The C64C Ultimate will be manufactured using the same tools as the original was back in 1986.
The creators of the C64 Ultimate, a recreation of the iconic '80s personal computer that uses an FPGA chip to accurately replicate the original, have announced a follow-up version that continues in its predecessor's footsteps. The original Commodore 64 first debuted in 1982 and was followed by the Commodore 64C in 1986, which was functionally nearly identical but introduced a slimmer case and a more modern color scheme. It's the same story for the new Commodore 64C Ultimate. It gives the C64 Ultimate a welcome facelift, but there's no new functionality.
To make the C64C an authentic recreation of the original – at least on the outside – the reborn Commodore reacquired the exact same injection tooling molds that were used to manufacture the original's plastic housing 40 years ago. The new C64C Ultimate even features faint semi-circular marks on its housing resulting from melted plastic cooling unevenly inside the molds; a sign of authenticity that would be overly-complicated to fake.
As with the C64 Ultimate, the new C64C Ultimate features upgrades like Wi-Fi, USB, and an HDMI port for connecting it to modern displays. But it also carries forward the same ports from the 1986 version of the computer and is compatible with its '80s-era peripherals like floppy disk and cassette drives. It's available for preorder now starting at $299.99 with shipping expected as early as September, while more premium versions that add upgrades like LED lighting, translucent case, and gold keycaps go up to $499.99.
(Score: 4, Disagree) by bzipitidoo on Sunday May 03, @10:45AM (6 children)
The Commodore 64 was a good computer that failed to achieve greatness because of its abominable floppy disk drive. In addition to being godawful slow, the C64 floppy drive was huge and expensive and fragile. Excellent graphics and sound for its time, blowing away the Apple II and the PC. But it could in no way match the other machines' floppy disk drives. C64 disappointed greatly in that the Apple II floppy disk system was so much faster despite being the older tech. Apple made a few bad blunders that unnecessarily slowed its floppy disk drive, but even with those blunders, it was still much faster than the C64 floppy. Apple II's mistakes there were more easily fixed, too, with 3rd party DOSes such as ProntoDOS, and no need to change the hardware at all. There were some aftermarket enhancements to speed up C64 floppy disk operation, but they didn't work on every disk. Copy protection in particular often was incompatible with those aftermarket speed ups.
If this C64 Ultimate has fast floppy disk drives, I'm tempted. If it doesn't, I don't want one. Walking away from that miserable floppy drive was the best thing about leaving the C64 platform. When EGA graphics and Soundblaster sound arrived for PCs, the C64's edge in those areas was gone. The Amiga had EGA graphics beat, but it was so expensive and locked down. Many a time I window shopped the Amiga and pondered how they did that checkered bouncing ball graphics demo. But I never bought one.
(Score: 5, Informative) by ShovelOperator1 on Sunday May 03, @01:14PM (2 children)
These times nearly every computer of this "home" segment had similar arrangement. Instead of extending the system bus, the second computer in the FDD.
The reason was that it was possible to put the disk operating into the drive as much as possible, putting some kind of barely programmable near-textual serial interface. Thanks to it, in C64, to use the floppy drive it was needed only to get a "C64 wedge", a small BASIC commands extended to support FDD. Some machines had an entire CP/M machine in a floppy disk drive. So computer became the terminal.
The alternative approach, thru the system bus, was used by Commodore in some of their their 16 line as more "productivity" version. But the C64 succeeded as gaming/educational computer, not an, as IBM would say, "business system". In such case, the floppy was considered more like datassette without rewinding and without the need to use a screwdriver. And in ZX Spectrum distributors indeed advertised some tape-loop storage devices as "drives", which miserably disappointed customers of course.
The worse thing is that many of these recreations of old machines have their flagship features not existing or seriously crippled. I'm not talking about games, as they can be emulated, but the ability to easily program the I/O, the picture processing including interrupts or so many interfaces that they exceed any Arduino. This is missing and limiting the creativity in a field of computer improvement.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Monday May 04, @10:25AM
The ZX Microdrive aka the tape ripper. It was fast, it was really fast, compared to loading things from a normal tape drive. But they had this tendency to break or become stretched. I guess things (tape) was just not intended to be rolled that fast.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday May 04, @06:04PM
Having lived thru it myself, I'd say there's a family tree where that strategy was a less popular solution.
Does it have CPU bus access? If no, its going to be a computer connected by serial port and it'll be slow. Like TI and Commodore and a couple others.
If yes it'll be like Apple and literally every model of TRS-80 and everything that ever ran CP/M or early IBM clone, and it'll be fast(ish). This market also segmented, TRS-80 type designs used "real floppy controllers" that sometimes cost a lot and sometimes required weird voltages but were at least fast and the software was easy to use, vs Apple did something weird like a winmodem but for floppies like it's entire FDC was a couple shift registers, latches, and a lot of software (although I was a TRS80 guy not an apple guy so I might be misdescribing the Apple II floppy system). Like the Apple design was bit-bang a bunch of GPIO ports and hope the CPU is fast enough and never gets an interrupt, more or less.
"Kids these days" probably don't realize how many computers back in the day didn't use DMA or sometimes didn't even have interrupt controllers or even productively use interrupts LOL. CPUs with built in floating point were also pretty rare back in the day.
(Score: 4, Informative) by VanessaE on Sunday May 03, @01:21PM
While it starts off as slow as the oldskool machine, it also has the ability to DMA-load from standard disk images -- at least to get a program started (this works best with single-load programs), and has built-in RAM expansion with high speed "bulk loader" as well.
The machine has turbo capability with a top speed of 64 MHz, and is capable of over 275 kB/second on sequential reads from SD/USB in that mode. It does 1 MB/second on DMA loads, and tops out at 4 MB/sec on RAM-to-RAM transfers.
It also supports digital cartridge images, which are instantaneous-access, and system firmware is soft-loaded as well, so ROM-based fastloaders like JiffyDOS work just fine.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Sunday May 03, @01:56PM
The Atari 400/800 floppy drive cost $440, it was in a huge FCC compliant housing (before class C exceptions were handed out freely), and to keep that emissions compliance it was connected over a serial cable. Yes, it was remarkably slow - but also pretty reliable, and very tank-like. Software pirates were known to open the case and adjust the speed control to effectively write bad sectors which were used as copy-protection locks at the time. Speed control was pretty easy to adjust off and back - though I never did that to my drive (I used friends' drives where they had drilled a hole in the case to access the screw.)
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(Score: 3, Informative) by looorg on Sunday May 03, @04:51PM
Those issues were fixed when the C64 was still a current in production machine via third party tools, cartridges or hardware replacements. Perhaps it was more of an issue in America as in Europe for the longest it was still mainly tape. Most things worked with them tho, as far as I recall it was a few games that didn't like it and well for most people that wasn't an issue since they didn't spend to much money on software and your friendly cracker friend had already solved that issue for your convenience.
Most of the modern hacks now use some other kind of storage and just load (and save) disk or tape image files from some kind of usb stick or sd card. There are numerous hacks around to buy or build them yourself. You have to have some kind of serious nostalgia disturbance if you connect up an old 1541 (or similar) and run things from that. You might have one and do it once or twice to transfer your own floppies over but that is it. It would be like connecting the tape drive ...
Some of the cartridge solutions had some kind of nostalgia mode you could use if you wanted to feel like back in the old days and let you sit there and load at the "normal" old speed. As much as I have fond memories from back then I would never activate that again. I don't have that level of nostalgia anymore that I want to wait for many MANY MANY minutes for it to load something from tape.
So if that, slow floppy access, is all that is holding you back from getting a C64 again. Go ahead. It's a none issue today that nobody suffers from.
(Score: 3, Informative) by corey on Sunday May 03, @09:37PM (1 child)
https://retrorgb.com/mister.html
I got my old C64 out of the cupboard the other day to play Boulderdash with the kids. It only works in black and white so I need to take it out to the workshop and figure out what’s going on in the PAL video unit.
Half my discs don’t work any more unfortunately.
Someone made an 80486SX CPU with MiSTer:
https://www.jamesfmackenzie.com/howto/how-to-setup-mister-fpga-ao486-core-part-1-getting-started/
(Score: 2) by looorg on Sunday May 03, @10:33PM
It's probably the PLA that is going. But it could be a multitude of other things. If you have more then one C64 try swapping them, if the other one works that is. You could get a good working one or one of them many replacements, most of them are very good in the like $3-15 range.
It's kind of odd I always more saw the Mister as an arcade replacement machine. Never really occurred to me to use it as an 8 or 16-bit replacement. If I needed a new C64 tho I wouldn't buy that FPGA monstrosity with it's blinking lights and god only knows. I'd get one of the good replacement PCB:s and solder myself a new one. Bwacks replacement boards are very good and he shares it all on hit github and youtube channel.