Introducing the New Commodore 64
commodoreusa.net
commodoreusa.net
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
I hadn't really thought of it this way before, but there is one. Arduino.
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.
A) Written in less than ten man-years without being a Unix clone and/or using existing C drivers
B) Displays modern video
C) Runs on a neighbor's PC
I speak as a frustrated OS developer.
1)Arduino Issue: http://makezine.com/25/
2)Arduino Projects: http://makeprojects.com/Topic/Arduino
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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Toaster#Video_Toaster_Fly...
Copernicus. Wasn't he Polish?
...and the Lords of Acid soundtrack.
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.
I could give this to my son and he would still be able to browse the web, read his e-mail and do his class assignments. A c64 is a toy.
So, how much would you pay for a computer unable to run Windows that can emulate a C64? Chances are, not much.
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.
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 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.
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...
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).
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1053309060448851979...
Amazing technical overview of the C64, including the latest in demo effects, in 64 minutes.
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.
http://www.lemon64.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=37431&highl...
And if you are like me an Unbeliever, check out Disney's TRON partners page:
"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."
http://www.commodoreusa.net/CUSA_FAQ.aspx#Q10
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I tried to, but the server was overloaded...
Awesome little box.
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.
I doubt the disks are still readable, though. They haven't always exactly been stored properly.
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.
In other news, if you want to join 60,000+ fans of the REAL C64, there's a Facebook Page for that: http://www.facebook.com/c64.fans
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.
It is a cruel mockery.
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.
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.
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.
This should totally be SID, MOS 6581!
The C64 looks like a refination of the Phoenix in a C64-style case. Strangely there's no CPU specs I could find.
But I guess people cared about the keyboard. I did - for my Pravetz 8C (Apple ][/e clone)
I'd like to send one back in time to myself circa 1982 ... but what good is it if there's no capable display device?
I guess using a C64 as a web server was a bad idea.