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Comment by joss82 | Hacker News Reader

I wish I could upvote you twice.

This is so very true, I can't think of any device that will offer them any kind of improvement over the brand new C64 scenario.

What device that is installed today will still be working 30 years from now? Maybe some appliances without moving parts? Some raspberry PIs?

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Your average church organ is expected to last 30 years, and large, representative instruments are expected to last hundreds. That's why the big ones are so low-tech. That's intentional.

We replaced our (digital) organ a couple of years ago. The previous one dated from 1992. People were surprised that we needed to replace it so quickly: I asked how many of them were still using an Amstrad word-processor from 1992.

I helped out a local church a few years ago that had an electronic pipe organ from approximately 1980. It wasn't digital at all, it was purely analog. Some of the keys didn't work any more, and others were out of tune. Basically, the way it worked is that every key had a whole circuit (with two key circuits per pluggable card) behind it which generated the tones; it was ridiculously inefficient. Over time, a bunch of the capacitors had gone out of spec, beyond the ability to use the potentiometers to compensate.

On the other hand, there's plenty people who are still using a HP calculator from the same era. There's nothing inherent to computers that forces a rapid turnover. It gets really problematic when you have capital equipment with a lifetime of decades controlled by a computer that for some reason needs replacement every five years.

Organ builders have solved the problem: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orgellandschaft_Ostfriesland

The reason to get on the emulator platform is that it only needs to be something that can run an emulator and have a bit of hardware hooked up, which is nearly everything that exists today. The "nearly everything that exists today" will be easier to get a hold of, even in 30 years, than Commodore hardware.

Just recently Individual Computer released a C64 motherboard replacement that is cycle compatible with the original, with the original IO ports etc.

On top of that there are about a dozen FPGA boards with a wide variety of C64 cores that will also give you more or less (depending on version) cycle compatibility with the C64 and varous degrees of availability of ports.

I think you underestimate how long hardware compatible with these systems will be available vs. the effort that would be involved in keeping an emulated setup working across migrating hardware and OS models and ensure the hardware interface they need keeps working for each new generation.

Will it really? There are devices that refuse to setup because their activation servers went offline after a few years now.

I couldn't even setup an iPhone 5C without giving it a connection to the internet.

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