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.
> 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.
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.
I went the same route, though I did OS/2 for a couple of years in there (even had a team OS/2 t-shirt).
In 2000 though, I switched from Linux to Mac because I was a bit tired of X tweaking. I found that the hobbiest culture of the Mac and NeXT crowds reminded me of the C64 days. What sealed the deal was OS X where basically I had a BSD workstation with a good desktop.
Most of my old Mig and Commie friends are sadly on Windows 7. They don't care for UNIX for some reason and dislike Apple. Maybe it's like those folks that "outgrow" the music they liked when they were younger...
X tweaking: I spent years trying to get suspend/resume work without issues under X on a series of cheap laptops; I got close but never quite there. Now I run Linux only on servers and under Parallels on Mac. Not the same, such a shame.
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.
I am also from Europe and I have a pretty hackerish feeling about macs.
In the 90s, we developed a large science application in our lab for the Atari ST. When our last ST broke down, we used a Macintosh Performa instead that came with an Atari Emulator.
Everything worked fine and the old ST application, that ran a complex atomic physics experiment, was even faster on the Mac. It also did a job sharing with an eltec lab computer, like the Atari did before.
Although this was by far not a hacker job, we felt pretty cool with the good old Mac.
It also saved a phd thesis that could not have been finished without that program.
In science, Macs always were a (strong) minority in the labs, even in Europe. Today they are in the process of becoming a majority and replace linux (there are only a few windows machines that could be replaced ;o).
> 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.
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.
Just today I found an old issue of a magazine called "Ahoy!" that was devoted to the commodore 64. What a neat time period, it was so exciting. I remember typing in games for my TI in the early 80's. Now programming feels like work to me.
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.
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.
An Asus Eee Keyboard is useful as a desktop machine and you can install a C64 emulator on it. If you are buying this product, it's for the nostalgia factor (as I doubt they will be able to hit a commodity nettop/netbook price point).
An Asus Eee Keyboard has no Cherry switches, so, this is probably better built. And yes - nostalgia has something o do with buying this instead of the Asus or any other probably cheaper small PC.
So, how much would you pay for a computer unable to run Windows that can emulate a C64? Chances are, not much.
It wouldn't need to be much. Per one of my other posts in this thread [1] computers that can emulate a C64 (but lack a keyboard and other features of the original) have been sold in the past for around $20. I'm guessing the cost of the machine I am envisioning would be dominated by the cost of the Cherry keyswitches. I'd buy it for $100 and I bet they could make a nice profit margin selling it for even less than that.
You still need the space for one more computer (or one more keyboard), but I think it's a fair assessment. This one is more compelling to the space constrained who want to solve two problems (one almost nobody has - needing a C64) with only one computer.
And your solution is not constrained by the need to have a PC-like keyboard - it could be very faithful to the original C64. And I'd be delighted to buy one for US$ 100, as long as it was a C128D with an SD card for its hard drive.
My wife would kill me, of course, but there are things worth dying for.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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