I really wanted to buy an official Commodore T-shirt, and all the designer had to do was put the chicken lips logo on a white background, but whoever was in charge decided to instead get creative and come up with a range of very bad designs that have zero resemblance with anything ever produced by Commodore.
While this is true (and the price for the new device is still extremely reasonable) by 1983 you could buy a C64 for $199 (in the US anyway).
This price reduction was the difference maker in allowing my family to (barely) afford to buy me a C64 in late 1983 (and this is what I learned to code on, first in MS BASIC, then in 6510 assembler).
In East Germany, the GDR, you could buy C64 and C128 from private sellers advertising in the classified ads section of the major electronics magazine in the GDR. They usually received those devices from relatives in West Germany.
The price for a C64 was thousands of East German Marks, at least half a year of salaries (the salary spread was low, so that's engineers or workers or managers).
An Amiga cost 25,000 Marks towards the end of the GDR, which was about two years of salaries (income was from below 1,000 Marks to ca. 1,500 for high earners, much more than that was unusual). This put 16 bit computing at home or school out of the hands of almost everyone, unless they had generous relatives in the West who sent them one. Even at work, the 8-bit PCs were still much more common (e.g. PC 1715 - https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_1715), with a CP/M clone OS.
But at least they were all available. Our own CAOS (Cassette Aided Operating System- https://www.mpm-kc85.de/html/CAOS_42.htm) 8 bit systems based on Z80 clone CPUs, KC-85 (1/2/3/4) where not too shabby, for work and serious stuff at least the later -3 and even more so the -4 lines were superior to the C64, easier to program, and much more usable screen (https://www.mpm-kc85.de/).
The state was pretty hands-off. My own school's physics teacher started a computer club in the 1980s and he spent thousands of public school money on exclusively Western computers, from ZX spectrum (the very first one) to Atari 800 XL, C64, C128, with both cassette and disk drives. That must have cost a lot. Still surprises me that nobody asked him to buy East German, especially since in the 8-bit range our own systems would have been perfectly fine for the purpose.
I don't know which exactly, but everyone in the East was restricted. I can only report my observations. Those systems I mentioned were mostly private imports through gifts, not regular imports on a business level. Not sure if something like an Amiga would have been a problem though anyway? I don't think any of the 8-bit systems should have been a problem in any case, no?
Adjusting for inflation over such long time periods in electronics is, IMO, not useful because of the wildly different cost curves of labor and capital. You expect average prices to go up, but electronics to get cheaper over time.
Adjusting for performance would be even more ludicrous. The computing power of about any modern smartphone would have cost billions, if not trillions, in 1983. Even this device is much faster than the original (48MHz in Turbo mode).
That would make that $2k about $100k, the price of 50 Commodore 64s at launch.
Maybe I can finally debug that cool-looking boxing game I typed in by hand from a magazine. To this day, I am sort of surprised I wound up a coder given that was my initial experience with programming.
Figuring out where I messed up (or where they misprinted) in the hundreds of lines of code entered from some of these listings was my introduction to debugging :D
100% that. And my Irish Catholic cynicism told me it was just as likely the person who wrote the article messed up the code as me so I went back to playing games.
I wound up typing that entire listing at least three times before I gave up and never saw the errata. Definitely worth the satisfaction of youtubing or googling the output decades after.
I remember having to figure out how port magazine and book BASIC code between the various dialects between the various spaces I spent time in. In the 1980s, my uncle first taught me BASIC on an IBM PC. At school we had an Apple ][+ while at home I had a Coco II and later an Amiga. Another friend had a Vic 20, while another had a Commodore 64. Then came QuickBASIC, QuickC, Microsoft C, C on the ICONs, Aztec C, gcc... 6502, m68k, 8086, i386... Learning about the quirks across systems so early on turned out to be an invaluable experience.
I didn't really know about this until recently when I listened to a DHH / Lex Fridman podcast. The podcast started out with him retelling a very similar experience. I wasn't familiar with DHH either and found myself disagreeing with a lot of his takes (JS > TS ... really?) but it was a really interesting conversation none-the-less.
Ordered a founder's edition in August. Looks like I might get it this year (originally estimated October). Retro Recipes x Commodore posted a video update about the manufacturing process recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BffeaLbKHkw
(In my case, it's not about nostalgia. I actually have been using a shared one in a hackerspace to play around with 6502 machine language and want my own.)
I miss the days of BBS'ing on my 300 baud modem, boosted to 420-ish. Things were so much simpler. I'm thinking this might make a good xmas present for myself! :)
> I miss the days of BBS'ing on my 300 baud modem, boosted to 420-ish. Things were so much simpler.
I have a lot of nostalgia from this time, but also remember it was all fun and games until my mom or one of my sisters picked up one of the phones (standard issue AT&T handsets) in the house, causing a rapid burst of line noise and usually a disconnection due to lack of error checking/correction at the hardware level.
If you had some idea of who was on the BBS and they had Call Waiting, you could give them a ring to knock them offline. Very bad manners but teens will be teens.
I was there in the 300 bps days with a Novation Apple Cat II and I never heard of such a thing. How did that work? Did you have non-standard modems on both ends?
If you had a pretty clean line, you could do 450 baud. Some BBSes had separate numbers for this speed. Sometimes it just worked with regular 300 lines.
Really? What standard allowed that? I'm only aware of 300 bps and 1200 bps. I'm not seeing anything in between those besides a V.22 standard for 600 bps I wasn't previously familiar with:
I also don't recall intermediate speeds. The modems at both ends would negotiate the highest standard speed they could. I must've owned a dozen dialup modems over the years starting with that Novation Apple Cat II (300 bps, 1200 bps half-duplex to another Apple Cat II) and just have no recollection of variable speeds like you're describing, and I spent a lot of time dialed into BBSes.
There's lots of knowledge from that era that didn't make it to the internet age. Not being listed on Wikipedia does not mean something didn't exist.
Maybe your modem just didn't support it. Or maybe it was one of the many mods people did to their modems.
I know that at least one of the modems I had (a combination of Commodore, Hayes, and Avatex modems) supported higher-than-usual baud rates out of the box. I can't say how exactly it worked, you just issued commands or the terminal program handled it.
Sure, it's possible it escaped both my memory/experience and what's on the Wikipedia. But I spent a ton of time online dialed into BBSes started around 1980, even running a small ISP in college. I have a CS degree. I took telecommunications courses in college. If there's something that escaped my knowledge, I'd love to know more about it.
To the very best of my knowledge, dial-up modems jumped from 300 bps to 1200 bps, and they exchanged data at whatever the highest speed they could negotiate. The Novation Apple Cat II modem was also pretty unique in that it supported 1200 bps half-duplex, but only to another Apple Cat II, and it also had the ability to detect and generate arbitrary tones. There were programs for it to play music and to use it as a voice modulator.
Which is all to say, I was pretty into this stuff.
So I'm really interested in any information about a modem that worked at intermediate speeds like 450 bps.
I searched textfiles.com but couldn't find anything there either.
FWIW, I had a very strong memory of a graphical BBS program that worked on the Apple II using hi-res mode and a dedicated client. I asked about it here over the years but was never able to find any confirmation it existed:
I built my own 300bps modem as a teenager, to connect to my C64. Tech was a lot more fun back in the day. It was exciting every year to see the speed of modems go up, and up, and up. 300 bps, 1200bps, and then when I got a 2400bps modem the C64 built-in serial code was too slow, I couldn't transfer files because there were so many dropped bits. So I wrote my own serial port code in assembly language and hacked it into my favorite terminal software (CCGMS) and that fixed the problem. I think by the time I got a 9600 baud modem I probably had an Amiga.
By the time you get to 2400bps you're starting to stress how fast the abysmal disk interface on the C64 could write data, you had better not hit too many seeks.
The 1541 drive can write at ~400 bytes per second, much faster than the 2400bps modem could deliver (240 bytes/s). And buffering was a thing back then. A simple ring buffer would suffice. I had no problems downloading at 2400bps after I fixed the serial code.
Faster, but not "much faster". Depending on where you were writing it could be as low as 300 bytes/second. You're starting to cut close to the margins, especially if the C=64 is having to also manage the modem communications at the same time. So yeah, doable but that's about the max you can expect out of the hardware. A 4800 baud modem would be right out.
The C64 doesn't control the disk drive directly, the 1541has its own CPU, about as powerful as the C64.
> A 4800 baud modem would be right out.
Not with a "Warp Speed" cartridge. It does write speeds on a stock C64/1541 up to 2900 Bytes per second. I'm pretty sure reading serial data faster than 2400bps is easily doable too.
"Your childhood just leveled up" as a tagline is pretty revealing. I'm not sure where the company goes after they have mined all the nostalgia. I like the statement "[t]his isn’t tech that controls you. It invites you to play, learn, and create" but I'm struggling to think of how that converts into a long-term product line. I wish them success though. More diversity would be nice!
Why do they need to? Can't that just be it? Why does everything need to grow forever? We all die. That doesn't mean it was necessarily a bad idea to live.
It can become part of new childhoods. I was actually born after the Commodore era but my first thought on seeing this was how great it would be to share with my daughter.
> Isn't this just an emulator or rebadged something-or-other?
>The Commodore 64 Ultimate from the only original Commodore® brand (est. 1958) is brand new hardware-based Commodore 64 technology. It features SID chip-reactive LEDs (case, keyboard, power light), the world's first transparent keyboard PCB, original and modern creators’ autographs etched in copper, and an updated FPGA that replicates the original C64 motherboard (not emulation). All customisable via a new, easy main menu. It’s a fully authentic new build from Commodore - who else?
I was hoping they would have authentic SID chips. The analog side of the SID is a large part of it's sound so it comes down to how well they can model that.
I'm excited for Christian (Peri) and team... but also kinda bummed that the RR channel has gone on a bit of a hiatus (understandable). Wishing everyone success with this amazing new chapter...
I might get one, I have the C64 Max and the kids are having a lot of fun on it with their friends playing Bruce Lee 1 and 2 as well as Archon. I'm also really really interested in http://www.apollo-core.com/gfx/A6000.jpg the amiga was my first programming machine and having a mostly useful computer that is compatible would be awesome.
I would find the product more compelling in a puck form factor (sans kbd). I can't imagine missing the extra key labels. That would make it significantly smaller, more robust, & less expensive.
I'd also prefer DisplayPort to HDMI, but that might have been chosen for cost, or for the home gaming / nostalgia play.
Pretty neat but I don’t love the price. I got a real working C64 for $100, and a turbo chameleon that can bring all the fpga benefits and connectivity for less.
I also wonder whose fpga core they are using and if they licensed it or not.
Not sure why, they have header pins for the user port and then an adapter if you want to use things that require the original edge connector. I'm guessing (although I'm not sure what those other chips on the adapter do) you could also connect directly to the header for new stuff. https://www.commodore.net/product-page/u64-userport-adapter
Fabricating a custom chip costs several million dollars, which is kind of a non-starter for such a niche product.
Is it theoretically possible? Maybe, there are high-res die photographs used for reverse engineering and improving simulator accuracy. But I doubt this is accurate enough to fab an exact replica.
Maybe not, but there are clones of every single chip in a C64 available for sale now. Getting a perfect replacement is tricky because the originals were far from perfect, the sound you got out would vary between batches and many of the older chips have partially degraded in different ways.
I thought all these were all simulations and not replicas of silicon. I'm talking about something that keeps all the interference flaws and weirdness of the analog synth intact, and every chip being just a little bit unique, like the original.
reSID is one of the best simulators, and actually does capture a lot of the quirks of the 6581. Take a look at the source, some of the models are actually based on electrical characteristics (filter.cc and filter.h for example).
Aren't they the standard Atari-style, with the RS-232 style ports? It should be cheap to get ahold of some compatible joysticks. I would hope they kept all the ports the same...
