Commodore to relaunch 21st century version of C64 | Hacker News Reader

Commodore to relaunch 21st century version of C64

mediapost.com

17 pointsnhebb18 comments

I see this story about every 3 years. For a few seconds I think "wouldn't that be awesome." Then I realize that a modern C64 (or Amiga) will never be as good as my childhood memories. In fact, modernizing it would probably destroy it for me. Let me keep the memories of notching 5.25"s, BBSs, and LOAD "*",8,1

You can always use VICE.

Or MESS, but I never quite got that one to work.

Still, a modern PC in a C64-like box would be sweet. It's like a casemod without sacrificing a real C64.

We cannot preserve those machines forever - they'll end up breaking. This may be an economically viable way to preserve the experience of using a C64, as well as a source of mechanically compatible parts.

The joysticks of my Atari XE were manufactured 20 years after the computer.

This could use a helluva lot more information on what the product will actually be. A clone of the original C64? A new-style Windows box in a keyboard form factor? A machine with a Commodore-branded special-purpose Linux-based OS?

I'd heard something about this a couple months back, but don't recall what it was all about. I think your latter guess is closer than the former.

Oh, here we go: http://www.pcworld.com/article/191896/commodore_64_awakes_fr...

Progress really smacked me in the face when I bought a C64 emulator a couple of years ago.

What used to require a large keyboard with extra room for the computer, a large diskdrive, an expansion slot and a drawer full of floppies now completely fits into the size of one of those original joysticks. You hook up the joystick directly to the TV and it contains about 100 games.

I'm just as impressed, or more, that an iPhone is more powerful than the Pentium II desktop I bought for $2,000 in 1998.

I have one of those too. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C64_Direct-to-TV . You can even solder a PS2 keyboard connector to it and hook up a keyboard, then use it as a C64 and do a POKE 53280,0 or write a basic program ;-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeri_Ellsworth designed it. An interesting talk by her is at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1053309060448851979... in which she also tells about how she got interested in electronics.

Just rebranding or remarketing something isn't the same as actual innovation. The home computers of the 1980s, such as the C64, were fun in part because they represented something genuinely new and innovative in technology. Taking some PC hardware and slapping a Commodore sticker onto it isn't quite the same.

In 1982, you could build a computer with 4-bit color at 320x200 graphics, a 3 voice synthesizer, without any software to run on it at the right price and have a huge hit.

You just can't do it now. If you build a computer that uses anything but an x86 processor, you won't be able to sell it to people who like Windows. You could go for 1080p screens, but many high-end home PCs surpass that. You could run a complete Linux desktop, but that would face some user resistance.

It kills me but there seems to be no space for innovation in the desktop PC market.

Perhaps it's that barriers to entry on the net are so high. I think you could usefully sell a $30 computer (simple to program, cheap to make, flexible enough to be useful) in places like Africa etc to people who could not afford to have one otherwise but even a basic web browsing experience needs a lot of CPU cycles nowadays. Of course there are text-based browsers, but you might as well go with the $100 price point like OLPC and just look for subsidies. I have heard nothing about how programmable those are, for young hackers in poor countries, I hope there's access to python, js, or similar.

Closer to home, I would have quite liked to use the Playstation 3 as a computer, to the point that I learned quite a lot about the Cell chip inside it and started thinking about Linux distros again. But Sony made it non-expandable (boo), with no access to the GPU (WTF), were late with driver support (argh) and finally ditched the OS loader option entirely. They briefly hinted at giving away their 3d modeling engine but changed their minds about that too.

Now, I know they recoup the hardware development costs from royalties on the games and have an investment to protect, but with a little more patience, support, and faith in their own engineering instincts they would have been rewarded with PS3s popping up up at every science fair. People are nostalgic about their 80s computers out of all proportion to their quality because they were easy to do things with if you wanted.

I do think there's still room for lightweight and hackable products. One which missed the mark by going down the x86 route and overloading price and spec was the eee keyboard PC (http://www.tomshardware.com/news/eee-eee-keyboard-eee-pc-wir...). Imagine if it had been $99-200 and run android or so!

> I have heard nothing about how programmable those are

They are excellent. They come with a Red Hat OS, with Python, Smalltalk and lots of goodies.

> But Sony made it non-expandable (boo)

They needed to do it because they sell (sold) it at a loss. They want you to buy games, not to browse the web or crunch numbers. I would pay for an expandable, non-subsidized PS3 (extra geek points if they resurrect the News name). I bet it wouldn't be that expensive now. And I wouldn't ask for PS3 compatibility.

If you can make a credible application (eg academic or sw publishing involvement) to http://develop.scee.net/ my understanding is that a test unit + SDK is under $2k. It won't play commercially available games/DVDs/blu-rays or dump the hypervisor, but I doubt that's why you want it. Twice the super-fast RAM (or maybe expansion slots for same), RSX access & Linux-compatibility. As it seems quite secure there is a limited trade in used units, which I've seen for under $1000.

If you can live without access to the graphics core, older Linux-compatible models can be had cheap on eBay, like $3-400. Sadly the Cell doesn't seem to have much future outside of industrial-scale computing.

That 'huge hit' of 1982 would be a Microsoft Kin today. Also, only a few 'you' managed to make a big hit. It wasn't that easy. In fact, many winners of that time already had some other product (Commodore, Atari) to build upon.

Today, I think the main barrier is economies of scale; it takes a much larger investment to enter the market at a competitive price point (for example, Apple sells a petabyte of flash memory on the opening week of a new iPhone launch, and probably even an order of magnitude more.) because of this innovation almost has to happen in markets where supply is (still) so limited that the big boys do not want to compete (current examples include color e-ink and roll-up displays)

The huge hit sold a couple million units. That's about a million times more than the Kin.

The C64 was a hit because if offered much more than its competition did at the time at a lower price. 64K, 200x320 and 3-voice was pretty high-end 8-bit system by then.

But I agree - to have a monster hit these days you have to move a couple million boxes a month. That's seriously hard.

64 as in 64 bit I guess? ;-)

Yes, actually. From the article I linked to above: "The computer will be an all-in-one keyboard, with Intel's 64-bit quad-core microprocessors and 3D graphics capabilities, according to the site."

Not quad core. Dual-core Intel Atom D525 1.83 GHz with GMA 3150 GPU on-chip integrated graphics.

GameSpy article on new C64: http://pc.gamespy.com/articles/111/1116901p1.html

Intel's CPU specs: http://ark.intel.com/Product.aspx?id=49490&processor=D52...

Wikipedia's list of Intel Atom CPUs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Atom_microprocess...

That makes more sense! A quad core sounded a bit excessive for this sort of system. That article is from a few months after the one I linked to, so I assume Commodore had clarified the specs a bit more by then. This all still seems quite vague, though.

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