It’s back… and better than ever! The new Commodore 64 is a modern functional PC as close to the original in design as humanly possible. It houses a modern mini-ITX PC motherboard featuring a Dual Core 525 Atom processor and the latest Nvidia Ion2 graphics chipset. It comes in the original taupe brown/beige color, with other colors to follow.
Since its hardware makes it essentially a PC rather than a copy of the original, I’d sure miss having to re-learn all those PEEK and POKE locations. The original C-64 was unusual in that sense, since most of its memory addresses were each dedicated to a specific function, e.g., setting colors or sound “envelopes”.
Probably the most fun was getting a book with program listings in “standard” Basic and trying to revise them to run on the C-64 which used a drastically different Basic (no if-then-else capability, for instance).
I loved the C-64 back in its days and had tons of games for it!!! What were some of your favorites? I used to play Activision’s Beamrider! (My favorite shoot-em-up game of all time for hours!!!)
I remember Activision when I had an Atari 2600 back in the 80’s. The Atari had great variety of games, crappy graphics on some of them, and than Activision came out and I remember being like WOW! Who didn’t love Pitfall???
Sadly, though I think those days are gone. The C-64 revision just looks exactly like the original unit, and it may not be powerful enough to handle the OS of a true specified computer. I just can’t picture a C-64 running modern versions of Windows! However, for games…AWESOME! Do any of you remember Pirates! or Telenguard?
I seem to remember that the Commodore 64 knocked my Trash8os off the market shelves, yes? Very traumatic for us Trash80 fans. But unlike some people I didn’t get rid of my TRS80s. In fact, I collected a few more along with all kinds of circuit boards and all I need to do to get that old feeling is pull one off the shelf and fire it up. That can be very helpful when I think one of the newer machines seems to have slowed down. Some of you remember, yes? Input a command and then make lunch. Come back and maybe the task is completed. Yep, I love my old Trash80. To heck with that upstart Commodore 64! And sure don’t want grandpa’s grandchildren around in the form of a look-alike.