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Commodore Returns with New Gaming PCs

Posted by Hemos on Tue Mar 06, 2007 08:40 AM
from the everything-old-is-new-again dept.
PC Games (Games) Hardware
JamesO writes "Commodore is a name which will bring memories flooding back to many a gamer and it's been announced that the legendary brand is to return with a new range of high specification gaming PCs. The new Commodore PCs optimized for gaming will be launched at the CeBIT show in Germany on March 15 and attendees will be offered the chance to play the latest PC games using the purpose-built PCs."
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[+] The Commodore Comeback at CeBIT 160 comments
Peter Malford writes "Earlier this month Slashdot reported on Commodore's return with new gaming PCs that would be officially announced at CeBIT. Cnet.co.uk has got a first look at the four new models called the XX, GX, GS and G. "The high-end XX packs enough grunt to make an Alienware machine run to its deformed alien mum. It uses an Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 quad-core processor, 4GB of RAM and two Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX graphics cards running in tandem... Commodore uses what it calls a 'revolutionary painting process' to make them look pretty damn gorgeous." Commodore also officially launched the Gravel In Pocket PMP and unveiled some new Gravel devices, one that has a 4" screen and one that features a built-in GPS receiver."
[+] Games: The Making of Ghostbusters on the Commodore 64 89 comments
Next Generation recently began running content from the respected British gaming magazine Edge, and today they're sharing The Making of Ghostbusters. The article is a look back to a barely-remembered but (for the time) forward thinking movie tie-in for the Commodore 64. Instead of a lame 'action' title following the movie's plot line, the game was set in the world of the Ghostbusters, and allowed players to build a financial empire through ghostbusting. "Crucially, for a game with so many parts - driving, simple resource management, shooting and trapping ghosts - the pieces snapped together well, and the money-making, business-upgrading elements gave the game a lasting replayability. Activision's Ghostbusters is polished, intelligently-paced, and suggests a measured and meticulous development approach: something which wasn't the case at all. 'A typical C64 game took nine months from start to finish,' laughs David Crane, the game's designer. 'Ghostbusters took six weeks!' Crane is one of the most prolific developers of the early videogame era. Creating titles such as Little Computer People and Pitfall made him Activision's star programmer."
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  • Its about time Lionel Ritchie changed career (Score:5, Funny)

    by Timesprout (579035) on Tuesday March 06 2007, @08:42AM (#18248856)
    nuff said.
  • Are these machines 64bit too?
    It'd be nice bragging rights: I've got Linux/Windows running on a C64!

  • Bit Early? (Score:5, Funny)

    by EveryNickIsTaken (1054794) on Tuesday March 06 2007, @08:43AM (#18248864)
    It's a bit early for Slashdot to start posting lame April Fool's articles, right?

    • Re:Bit Early? (Score:5, Funny)

      by rhyder128k (1051042) on Tuesday March 06 2007, @09:19AM (#18249156)
      Seems like the old ploy of slapping a respected old brand name on some unrelated kit. There is a company selling Acorn branded equipment in much the same manner:

      http://www.drobe.co.uk/riscos/artifact1698.html [drobe.co.uk]

      I won't consider one of these machines to be a true Commodore until they start to do things like:
      Refuse to give the currently running Star Trek series a free machine as a prop forcing paramount to acquire a Mac instead.
      Make a cut-down budget machine that is more expensive to manufacture than the regular machine (a600).

      When I have some *guarantees* that they are running the business into the ground even though they have massive lead over their competitors, then I'll consider this to be a Commodore. And not before!

        • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

          by Anonymous Coward
          You work for Sony? ;)

  • Atari was a better system (Score:5, Funny)

    by xzvf (924443) on Tuesday March 06 2007, @08:45AM (#18248870)
    My Atari 800 was way cooler than the C64

  • just a hunch (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gEvil (beta) (945888) on Tuesday March 06 2007, @08:50AM (#18248906)
    I have a feeling this is doomed to fail. Anyone who is old enough to remember when Commodore was a decent gaming platform has probably grown into the type of person who builds his own machines. And the Amiga users will just sit there reminiscing about the good old days...

    • Anyone who is old enough to remember when Commodore was a decent gaming platform has probably grown into the type of person who builds his own machines.
      Many will have got bored of tweaking and now be happy to buy a prebuilt machine -- sacrificing power and flexibility for convenience.

      You only need to be 30 to remember Commodore with fondness. Whether that fondness will be enough for the brand to sell fairly ordinary PCs is another matter.

      • Re:just a hunch (Score:5, Funny)

        by j00r0m4nc3r (959816) on Tuesday March 06 2007, @09:39AM (#18249342)
        Many will have got bored of tweaking and now be happy to buy a prebuilt machine

        You're right about that. There are so many different bus speeds, and CPU types, and memory types, and chipsets, and video cards, and so on and so on... Who wants to keep track of all that shit and build their own computer nowadays just to save $100? It used to be fun back in the day, but nowadays I just feel like, "Sheesh. Just give me something that works already so I can get back to re-drywalling my stupid living room..."

    • Re:just a hunch (Score:5, Interesting)

      by rucs_hack (784150) on Tuesday March 06 2007, @09:04AM (#18249034)
      I was going to argue with you.

      However, I'm 40, and every machine I own (ten atm) is home built.

      I guess you're right then.....

  • In separate news... (Score:5, Funny)

    by squiggleslash (241428) on Tuesday March 06 2007, @08:50AM (#18248908) Homepage Journal

    ...the new Cray MCX, an amazing new supercomputer with a 2GHz Core2Duo, 512Mb of RAM, and a 40GB hard disk, goes on sale tomorrow.

    I fail to see the point in this product being branded Commodore. It's another PC.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by newrisejohn (517586)
      Macs are just another PC - despite this people still froth at the mouth for them. Maybe Commodore is trying to build on whatever brand power is left. (I am a Mac user and used to be a C64/C128 user, fyi)
    • Cray is dead.
      But it was sweet. the servers they were making in '93-'95 are only just now being outperformed.
      I, personally, want a Cray Laptop. I used to joke about getting one with my friends, I've been thinking about taking my HP DV8230US and modding it to appear to be one for the next lan party.
  • "25 years ago, Commodore launched the best selling personal computer of the late 20th Century, the C64"

    -- Bala Keilman, CEO for Commodore Gaming.

    There's a CEO with vision for you. Best PC of the late 20th century. Would've been best all time except for getting pwned by the mid-16th century's "Conquistador 200."

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by slim (1652)

      "25 years ago, Commodore launched the best selling personal computer of the late 20th Century, the C64"


      -- Bala Keilman, CEO for Commodore Gaming.


      There's a CEO with vision for you. Best PC of the late 20th century.

      Best selling, fool!

  • Nostalgic name, but that's it. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Rob T Firefly (844560) on Tuesday March 06 2007, @08:53AM (#18248922) Homepage Journal
    I hate to be the cynical one this early in the morning, but it's worth noting that the Commodore brand name has been bought, sold, lost, found, and liquidated ridiculously often [wikipedia.org] since its 1980s heyday. The current owners of the Commodore logo and brand name have about as much connection with the people who made the C64 and VIC20 as the current telephone companies have with Alexander Graham Bell.
    • Yes, but it would still be kinda nice to own a Commodore (Athlon) 64.

      I just wish that they'd use original C-64-like cases..

    • Re:Nostalgic name, but that's it. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by mdwh2 (535323) on Tuesday March 06 2007, @09:28AM (#18249232) Journal
      The current owners of the Commodore logo and brand name have about as much connection with the people who made the C64 and VIC20 as the current telephone companies have with Alexander Graham Bell.

      Welcome to business. This is true with an awful lot of brandnames. They get bought and sold (e.g., in the UK, the cable company NTL recently renamed to Virgin Media, but it's still basically NTL and not Virgin). But then, even within the same company, over a period of decades you often won't have the same people working there anymore, so it's hard to see there's really a connection, plus of course, even whole companies can be bought and sold, not to mention made public, so often the "current owners" have nothing to do with the people who originally started it.

      I suppose I can see why geeks would be more likely to prefer that brandnames were used on technical similarities rather than for reasons of marketing. Although then again, no one seems to care about reusing the Macintosh brand for different operating systems, or reusing brandnames like "Playstation" for completely different consoles - for some reason it only seems to be the Commodore (and perhaps also Amiga) brands which people complain about here.

      • Re:Nostalgic name, but that's it. (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Rob T Firefly (844560) on Tuesday March 06 2007, @09:57AM (#18249518) Homepage Journal

        I suppose I can see why geeks would be more likely to prefer that brandnames were used on technical similarities rather than for reasons of marketing. Although then again, no one seems to care about reusing the Macintosh brand for different operating systems, or reusing brandnames like "Playstation" for completely different consoles - for some reason it only seems to be the Commodore (and perhaps also Amiga) brands which people complain about here.
        Still, some brand names remain a bit constant. If you happened to be hanging around Apple headquarters, you might bump into Steve Jobs or Woz. The current Apple grew directly from the guys who were building the IIc in the 1980s. You could conceivably still find Shigeru Miyamoto running around the Nintendo offices, and you'd know that you're at the birthplace of the NES you were so glued to way back when. Hate Microsoft all you like, but you can still point to Gates and Ballmer and know that these are a couple of the guys responsible for that ubiquitous MS-DOS stuff you used to play with.

        Brand loyalty can be a funny and superficial thing, and I'm not usually a practitioner of it myself, but I still prefer to see it used by those who earned it rather than third parties who scoop up names that others built. As another commenter on this story wrote, it feels pretty much like the retail version of domain squatting.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by elrous0 (869638) *
      I suspect they'll basically just be selling the Commodore logo sticker slapped onto on a modern PC. Of course, anyone could just make a sticker themselves, slap in on their existing computer, and save a lot of money.

      -Eric

  • Loading games (Score:5, Funny)

    by nodrogluap (165820) on Tuesday March 06 2007, @08:55AM (#18248940) Homepage
    To load the games, will you still need to do

    LOAD "*",8,1
    RUN... :-)

    • Re:Loading games (Score:5, Informative)

      by Experiment 626 (698257) on Tuesday March 06 2007, @09:43AM (#18249382)

      Programs loaded into the C64 with LOAD "*",8 loaded into the beginning of BASIC memory and had to be executed with RUN, but LOAD "*",8,1 loaded the program into a specific location in memory. This could be done for programs started up with SYS (execution jumps to a specific address in memory), as another reply mentions. The most popular use of ",1" however was to overwrite memory such that the address the system returned to after it finished loading would contain a run instruction, causing the program execute with no further intervention after the LOAD command. Or am I overanalyzing the joke and being pedantic?

      • Re:Loading games (Score:4, Funny)

        by ElephanTS (624421) on Tuesday March 06 2007, @10:06AM (#18249630)
        Or am I overanalyzing the joke and being pedantic?

        You betcha!

        • ...load into the stack area, which (fortunately) was located south of location "x0101"...

          So THAT'S why SuperHuey kept crashing after I turned my desk to face the window. That put the stack west of "x0101"! Sure wish I'd known that at the time :(

  • Don't RTFA (Score:5, Interesting)

    by PadRacerExtreme (1006033) on Tuesday March 06 2007, @08:56AM (#18248958)
    The whole thing is in the summary. Why bother linking to a blog with no real information in it?
    <sigh>
  • I just hope they are backward compatable.....

  • Is it gonna be called (Score:4, Funny)

    by $RANDOMLUSER (804576) on Tuesday March 06 2007, @09:04AM (#18249032)
    the Vic 2.0?

    • Re:Is it gonna be called (Score:4, Funny)

      by operagost (62405) on Tuesday March 06 2007, @09:45AM (#18249406) Homepage Journal
      ** CBM BASIC V2 **
      3583 MEGABYTES FREE

      READY.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Dogtanian (588974)
        Ooh... let's hope you weren't planning on loading any games from the tape deck.

        If Wikipedia is correct that the tape deck was 300 baud, then that's 37.5 bytes per second, 135,000 bytes per hour.

        3583 megabytes = 3.757 x 10^9 bytes, divided by 135,000 this means your program would take...

        27,830 hours, or 1160 days, or 3.17 years to load a game that filled the computer's memory.

        And let's put this in perspective; that's less than a single-layer DVD's worth. The equivalent of a full 8.5GB dual-layer DVD
  • PC is just regular, and this seems like the brand name has been pasted onto beige run-of-the-mill PCs.

    I'd rather see (and purchase) a custom ARM9-based PC with ZetaOS or something with a very funky basic compiler/interpreter on which all programs use BASIC. ARM9 should also bring the price sufficiently down to make the product a success over regular PCs (I mean in the hobbyist market).
  • Everybody's favorite computing zombie rises from the grave one more time.

    I loved my C64 and my Amigas but, really, isn't this just the retail version of domain squatting?

  • TV output? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by tepples (727027) <slash2006NO@SPAMpineight.com> on Tuesday March 06 2007, @09:13AM (#18249106) Homepage Journal

    The original C=64 could output to a TV, and most games for the platform anticipated this. They also were optimized for joystick or joystick+partial keyboard control. But unfortunately, few games for Windows anticipate reading input from two USB gamepads and displaying output on a standard-definition TV. Does Commodore plan to revive the development of TV-friendly computer games?

  • In other news... (Score:4, Funny)

    by broller (74249) on Tuesday March 06 2007, @09:17AM (#18249128)
    Abraham Lincoln announced his candidacy for president this morning. Abraham "Honest Abe" Lincoln, a businessman from Chicago announced Tuesday before an invitation-only crowd of "four score and seven" supporters that he intended to "officially throw my stove-pipe hat into the ring." Mr. Lincoln, born Abraham Leibowitz, says that he changed his name last year, "because Leibowitz is hard for voters to spell." His opponents have said that Lincoln is merely trying to capitalize on the popularity of the sixteenth president's name. Lincoln asked that his supporters help to suppress this rumor, adding, "Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed."

  • Awesome! (Score:3, Funny)

    by DoofusOfDeath (636671) on Tuesday March 06 2007, @09:18AM (#18249140)
    I can't wait to play Zork on a 64-bit Athlon 5200+!

    And it that gets boring, I can play all of Raid over Bungling Bay in 27 millisecond!

  • Machines optimized for gaming... (Score:4, Funny)

    by jez9999 (618189) on Tuesday March 06 2007, @09:21AM (#18249176) Homepage Journal
    So they're running Linux, right?

  • Already have one (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Zedrick (764028) on Tuesday March 06 2007, @09:27AM (#18249222)
    I put a nice, thick Commodore sticker on my homebuilt 64-bit desktop.

    It's just as much "Commodore" as these machines. Perhaps even more so, since I've also got a real C-1541 connected to it.

  • When Commodore... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by smokin_juan (469699) on Tuesday March 06 2007, @10:08AM (#18249648) Homepage Journal
    When Commodore -

    - returns to making computers that boots in one second -
    - creates an OS that has programming languages built-in and ready to go -
    - designs a machine that will fit in a backpack -
    - invents a clock that keeps time without power -
    - does something revolutionary -

    that's when I'll buy another Commodore. I'll be damned if I let a group of people manipulate my nostalgia to sell me something as common as air.

  • Commodore made x86 machines in the 80s & 90s (Score:5, Interesting)

    by zsazsa (141679) on Tuesday March 06 2007, @10:48AM (#18250114) Homepage
    In the 80s and 90s, Commodore made a number of 8088/8086 [zimmers.net], 286 [zimmers.net], and 386 [zimmers.net] desktops and laptops [zimmers.net]!

    There's also the bizarre "Commodore 64" Internet Computer [zimmers.net].

    So this use of the Commodore brand isn't completely ridiculous, just a little bit ridiculous.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Dogtanian (588974)

        I have a Commodore PC at home. It's just a standard 486 beige box[1] with a Commodore label on. I bought it second hand and used it as a firewall. When one of my friends saw the label, he assumed it was some kind of joke. I had to explain that Commodore sold PCs before they went down.

        At least that was made (or at least sold) by the "real" Commodore, though, despite the company's crapness. "Commodore Gaming" are just a bunch of unrelated guys that bought the name... so what?

        As another poster said, buy an old name, slap it on any old equipment; Commodore's brands have been exploited this way before [theregister.co.uk]. Things is, these tactics seem to get some attention from the press. Does the "new" Napster have any more relation to the original service (or its owners) than any other legal download servi

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