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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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He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.
-- J.R.R. Tolkien
(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.