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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: 1) by zzarko on Thursday October 05 2017, @04:36AM (1 child)

    by zzarko (5697) on Thursday October 05 2017, @04:36AM (#577309)

    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

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Thursday October 05 2017, @06:09AM (#577325) Journal

    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.