Introducing the New Commodore 64

http://www.commodoreusa.net/CUSA_C64.aspx

by will_lam • 15 years ago

225 92 15 years ago

th0ma5• 15 years ago

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.

jerf2• 15 years ago

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

joeld42• 15 years ago

this is just a PC casemod. bleh.

skeltoac• 15 years ago

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.

_b8r0• 15 years ago

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

teach• 15 years ago

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.

SwellJoe2• 15 years ago

Yeah, I still have my Color 64 BBS boot disk, which had a bunch of custom games, graphics, and other stuff I made when I was about 12. I'd be amused to see that stuff again, though I also suspect it's probably long gone, since the disk has been passed from bookshelf to garage to attic to storage, etc. over the 20+ years since.

noonespecial• 15 years ago

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.

Groxx• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

maybe a smart MVP ;-)

tesseract7• 15 years ago

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

reitzensteinm• 15 years ago

Agreed. This seems like a tween product - too inauthentic to appeal to Commodore 64 fans and too ugly to appeal to anyone looking for a media PC.

dotBen• 15 years ago

Hardly 'tween' then - more like DOA.

mayank• 15 years ago

You mean it's a hipster product.

rbanffy6• 15 years ago

Well... I'd buy one.

alanfalcon• 15 years ago

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...

kragen• 15 years ago

I am pleased to discover that youtube-dl can successfully download this video.

tesseract7• 15 years ago

And if you aren't sufficiently impressed by that, look up her from-scratch pinball machine or her basement CMOS fab or any of a million other things. I am in awe of Jeri's creativity and her ability to find the time to do so much cool stuff.

tomconte4• 15 years ago

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.

zenocon• 15 years ago

Wow -- thanks for that. Great lecture. Little golden nuggets like this are what make HN so great.

andywood• 15 years ago

This was incredibly inspiring. Thank you.

daeken3• 15 years ago

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.

tesseract7• 15 years ago

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)?

tomconte4• 15 years ago

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

Awesome little box.

daeken3• 15 years ago

Oh, I know. There's also hardSID and all those, but this would be appealing with that one simple addition.

URSpider942• 15 years ago

And, it's missing the original C64 game ports (like Atari joystick ports), which had OUTPUT capability!

inji• 15 years ago

> Realtek ALC662 6-CH HD Audio

This should totally be SID, MOS 6581!

tomconte4• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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-...

eru• 15 years ago

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

marcusestes• 15 years ago

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

tesseract7• 15 years ago

> the landscape needs a new "creative computing" competitor

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

drblast• 15 years ago

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.

evanrmurphy• 15 years ago

Could you recommend resources for learning more about Arduino? Is http://www.arduino.cc/ a good place to start?

chalst2• 15 years ago

When I saw the title, I hoped the story was about Arduino hardware...

tintin• 15 years ago

And the Beagleboard came in mind (http://beagleboard.org/).

oasisbob• 15 years ago

Thanks for that Video Toaster vid! Really brought me back.

The Video Toaster was way ahead of its time. When I was doing video production, we were still using a Video Toaster for live CG and graphic display, and that was in 2002.

alexqgb• 15 years ago

The Video Toaster introduced me to non-linear editing...in 1993.

chopsueyar2• 15 years ago

I got that video in the mail when I requested it in 7th grade. I must have watched it at least 30 times.

Copernicus. Wasn't he Polish?

...and the Lords of Acid soundtrack.

rbanffy6• 15 years ago

> Cramming a modern PC...

Sadly, there is little option to that these days. A computer that can't run Windows instantly loses 90% of its possible buyers.

If you go that way, you'll have to price the computer as a novelty item and you won't be able to use high-quality components like the cherry keyboard these computers have.

tesseract7• 15 years ago

Among Commodore fans? I doubt it.

enduser• 15 years ago

> it feels to me that the landscape needs a new "creative computing" competitor.

If you're looking for a creative hobbyist computing platform, I think you're looking for Linux. I used Apple from Apple II to original Mac up through the early PPC systems and then switched to Linux because it has the hacker culture that originally lured people to Apples/Macs.

The creative potential is not limited just because Linux -can- look just like a mainstream desktop OS.

SwellJoe2• 15 years ago

I was a C64 and Amiga user until 1995. In 1995 I switched briefly the Windows 95, and then, already disgusted and bored by Windows, switched to Linux.

I found that nearly everything I had loved about the Amiga and C64 culture was stronger and more vibrant in the Linux and Open Source world. The only negatives were that the graphics and sound capabilities of Linux at the time (and still do, honestly) lagged behind Windows significantly, making it difficult to think of it as a creators system, unless what you were creating was software. I suspect part of the reason I moved more and more into software development and IT-related work was partly because the system I loved to work with was simply not capable of doing music and audio on a professional level (and still isn't, despite near-heroic efforts on the part of a few developers; if the kernel can't maintain an audio stream that doesn't skip and sputter, it's impossible to ever produce great audio).

Anyway, Linux and Open Source is definitely the heir apparent to the Amiga and C64, and I know many people from those communities ended up in the Open Source world.

SeanDav• 15 years ago

Not sure I agree with your comment about hackers migrating to the original Apples/Mac. In my opinion the original PC environment felt more "hackerish" and the Apples/Macs were known for their good graphics and consistent user interfaces and not as hacker machines. Perhaps this was different in America as I come from a European background.

norswap• 15 years ago

The problem with Linux is that it works better with people who like to fix stuff than with people who like to make stuff.

Goladus• 15 years ago

Why is it a terrible idea? Why doesn't it feel like he's going to succeed?

TheSwede75• 15 years ago

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!

tomconte4• 15 years ago

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...

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

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

xbryanx• 15 years ago

Gotta break out all my old C64 casette tapes.

phren0logy• 15 years ago

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

nzjames• 15 years ago

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.

defroost2• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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.

defroost2• 15 years ago

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.

hvs• 15 years ago

I'm not saying that they are going to create a great OS, but those that know web design and those that build operating systems are often a disjoint set.

chipsy• 15 years ago

If it looks correct and doesn't cause a gaping maintenance problem, I wouldn't knock it. It's a promotional site, not a web app.

rbanffy6• 15 years ago

Be fair.

It's rather easy to roll out a Debian-derived distro that's Commodore and Amiga-centric by changing defaults. There are themes, icon sets and emulators already packaged that makes this more or less a click-some-checkboxes job.

rikthevik• 15 years ago

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.

xsive• 15 years ago

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

malkia• 15 years ago

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)

Udo2• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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.

Udo2• 15 years ago

> 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...

wyclif2• 15 years ago

Anybody have a price on this?

michael_dorfman• 15 years ago

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

astrodust• 15 years ago

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

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

wyclif2• 15 years ago

Please. I knew it was there, but I couldn't see it because the server was getting crushed at the time.

duck• 15 years ago

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

mixmastamyk• 15 years ago

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?

mambodog• 15 years ago

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.

asciilifeform2• 15 years ago

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.

wbhart• 15 years ago

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.

jerf2• 15 years ago

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.

gaius2• 15 years ago

There was a PowerPC Amiga IIRC http://www.amigahistory.co.uk/ppchistory.html

Sukotto• 15 years ago

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.

gaius2• 15 years ago

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

Introducing the New Commodore 64

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