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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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In Tulsa, Oklahoma, it is against the law to open a soda bottle without
the supervision of a licensed engineer.
(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.