ebayed it, I hooked
it up. The old disks were surprisingly resilient and my 300 baud modem still
worked. I transferred many of the programs I wrote as a child in basic.

It was damn near a visceral experience to hear Renegade whistle out its
ancient tune as my C64 connected...

I can now say that I have code I wrote when I was 10... and then goto
_ashamed_.

------
tomconte
This is obviously an April's Fools joke, except they missed the deadline,
which is typical Commodore ;-)

In other news, if you want to join 60,000+ fans of the REAL C64, there's a
Facebook Page for that: <http://www.facebook.com/c64.fans>

~~~
dpapathanasiou
If it's a joke, they've been at it for a while; it was supposedly going to be
ready for Xmas 2010: [http://www.tgdaily.com/hardware-brief/51285-commodore-
makes-...](http://www.tgdaily.com/hardware-brief/51285-commodore-makes-new-
computer-with-very-old-looking-hardware)

------
asciilifeform
This is not a Commodore 64.

It is a cruel mockery.

The main appeal of the Commodore was simplicity and understandability. This is
a PC, that is to say, a piece of junk overgrown with cancerous accidental
complexity.

------
nzjames
I may be the only one who likes this. I've recently been looking for an old
commodore 64 for nostalgic reasons, there is no practical reason to own one
unless you're a demo purest. But I'm also in the market for an HD media player
and the specs look up to the task. I can get my retro gaming and media fix in
one package and decommission my xbox1.

Sure the price will be inflated but I can imagine leaving this sprawled out on
my lounge floor provided there are some decent retro usb/wireless joysticks to
go with it.

------
wbhart
I would love to buy a computer that is a modern upgrade of the Commodore 64,
as if the machine had continued to evolve. In other words, the CPU would be a
say 32 bit evolution of the original CPU with obvious changes to the
instruction set as found in the C64.

The memory space would be flat 32 bit addressable up to a gigabyte.

The sound and video hardware would work in a similarly simplistic way as the
original C64 did.

But the CPU would have similar performance to a modern CPU.

It would also have a modern (size) hard drive.

The whole thing could be done as an emulator. But the important thing would be
performance. The virtual machine would have to convert one assembly language
to the other by _compiling_ it on the fly, e.g. to say x86 code, and not by
interpreting it slowly!

And of course the thing would have ROM BASIC built in and/or a simple Amiga
style classic look and feel OS.

At the very least I'd buy one of these machines, especially if you put it in a
C64 keyboard style box.

~~~
jerf
We don't have virtual memory because the evil Intel monopoly forced it on us.
In fact they were late to the game. We have it because it's a good idea. We
don't have mediated access to hardware because the evil Intel monopoly forced
it on us. We have it because it's a good idea.

Had Commodore stuck around and continued to evolve some things may very well
have been different, especially in the UI arena, but I think you'd find that
by now the Commodore brand would have had to do the equivalent of the System 9
-> OSX upgrade by now at least once no matter what.

------
xbryanx
Gotta break out all my old C64 casette tapes.

------
eru
I like the C64 laptop much more
([http://benheck.com/04-05-2009/commodore-64-original-
hardware...](http://benheck.com/04-05-2009/commodore-64-original-hardware-
laptop\)---it) uses the actual old hardware.

------
inji
> Realtek ALC662 6-CH HD Audio

This should totally be SID, MOS 6581!

------
iuguy
These are the same guys that did the Phoenix[1] a while back, which was
essentially a knock off import that didn't do very well.

The C64 looks like a refination of the Phoenix in a C64-style case. Strangely
there's no CPU specs I could find.

[1] - <http://www.commodoreusa.net/CUSA_Phoenix.aspx>

------
malkia
Something more portable (iPad-ish) or more like a little toy with keyboard, or
mini-usb where you can plug one, and HDMI on the out would've been better.

But I guess people cared about the keyboard. I did - for my Pravetz 8C (Apple
][/e clone)

------
duck
I wonder if it will play my Frogger cassette tape that I still have up on the
shelf? :)

------
th0ma5
I'd like to see a working prototype at least. Those who are fans know that
seemingly starting with the success of the original product and then the
Amiga, the company has always had some kind of problem delivering something
new.

~~~
jerf
A "working prototype" of a bog-standard nVidia/Intel computer in a glorified
case? I don't think this is rocket science here.

------
mixmastamyk
Where's the RF connector to hook up to the TV if need be?

I'd like to send one back in time to myself circa 1982 ... but what good is it
if there's no capable display device?

------
joeld42
this is just a PC casemod. bleh.

~~~
skeltoac
It might actually do better if it were marketed that way. Make it whatever
standard form factor will fit inside the plastics and spend the rest on an
Ubuntu theme.

------
rikthevik
Wow. If those aren't too expensive, I'd love to get one. What a fantastic
desktop machine. This kind of seems like a late April fool's joke, however.

------
Sukotto
I'm not sure why I still feel so strongly negative towards Commodore for
destroying the Amiga brand.... but I do. Even after all these years.

~~~
gaius
I'm not sure either, since I doubt there is one single person the same between
this incarnation of Commodore that that one.

------
xsive
Commodore USA have been promising this stuff for ages and nothing has
materialised. It looks like vapourware to me.

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phren0logy
Maybe hosting the site on an actual C64 wasn't such a good idea...

------
wyclif
Anybody have a price on this?

~~~
michael_dorfman
Come on, it was one click away from the parent article:
<http://www.commodoreusa.net/CUSA_C64Select.aspx>

~~~
astrodust
Yeah, except the site is being crushed under high load.

I guess using a C64 as a web server was a bad idea.

------
TheSwede75
Still have my original Brown-Box, with Cassette player. . . I will ONLY buy
this if MR-Z comes back onto the field to crack games!

