Building a 100% New Commodore 64 [video]
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The chips were previously available, e.g. from Individual Computers, which also produced new, improved mainboards (the C64 Reloaded) and a lot of other hardware and accessories for the C64 (and also for the Amiga computers).
The case is from a previous kickstarter campaign, which you can also buy normally now.
New are the keycaps itself, which finally seem to be shipping from the crowd funding campaign. Most likely he also backed the first attempt from someone who found and bought the original molding machine for the keycaps, but got bogged down by small little details and sadly never delivered. So it's good to see, that the second crowdfunding campaign from a different person who recreated the keys in a 3D layout and then went on to let them cut/print elsewhere, but which also took a long time to finally happen. Not few - including me - thought they lost their money a second time.
Since there existed previous test samples from both key campaigns, I'm confident someone already built a completely new C64 this century.
So, there you have it. The original video headline is quite a bit clickbaity and I honestly expected he did the layout of a completely new C64 board; nevertheless the video is fun and I'm happy that the C64 (scene) lives on in so many hearts.
Coming from the Z80/Sinclair universe, I never really “got” the fascination/nostalgia about the C64, although I do appreciate the 6502 and that the C64 is a small enough computer to fully wrap one’s brain around while having has a plethora of interesting architecture/design features (not to mention the SID chip, which is my favorite aspect of it).
Still, it is nice to see a fully modern recreation of it, and I hope things like the Raspberry Pi 400 (despit some stock shortage - that hasn’t affected this model as much as others) can play a similar role in getting kids interested in computers.
The RPi is fantastic, but it's far too complex to be described down to the machine code level in only 300 pages. I don't think even a million pages would describe the RPi to the same level as what we had with a C64. Of course, by modern standards, a new machine similar to the C64 (without the keyboard) would be rightfully called a small microcontroller and sell for less than $1.
No disk drive and my dad made me unplug it between uses...
Sure you can perhaps use the much faster CPU core to do both drawing and output in software, but (to me) that doesn't feel the same as having dedicated hardware with known architecture and limitations, shared among all machines of the same type.
>>BMC64 is a bare metal fork of VICE's C64 emulator optimized for the Raspberry Pi. It has 50hz/60hz smooth scrolling, low video/audio latency and a number of other features that make it perfect for building your own C64 replica machine. For more details visit the github link below.
So there is not OS between VICE and the Hardware.
The pinned comment is actually exactly your criticism.
Where did they buy them?
After all, it's not that long ago sprite crunching was discovered. Perhaps there are still other useful undiscovered hacks you could pull off.
Are there any efforts to decap VIC-II and create a 100% clone?
Using Shift to move left/up.