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The Commodore Comeback at CeBIT

Posted by Zonk on Fri Mar 16, 2007 12:17 PM
from the old-skool-new-skool dept.
PC Games (Games) Hardware
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."
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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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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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  • Wha? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by AKAImBatman (238306) * <(akaimbatman) (at) (gmail.com)> on Friday March 16 2007, @12:20PM (#18377317) Homepage Journal

    The high-end XX packs enough grunt to make an Alienware machine run to its deformed alien mum.

    Alienware is not a serious competitor. At least not any longer. They're just another Dell brand.

    Also, it's probably worth noting that the really high end systems are often hand-built. That way you can get both the hardware you want, and the case design you want. Many of the 'Gaming PCs' tend to be targeted at the market of wannabes who have too much money and not enough sense.

    Commodore uses what it calls a 'revolutionary painting process' to make them look pretty damn gorgeous.

    I'm so sorry, am I missing something here? Because "pretty damn gorgeous" is not how I'd describe these machines. "Pretty damn hideous" is a bit closer. "Treading on someone else's memories and goodwill to make a buck" is even better. "Looking li-"

    OMFG! What the hell is that Giana Sisters [commodoregaming.com] skin!?!?! ('scuse me, C-Kin)

    My beautiful sisters [lemon64.com]! What has become of you!?! I... I... I...

    I think I need to go now. If you'll pardon me. I... need to find the nearest restroom before I hurl.
    • These cases hardly seem revolutionary, despite the ability to interchange "skins".

      Revolutionary...now that might be adding handles to the case to make it easier to bring the machine to a LAN party...or making the case a different shape...or something like that. Something at least useful.

      But this is a regular old square PC with a skin on it. Not revolutionary. Just different.
    • Lighten up a little, Batman. Nostalgia has a great purpose in life. We can always mod the case (make our own C-kin) and the internal cards at a later date. I'm guessing it's not all integrated.

      I want one of each so that I can test a home-grown aLFS [linuxfromscratch.org] in parallel.

      You're right about the Giana Sisters C-kin. WTH?

      • Lighten up a little, Batman. Nostalgia has a great purpose in life.

        I fail to see the nastolgia in this. I have a Commodore 64 sitting at home. This new behometh looks nothing like it, nor does it evoke any sense of the original. Nor is it even close to the grace of the Amiga. So I'd say, "treading on memories and goodwill" is pretty close, wouldn't you?

        We can always mod the case (make our own C-kin) and the internal cards at a later date. I'm guessing it's not all integrated.

        Um. Okay?

        It's a box. That's painted. If that appeals to you, good for you! To each their own. But it still has nothing to do with Commodore. It's just a label slapped on an unreleated company to generate press.

        I'm not really sure why you're mentioning expansion cards. I have no doubt that these are internally expandable. Just like you'd expect any machine of these specs to be. I also have no doubt that they'll be incredibly expensive, and highly impractical when compared to what you could custom-build for less. *shrug*

        You're right about the Giana Sisters C-kin. WTH?

        Please do not take this as sarcasm, because it is not intended as such. Thank You! I was worried that I'd get jumped on for "not liking Japanamation" or something screwy like that. My only concern is that the case design shown is not the Giana Sisters. That looks more like Pokemon with a new name slapped on it.

        • So I'd say, "treading on memories and goodwill" is pretty close, wouldn't you?

          Well, ummm, yeah... but it has a C= logo on it! It's turtles all the way down!

          it still has nothing to do with Commodore

          They bought the C= logo!

          just a label slapped on an unreleated company

          I've tried polling for more corporate geneology here [slashdot.org].

          I also have no doubt that they'll be incredibly expensive

          You're probably right--but I'm in La Jolla, CA. *looks around* What, is there a shortage of money in this town? They even have a job opening on the ethics commission [slashdot.org].

          you could custom-build for less

          Now that's a really good point. I've always preferred to buy as many no name parts as possible and build my own.

          That looks more like Pokemon

          I have no problem with anime, but make it good [google.com] anime [google.com].

          • Well, ummm, yeah... but it has a C= logo on it! It's turtles all the way down!

            You know what I just realized? My current sig suggests a business model that makes better use of the Commodore name than these guys are. What an interesting coincidence that ended up being.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Seumas (6865)
      I'd love to buy a high-end Commodore gaming rig, presuming it is about as cheap as building it myself. I have never bought a pre-built machine in my life (except for laptops, of course). I would not mind letting someone else handle the trouble and hassle of the process of putting the components together for me, but I have yet to find thoroughly high-end and high-quality gaming rigs that are not significantly cheaper to build on my own. If they charged within about $100 of what I would pay for the parts via

    • Many of the 'Gaming PCs' tend to be targeted at the market of wannabes who have too much money and not enough sense.

      Now there's a statement that could be generalized almost indefinitely.

      "Pretty damn hideous" is a bit closer. "Treading on someone else's memories and goodwill to make a buck" is even better.

      I have fond memories of my C=64 and Amigas. Why the hell someone would buy the Commodore name just to drag it through the (brightly painted) mud just boggles the mind.

      • Maybe they're vaguely related to Mehdi Ali and Irving Gould and just live to piss people off who have any love for what Commodore's engineers were creating...

        I mean, we're geeks. We love great engineering. We saw the amazing stuff coming out of Commodore and we appreciated its underlying beauty. If we, as geeks, had taken over Commodore, it would be producing absolutely stunning, beautiful, powerful hardware, that works in a different but better way than anything anyone else does.

        But we're not exactly

        • Speaking of a takeover. If you recall, Commodore's assets originally sold for a mere $23 million. That seems high until you look at it that each Amiga user could have donated about $1 and owned the company. It'd have sucked majorly to try to get anything done with it but it'd still have been more productive than the Escom/Gateway/who-the-hell-ever-else-there-was combo that managed to turn Commodore/Amiga into the non-innovative, umm, company it is today.
    • HA HA!

      I agree with what you said. Using your link, turn the machine over and its feet are little commodore symbols. I wonder if they're expecting that little symbol to carry their weight, too. (obviousness alert) Cute finishing touch, though. :)
  • I love the modular case design. It won't be long until users begin creating their own C-kin panels.

    We need more information in the about us [commodoregaming.com] section:

    Having acquired the Commodore brand in late 2005 as part of a joint venture with Commodore International Corporation, Commodore Gaming aims to re-establish the brand as a leader in its industry.

    Who was it that ponied up the cash to buy the old C= logo? Are they at all related (by blood or money) to the people who drove CBM into the ground? How is CIC related to the former CBM? Are they interacting with the current owners of Amiga Technologies (if that still exists)? How long until they make laptops?

    I want one... or four.

  • Funny English (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Knertified (756718) on Friday March 16 2007, @12:28PM (#18377429)
    "We Open Store Mid April!" "You have dedicated time for your gaming and you want the edge that gaming supreme will give you." "The Commodore gaming extreme takes your frag count to a whole new level with this high performance..." Why does this remind if me "all your base are belong to us?"

  • Finally! (Score:3, Funny)

    by rmckeethen (130580) on Friday March 16 2007, @12:31PM (#18377475) Homepage

    Thank you Commodore, for putting out a new system actually capable of running Vista right out of the box!

  • cold dead fish (Score:4, Funny)

    by nuzak (959558) on Friday March 16 2007, @12:34PM (#18377531) Journal
    "Gravel in Pocket"?

    I'm speechless.
  • ...can we get hold of that machine emulator thingy separately and install it on our home box? I'd definitely pay for that, but not for the whole box (which is kinda useless in my home office, stuffed to the gills w/ machinery as it is...)

    /P

    • "Machine emulator thingy"? To emulate what? Aren't these just standard Windows machines with a nostalgic logo attached?

    • ...can we get hold of that machine emulator thingy separately and install it on our home box?

      What, like this? [viceteam.org] I thought everyone knew about VICE? You can (legally!) get all the ROMs you want at C64.com [c64.com]. And if you want real C64 hardware, it costs less than $20 [wikipedia.org]. Oh, and you can mod it to your heart's desire without feeling bad about it. ;-)

  • Gravel (Score:5, Interesting)

    by AKAImBatman (238306) * <(akaimbatman) (at) (gmail.com)> on Friday March 16 2007, @12:34PM (#18377551) Homepage Journal
    Ok, I'm back. Looking at the "Gravel" (who names this stuff?), I'm much more impressed by it than I am their PC offerings. The CNet article shows a very compact device that appears to be well suited to portable television applications. I must say that I'm impressed. At least with the form factor and control scheme. The memory size seems to be a bit of a show-stopper, though. It doesn't take much to fill up 2 GB (or even 4 GB) of storage. With iPod videos starting at 30GB, this thing looks woefully small for the task.

    Of course, that's something that can always be fixed in future revisions. If it's going to fail in the marketplace, it will be because it lacks content. No media player ever sells without content. And with Apple sewing up the downloadable television/movie market, I'm not sure where that leaves the Gravel. (Groveling, perhaps?) It's a neat device irrespective of its Commodore branding, but I sincerely hope that The New Commodore(TM) has some content distribution deals in the works.
  • Big flipping deal. These PCs are not the Commodore that I knew and loved from my teenage years.

    The only way I'll buy another Commodore computer for gaming is if it's a PC in an original-looking Commodore 64-style case. There have been PCs-in-a-keyboard [cybernetman.com] for a while now, and the C64 was a hefty-sized unit. Modding a PC into a C64-style case should be completely possible, barring some necessary key changes, like F1-F12 keys instead of the C64's F1-F8. Slim-line DVD drives and 2.5" hard drives should mak
    • Okay, I missed that in the article. My bad. It still doesn't make these PCs Commodores.
    • What if they put BASIC in the BIOS?
      • I know you're saying that to be a smart ass, but actually that's a really cool idea. Make it a dual-boot system at power-up. Hold down the C= key at power-up to immediately boot into an emulator-on-a-chip that could be upgraded as necessary -- full C64 BASIC that could access .d64/.t64 images over a FAT-formatted USB drive or floppy disk. Otherwise, if you don't press the C= key it will boot up like any other PC.

        For the people who grew up using the C64 back when it was in its prime, it would probably
    • If you want to know what they should really do, read the second page of my latest blog article [intelligentblogger.com]. I didn't realize it before, but it seems I came prepared for this article! :P
  • OMG WOW a 800W box to play video games. Good thing to know my 300mW gameboy can play games too.

    Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. Or are people incapable of learning that lesson?

    Tom

  • The LOGO (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Paolo DF (849424)
    At least, they didn't mess with the logo and butchered as Atari (the new Atari) did.
    Look here [myatari.net]
    • This guy is seriously obsessive about some pretty small details. The logo is still instantly recognizeable and hardly butchered. He must have serious conniptions when he sees the animated version of the logo (on all Atari loading screens).

      You want to talk about butchered logos, how about Cisco's new Fischer-price look?
  • I think this company could have simply made more money by selling cases and maybe other components like power supplies and heatsinks -- if you look at their site, they focus 99% of the features on the damned case....
  • does it run... Mr Do's Castle?
  • system with 2 8800? they should put the high end X-FI card in.
  • I just got one of these babies . . . I can't get the CD rom to recognize, anyone know the load extension for it? I tried Load "zaxxon",8,1 And Seriously, my commodore tape drive isn't USB OR Firewire...any thoughts? If you could fit, in some cases, 10-15 games PER SIDE of a non HD 5.25" floppy, can you imagine a DVD worth of C=64 games!? ooh man....

  • This Case says it all [commodoregaming.com]

    As a long time Commodore Fan it just makes me want to cry. :-( Though I think those who think Skateboard deck art is really cool will love it.

    I was a big fan of the iMac flavors and Blue/Wite & Grey G3s and G4s, this new monoskin instead of a two-tone case look is really lousy looking (I always wished they did a ruby iMac with Chromed speaker grills and black trim.... sweeet.).

    I noticed the options were United Kingf\dom and nothing else for country.

  • Nothing new here. I bought a "Commodore" branded PC (beige box Pentium 75) about 10 years ago. A Canadian company named Campus Computer bought the rights to the name (at least here in Canada). It even had the famous logo on the case. I also remember seeing the Commodore logo on some old army green filing cabinets, which must have pre-dated their entry into computers, back when they were an office supply and calculator company.
  • Though they use the same logo, can one truly call these systems chicken head computers [computer-d...online.org] with these specs?
  • The cases may be pretty but from the looks of the pictures, they've resurrected Commodore's legendary problems with trapped heat as well.

  • Old Commodore vs new Commodore (Score:5, Insightful)

    by the_womble (580291) on Friday March 16 2007, @03:11PM (#18379729) Homepage Journal
    Old Commodore: "revolutionary graphics chip" "revolutionary audio" "revolutionary OS" New Commodore: "revolutionary painting process"
    • I'd buy one for sure if you could punch a key combination at POST to get a little flashing cursor and then type "GO 64". It would really be a Commodore then.

      • I'd buy one for sure if you could punch a key combination at POST to get a little flashing cursor and then type "GO 64". It would really be a Commodore then.
        Isn't that what VICE is for?

    • too bad that it looks like just another PC clone.
      Well, a very good clone, it seems, however...
      I was using Atari 800XL back in the day and we hated Commodore 64 but it really hurts to see poor thing became a brand for "Gaming PC".
    • It's Commodore as a BRAND - just like Atari was resurrected as a brand. Neither one has any semblance to the previous company.

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