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posted by martyb on Wednesday October 04 2017, @04:28AM   Printer-friendly
from the shoulda-priced-it-at-$64 dept.

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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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 04 2017, @05:00AM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 04 2017, @05:00AM (#576924)

    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

    by looorg (578) on Wednesday October 04 2017, @05:28AM (#576931)

    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)

    by kazzie (5309) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday October 04 2017, @06:13AM (#576936)

    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

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 04 2017, @07:19AM (#576942)

      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

    by Hyperturtle (2824) on Wednesday October 04 2017, @02:04PM (#577022)

    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

    by Hartree (195) on Wednesday October 04 2017, @04:24PM (#577076)

    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. :)