The Commodore 65 | Hacker News Reader

The Commodore 65

zimmers.net

103 pointskmooney25 comments

Neat! It looks kinda like an updated version of the old C=128 that was my first personal computer as a kid. My dad picked that one up used from a guy at work along with a pile of floppies. I wasn't allowed to hook up the modem that completed the "package" so I didn't quite understand what a lot of the programs were for or why so many of the games had weird (but awesome) intro screens with flashy graphics and music better than anything in the actual games. That was my unknowing introduction to the world of BBSes and crack demos. Either way, that was a really fun computer to learn with. Came with a couple of massive manuals and booted straight into Commodore BASIC so I was making my own flashy screens and bleeps and bloops soon enough (god I loved that SID chip). Never did get the Amiga I wanted later on and by the time I could afford my own used computer, it was a beige box Intel machine running DOS.

Reminds me of Miles Gordon Technologies' SAM Coupe - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAM_Coup%C3%A9. The SAM was also a 1989 'second gen' 8-bit machine, offering backward compatibility to a classic 8-bit machine - in the SAM's case, the ZX Spectrum - in a package more reminiscent of the 16 bit Atari ST or Amiga 500.

Very much so, I had a Sam Coupe and it was a lovely machine but it came our about a year or two too late and had some firmware bugs. If it had come out in 88 or 87 it might have gained some serious traction and had spectrum users switch to it.

Its a bit like my Oric Telestrat, which was an upgrade to the Oric-1 -> Atmos machines, in that it gave a full 64k and had expansion options.

Sure was a wild and woolly period of computing - so many wonderful machines, too many different ways to develop things. Just like today, only cuter ..

The Telestrat seems to fit more in the second wave of the original 8 bit era - with the Spectrum +2, the C=128, and so on. The SAM and the C65 which this piece talks about were later (late eighties, not mid eighties) and seem to have been much more capable machines: the SAM, for example, had 256K of RAM, expandable to 4.5M, 6 channel stereo sound, and a 6MHz processor (compare to the Atari ST or Amiga 500's 68K running at 7.1-8MHz - vs. the Spectrum's Z80 at 3.5MHz and the C=64's 6502 at 1MHz). This was really about trying to create 8-bit machines which could survive in the 16-bit era, easing the transition for users and developers.

Then the whole lot got eaten by the PC.

True, thats the right context - in my case though, the Telestrat was "the machine that almost made it to the 90's" in a similar fashion.

It was a great time to be interested in computers. Much complexity, many options, and so little time .. which eventually ran out for all of it. Only a handful of us are still using these machines for things these days..

I agree with your comment, mostly.

Just mention that comparing MHz is not quite right in that era. For example Speccy's 3.5MHz were not that much of an advantage compared with the 1MHz of the C64 if you take into account that it didn't have hardware sprites and all had to be implemented by software, 48K models didn't have dedicated audio chip, etc.

The lack of hardware sprites was easily overcome by the raw speed of the spectrums CPU. Also at anything other than sprite focused games, ie vector graphics or the like the Spectrum smoked the C64. And even with sprites the C64 hardware was limited to 8 before you had to do strange multiplexing.

Sound wise the C64 was better but in terms of speed the Spectrum dominated.

I am just delighted to have sparked a Speccy/C=64 'which is best' fight, on hacker news, in 2015. Keep that flame alive!

Of course, it goes without saying that the spectrum was best.

I didn't say what was best, I said that comparing "only" MHz is missing part of the picture. Today machines are easier to compare because they have similar functionality, but back in the day it was different.

I had a ZX Spectrum +2A back in the day and I've programmed several games for the speccy, and the attribute clash was a pain :)

It's well know that Speccy is more funnier that the C64 :D

I'm enjoying the fact that the Telestrat sparked it. ;)

Oh yes, that thing. I had one, but it was too late, PC already was taking over :(

my HAD comment:

'design started in 1989? Commodore was so mismanaged its not even funny :( Another pointless pet project like C128 (I had one, what a piece of shit, there was pretty much no c128 soft so you ran it in c64 mode all the time, at twice the price). They were already selling Amiga 500 in 89, and you could go out and buy 386DX 40MHz or first 486s. What were they smoking to come up with 3MHz 8bit computer when market moved on to 16/32 bit? Commodore didnt know what they had when they took over Amiga :( and kept wasting money and R&D on pos like this.'

Just to reiterate, post Jack Tramiel Commodore hired new CEO with industrial construction background who knew F-all about computers or business. This new CEO canned completed and almost ready for production Commodore laptop project because Tandy CEO told him there is no money to be made in laptops (while selling HUGELY popular TRS-80 Model 100) ... This is like GM calling Musk, and convincing him to cancel Model 3 because there is no money to be made in ~30K electric cars, while selling Volt and planning Bolt.

> What were they smoking to come up with 3MHz 8bit computer when market moved on to 16/32 bit?

I think the A500 cost more than 8-bit money, and back then a barebones 386 from a computer shopper ad cost about the same. Add VGA, monitor, sound card, hard disk and you far exceeded the A500 cost and there still weren't many good arcade type games for the PC.

They probably wanted to sell to gamer-pirates. I remember thinking NES users were getting shafted buying $40 rom chips, when 100 floppies cost $25 and some of my friends had huge libraries to copy and trade.

Edit: I liked the C128. I used CP/M on it at times. Ultima V was cooler to play in 128 mode. 80 columns, wow, I used that all the time with a 128-mode terminal (was it "desterm?"), some word processor I can't remember now, and GEOS was better except that it did not know how to handle the display aspect.

The jury's still out on that one, though. Maybe there is no money to be made in ~30K electric cars. :-) But I am almost certain that's not true.

Commodore 64 was still selling very well in '89 (1.5 million in '88 - I don't know specific numbers for '89), and continued selling well enough that Commodore kept manufacturing them right up until their bankruptcy in 1994.

You can say a lot - mostly bad - things about Commodore management, but they had actual hard sales numbers that demonstrated that there still was a market for a really cheap entry-level computer in 1989.

Their big problem was figuring out what to do in that space.

Here's the blog of a guy who's building a machine based on it: http://c65gs.blogspot.com.au/

I remember reading about the c65 in zzap!64 back in the day.

This (old) page has a bit more info.

http://www.floodgap.com/retrobits/ckb/secret/65.html

The complete issue on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/zzap64-magazine-079

It is just a prototype they only made 50 or 200 of them.

It is backwards compatible with the Commodore 64 but runs a different CPU that runs a 3.4Mhz that can go into 6510 mode. Then a Vic-III chip that has graphics like the Amiga but backward compatible with the Vic-II chip in the C-64.

Had they made the Commodore 65 instead of the Commodore 16 and Plus 4 it would have done well. But by 1990 the 8-bit market was bottoming out as the PC Clones took over.

Here's one for sale. http://www.ebay.com/itm/Commodore-65-64DX-C65-Engineering-Pr...

And here's a more complete one that just sold on eBay - for $22,000...

http://www.ebay.com/itm//171673209321

Amazing! I wish I had seen one at the Commodore tent during the 2010 TNMoC event. I guess they are very rare indeed. Would be good to get one in the The National Museum of Computing in the UK.

Also, slightly strange timing - this came up in last weeks B3ta newsletter.

Nice, lol

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