Also I find the presence of the floppy drive in 2021 ridiculous. Yes the C65 had one - but that was a prototype machine from 1990 that was never produced. There’s no c65 software available on floppy disk, so no reason this couldn’t have used sdcards instead.
This one instead reminds me of those Vampire FPGA’s with SAGA graphics mode running on a so called Motorola 68080, that is so niche on a niche system that nothing is developed for it other than tech demos and software compatibility suffers to boot.
Then again, I don’t like to complain about these passionate projects! They’re clearly 80’s “dream machines” of sorts. I just think that from a financial/success perspective this may not be where most profit is at.
I can get a RPi4 for much less and install an emulator.
I understand that this is (should?) be better, but still, 800 euros!
I can imagine a version based on an emulation using a small ARM with the same physical keyboard and box, minus (or maybe not) floppy. The board is costly, and they expect to sell a finite number of units, so they need to recover the cost of the plastic injection tooling within that batch.
Having future versions based on emulated hardware would open up a market and drive down unit costs to more THEC64 Maxi levels, which would be extremely beneficial.
I'm looking forward to more retro machines, even if based on emulators, but with accurate physical reproductions of vintage hardware.
For lots of platforms, the physical object is not that important - We have 102/104-key with layouts that replicate most post PC-AT Unix workstations - it's the same layout we use, that the Archimedes and its descendants used, that most SGI's, most HP's and most other post-AT computers used. For those, the most important physical aspects are easy to replicate. If you really want, even a Trinitron tube can be replicated with a flexible OLED display and some bent plastic.
For computers like the C-64, 128, 65, Amigas, 8-bit Ataris, ST's, Apple II's, ///s, and earlier Macs, Sun workstations, Lisp machines, Alto's, Lilith's, DECs and others, the illusion will break if you use a PC keyboard and mouse. It'll feel strange.
For the C64 at least what you describe exists: TheC64 remake by RetroGames. It's exactly that, an ARM chip running VICE inside a case that looks and acts like a C64, complete with working keyboard. I own one and it's pretty cool.
Why not a real C64 I hear you ask? Well, real C64 are brittle, require swapping components, and outputting to modern TVs and pen drives requires expensive specialized hardware gadgets and addons anyway. Some hardcore fans do it, but it's not for me -- I just wanted it to work out of the box.
I'd consider buying one at 300€. I'm not even contemplating it at the current price.
>floppy ridiculous.
I disagree. Floppies are very adequate to this sort of hardware, and an important component of the classic feel.
I just wish the drive faced the right side (like a keyboard Amiga) instead. It's not like they have any ports in there.
Inserting floppies from the front seems extremely uncomfortable to even think about.
Anybody who could afford it did get a floppy drive. I got an Amiga 500 at some point, instead.
I still have the hardware and the tapes, so I intend to get everything operational again at some point. It's just in the back of the queue, as I am busy dealing with a lot of "retro" platforms already.
Using a hard drive for a c64 isn't uncommon.
The emulator has been used to develop software for it and most stuff is open source or free.
Plus C64 software runs on it like the 128 does in a C64 mode.
* dual SDHC™ card slots