The Commodore 64 is coming back, in a form that owes a debt to both Nintendo's shrunken Mini SNES and thee[sic] Vega+ Sinclair ZX Spectrum reboot.
The due-in-early 2018 “C64 Mini” matches Nintendo's plan to shrink an old machine, in this case by 50 per cent. Like the Mini and the Vega+ the revived Commodore will pack in pre-loaded retro games, 64 of them to be precise. The device will also ship with a USB joystick boasting 80s styling, HDMI out so it can connect to modern tellies and USB-mini for power.
[...] Price has been set at £69.99/$69.99/€79.99 and the machine will “hit the shops in early 2018” with Koch Media handling distribution
There's plenty of nostalgia surrounding the C64, but is it worth reviving?
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Commodore 64 Makes a Half-Sized Comeback
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(Score: 1) by zzarko on Wednesday October 04 2017, @04:47AM (1 child)
I can see the purpose of mini replica console with non-working keys, but for a mini home computer - sorry, but no...
C64 BASIC: 1 a=rnd(-52028):fori=1to8:a=rnd(1):next:fori=1to5:?chr$(rnd(1)*26+65);:next
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 07 2017, @10:13AM
Many people will only be interested in it for the games, and I'm sure all the included games can be played without a keyboard. But if you need/want a keyboard, you can just plug one in. And if this just isn't the product for you, that's fine, I'm sure there will be other people who are interested in it.
(Score: 2) by Hartree on Wednesday October 04 2017, @04:49AM (11 children)
I'd just get out the old C64 system I still have around somewhere and see if it's still working. (Yes, I still have the old style analog TV to hook it to.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 04 2017, @05:00AM (5 children)
Does the disk drive still work? Do you still have the floppies? Funny enough, where would you get a cassette tape player (or some old walkman) to hook it up with?
(Score: 2) by looorg on Wednesday October 04 2017, @05:28AM
The classic C64 didnt come with a built in disk drive, it was an external behemoth (1541). I still have some floppies and tapes around -- not sure if they actually work. Connecting a cassette player seems problematic since they removed all the ports -- you would have to find one that would work over USB. That said I'm fairly sure they intend for this to be USB or small dd only and everything will just utilize d64/t64 archives and similar. Cause nobody today would like to spend 5-20 minutes looking at a loading screen.
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Wednesday October 04 2017, @06:13AM (1 child)
As it happens, I recently discovered that suitable cassette recorders are still sold new [argos.co.uk] on the UK high street, for £25. Cables are readily available on eBay, etc.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 04 2017, @07:19AM
That should work for the Spectrum and others, but not the C64. The C64 casette interface was not a regular audio interface, it had control lines to start and stop the tape, among other things.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Hyperturtle on Wednesday October 04 2017, @02:04PM
While I can't answer his questions, I had dug out my C64 and did the following to it:
Added an "SD2IEC" flash based SD card reader that looks like an itty bitty 1541 drive -- and fits in the same port. It is device ID #8
Tested my original 1541 drive; it works but to change it to a different device ID, I have to cut a jumper on the PCB; instead I pulled out a 1541-II drive I bought off ebay a number of years back and that still works... and am using that as device ID #9; it had actual dip switches to select the drive ID.
I added an "EZ-Flash 3" cartridge. This is a modern flash based storage cartridge with a number of different optimization environments (fast load for disk, fast load for cassette, etc) that also has space for a number of virtual cartridge slots.
In that, I put in game collections and a pretty awesome combination of the Ultima 5 graphics set imported into Ultima 4.
I cannot tell you the speed difference in loading Ultima 4, even with the higher quality graphics pack that all still fits within the limits of a 64KB computer, is over what it was like as a kid.
I would load the game, switch channels, watch TV a bit, check for the light to blink or hear the drive knock, then get past the cool title screen and its demo and Journey Onward! And then insert the Britiannia disk and hit enter, or when I had added the second disk drive, it LOADED THE SECOND DISK AUTOMAGICALLY!
Game play was much improved. The load times were faster simply because it didn't have to wait for me to flip the disk. I got distracted waiting for it to load, so human latency added into the horrible load times...
But now?
Now when I press the button to load Ultima 4, it's ready. Just like that. The screen flashes and it's ready... It's like turning on an Atari 2600 -- the game is there. I could not believe this; I didn't think the c64 was even capable of getting the game into memory and doing something with it that quickly. It truly demonstrates the latency of the IO on the c64 when that latency is removed. THere is more of a delay getting the distribution group (cracker group I guess) demo loaded ahead of the game than there is getting the game up; and really that happens so fast I often forget to hit space immediately to skip the routine because I don't expect it to appear so quickly.
I also have a serial-RS232-to-ethernet-to-wifi bridge, so that I can connect to my home wifi (it supports WPA2 encryption!) and can telnet out to various places. I can even connect to network gear, but the original 40 column width can be challenging. With S-Video out to the converter, a terminal emulator that renders 80 columns is actually quite legible; doing that on an older CRT has been dismal in my past experiments... When my power went out over the summer, I had it on a UPS and had what we could call a wireless C64 since it was on battery and using wifi (no point really, but it was an achievement unlocked moment for my list frivilous tech milestones in my life--a truly "wireless" c64 using batteries and solid state storage).
Anyway, lots of cool places online to explore; many old BBS software packages are running on original hardware and also in emulation -- sometimes the same guy has 3 or 4 versions of the same BBS on different BBS software versions. Pretty neat to see them side by side; it is easy to forget the differences over time...
For a monitor, I am using a video game console adapter that lets me connect S-Video, RCA component, and Antenna (sometimes called A/V or CaTV) out (the coax cable output sometimes for the "rabbit ears" or real cable tv) to get converted to 15 pin VGA, and connected that to a 17" monitor -- otherwise I would use a 24" one I have with direct RCA and S-video input. This doesn't have HDMI input, but I used an HDMI adapter to connect my rapsberry pi stuff. Otherwise I don't have anything with HDMI to even connect it to.
(Score: 2) by Hartree on Wednesday October 04 2017, @04:24PM
Last I checked it (5 years or so) the 1541 drive still worked and the couple of floppies I fed it were readable.
Oh, and I've got multiple working cassette decks/players still, and if I can't manage to get one of them wired up to a C64, I shouldn't have my job. :)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by vux984 on Wednesday October 04 2017, @05:19AM (1 child)
Actually...on that note ... does anyone have a good recommendation for adapters to attach some of these old devices to newer HDMI devices?
I've got a couple old consoles and systems that use various old interfaces that I'd like to attach to a new TV via HDMI.
I looked for some RCA to HDMI adapters for example for one system and they definitely exist... but the reviews are really hit and miss, with people saying they lasted a few weeks then died, or had unusable levels of input lag, no sound, complaints about the power supplies, etc, etc. I want something decent, for a fair price... but I have no idea what's rip off garbage vs a decent product.
I've got an old TRS80 COCO2 and both an original intellivision (the antenna adapter thing) , and one of those intellivision mini-re-releases from a couple years ago (RCA)... that it would be so nice to just be able to attach them via HDMI.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 04 2017, @12:52PM
PCI NTSC capture cards. Doesn't help with direct TV output if you want it, but the older ones at least had no input lag if you didn't mind wasting most of your PCI bus bandwidth.
I had one years ago planning for video editing, but I ended up using it for gaming off my consoles and such instead. Turned out to offer better resolution/quality than my TV and the unencoded stream felt just like watching it live on the TV. The Hauppage one I got later witht he mpeg2 encoder included did feel like the laggy shit you are talking about though.
I think china dropship sites still sell the former adapters. I don't know the exact models of any of the chips however, but one of them was a bt848 or whatever, and I think the other was a SSI/SIL chip.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday October 04 2017, @01:00PM (2 children)
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by looorg on Wednesday October 04 2017, @04:55PM (1 child)
Yes. They are called TAP files, they are in essence just wave files. You can write them back to tape or convert them to .t64 files etc. So if the game had a 10 minute load the file will be a 10 minute wave etc. In that regard it's the complete classic feeling for the eternal loading screen. I guess it's as close to the real feel you come without running the actual thing.
http://wav-prg.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Thursday October 05 2017, @09:52AM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by looorg on Wednesday October 04 2017, @05:09AM (2 children)
Worth it? Nooope. Does not even have a real or actual SID chip. It's at best a replica emulator so you might as well just run the c64 emulator of your choice on whatever hardware you already have. Also if it's half the size using the keyboard is probably gonna suck.
(Score: 2) by stormwyrm on Wednesday October 04 2017, @05:32AM (1 child)
The keyboard is as real as the cartridge slot on the Nintendo mini units, i.e. it is completely non-functional. They expect you to plug in a standard USB keyboard to be able to type in stuff, such as the LOAD "*",8,1 that was the usual way to start C-64 games. I can't find any information about what is actually in the innards of the thing from their site though, and there are no technical details as to how one is supposed to load and save stuff there (if there is something that works equivalently to a 1541 drive or whatnot), only that it ought to be doable.
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Wednesday October 04 2017, @06:41AM
The keyboard isn't even functional? So it's just there for aesthetic reasons? Making the project even more worthless. I'm not sure how they intend for it to work, for all I know they have turned the joystick (they couldn't seriously cough up a few bucks for a TAC-2 clone?) into a mouse and have a point and click interface with some hidden menu system ala GEOS. Even with the form factory box being half size I still suspect most of the box will be air, after all there shouldn't be a lot of hardware required to emulate a C64 - a smartphone a few years or generations old will or should do the trick. FRODO is already available for Android and have been for quite some time as I recall.
I'm fairly sure they'll use some kind of SSD or USB drive/stick for storing files and it will all be .d64/t64 archives for the files -- which would then emulate the 1541 and tape cassette player respectively.
Since it comes with a bunch of games out of the box I guess they could have put them onto a chip by now since none of those games are ever going to get patched or updated or anything of the sort. They could even have saved the expansion port and used that for a cartridge full of games, like for the actual C64 -- but considering size and all a USB stick of reasonable size would contain more or less every game ever released for the C64, I think the estimate is something like 25000 games and each taking up less then a hundred or so kb each. Most of them just a fraction of that. (Sid Meiers) Pirates from Microprose was 136 kb as an example.
If one looks at the real C64 with all its ports there are various kits out there to turn said ports into USB hubs and connectors for disk drives etc. So it's not like they couldn't probably do the reverse here and put a DD or tape player and hook it up via USB but I doubt anyone would actually want that since it would be by todays standards horribly horribly slow.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday October 04 2017, @05:17AM (1 child)
Worth reviving what? The C64 or the nostalgia surrounding it?
(grin)
(yes I know the "Remember those times when we were nostalgic?" one)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 04 2017, @08:08AM
Remember those times when we still remembered those times? Those were the times!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday October 04 2017, @05:21AM (3 children)
Sounds good, as long as its floppy drive emulation is NOT faithful to the original's slowness.
What about an Apple II in a smartphone sized package? I know there's an Apple II emulator that runs on Android, as that was used to run a classic game (Karateka) I picked up cheap in a Humble Bundle. The emulator even reproduces the sounds of the Apple's floppy disk drive, which seemed to me to be a fanatic level of emulation. But then, there were a very few programs that used the disk drive for sound effects, so maybe it is a good idea. And there's stuff like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cM_sAxrAu7Q [youtube.com]
One issue with emulating the 6502 is that I haven't seen its decimal arithmetic emulated correctly when given "illegal" values. On a real 6502, 0xFF is interpreted as 15x10+15=165 when used as a value in a decimal arithmetic operation, whereas the emulators seem to treat that as 0.
(Score: 1) by Chromium_One on Thursday October 05 2017, @02:05AM
... because the C64 doesn't have a 6502 CPU, it's a 6510. IIRC the 6510 adds an 8-bit I/O port, adds a couple opcodes, and modifies a few opcodes. Again IIRC the 6510 should run all 6502 code just fine, unmodified, while the reverse won't be true.
When you live in a sick society, everything you do is wrong.
(Score: 1) by zzarko on Thursday October 05 2017, @04:36AM (1 child)
If floppy drive emulation isn't faithful, many games and demos just wouldn't work. Speeding up 1541 is just a matter of software, not hardware.
I haven't encountered 6502 bug that you described in many emulators that I tried that emulate machines with 6502. All that I tried emulate 6502 correctly, including illegal opcodes. Where did you see that?
C64 BASIC: 1 a=rnd(-52028):fori=1to8:a=rnd(1):next:fori=1to5:?chr$(rnd(1)*26+65);:next
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Thursday October 05 2017, @06:09AM
As I recall, it was an emulator that ran only on Windows, called AppleWin appropriately enough. A hack I used in Ultima III to create more powerful characters was to exceed the maximum values of 99 allowed for str, int, wis, and dex by editing the character data on the disk to set them to 0xFF. It didn't work on some classes, but it sure did for the druid class because their magic power is half their wisdom (or intelligence, or the average of them both, I forget exactly), and setting their stats to 0xFF gave them 165/2 = 82 power, where normally they could not have more than 99/2 = 49 power. Made them able to cast the most powerful spells, which took 75 power. Worked great on a real Apple II+, didn't work at all on that emulator.
All this was a long time ago, before the emulator was released under the GPL. It has been updated many times since and I haven't checked whether this little issue has been fixed.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Wednesday October 04 2017, @05:22AM (1 child)
This is just another Linux settop box with a custom case, that isn't even functional so is cheap enough, preloaded with an emulator. Put a real C64 in it with an emulated C1541 drive loading from flash. Put a real keyboard with correct layout so games that depended on that goofball layout don't break. Recreating the "real keyboard" feel might be too expensive so a membrane one would probably have to be a compromise. And real game ports for anybody with real vintage controllers, include an actual C64/Atari style joystick instead of a USB one. Include a real port to plug a real 1541 drive in to import more games. Don't know how many old carts still exist so having that slot might or might not be a good idea.
Have the second processor that runs the emulated drive also be able to take over / overlay the screen so it can give a loader menu and to save time the preloaded games could just burst in an initial C64 ram load and launch direct that snapshot. To keep it simple just freeze the 6502, save the ram/video controller regs and paint a menu then restore things. A C64 has no RTC so no software side effects could possibly occur from freezing the clock.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Wednesday October 04 2017, @03:57PM
This was my reaction too. Boring. You can't stuff a cheap SoC running Linux and an emulator into a box that resembles the system of old and call it retro. If they engineered a modern C64 SoC including genuine SID core then that would be much more interesting and retro.
(Score: 3, Informative) by shortscreen on Wednesday October 04 2017, @09:39AM
back in 2004...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C64_Direct-to-TV [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by Subsentient on Wednesday October 04 2017, @10:26AM (1 child)
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Wednesday October 04 2017, @01:43PM
I think a Pi is actually about $35. With a reasonable USB jokstick, and HDMI cable, and a small SD card you'll probably need about $65 or so. I would also get a USB keyboard and mouse for it.
The draw of this little device is really just the case. So about $3-$6 in plastic depending on the volume they are buying them in.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Lemming on Wednesday October 04 2017, @03:42PM
This is a dual core ARM with open source emulator VICE [sourceforge.net] running on it, in a fancy case with a fake keyboard.
An important point of criticism is that it seems you can not load any other software outside of the 64 games provided. There are no indications that you can read disk images via usb, but you can type out basic programs via an external usb keyboard if you like :-) And among those 64 games there are some classics like California Games, but many popular classics (eg. Last Ninja, Maniac Mansion,...) are absent.
(Score: 2) by jbernardo on Wednesday October 04 2017, @06:31PM (1 child)
This project seems to be by one part of the team that was involved in the Vega and at the beginning in the Vega+. Their split was all but friendly, and both the "the 64" project and the Vega+ have yet to send anything to the crowdfunders. The " the 64" is the "ancestor" to this mini.
I'd stay well away from it...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 08 2017, @09:28PM
This doesn't seem to be a crowdfunded project. So you can wait until it is released, and check a few reviews before deciding on it.