Commodore Returns with New Gaming PCs 281
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."
Its about time Lionel Ritchie changed career (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Its about time Lionel Ritchie changed career (Score:4, Funny)
Commadore 64(bit) (Score:5, Funny)
It'd be nice bragging rights: I've got Linux/Windows running on a C64!
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I would love to get my new new Core2 Duo Extreme Commadore 64!
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Re:Commodore 64(bit) (Score:2)
If they're gonna use the Commodore name though, I hope they take it halfway seriously. There should be preinstalled an emulator and as much software as copyright issues allow, to play nice with those of us with nostalgia for the old Commodores.
More importantly though, it should come with a useful programming language whose learning curve isn't too steep. BASIC has become obsolete, but when I think Commodore, I think typing in code from the back of magazines. Pyt
Bit Early? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Bit Early? (Score:5, Funny)
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!
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Yes I am still bitter about the A3000+, A4000 and the post-AGA chipsets, why do you ask? Medhi Ali can...go do something very rude to himself.
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Atari was a better system (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Atari was a better system (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Atari was a better system (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Atari was a better system (Score:5, Funny)
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-Eric
Re:Atari was a better system (Score:5, Insightful)
I owned just about every home computer of that era, and the 800 was definitely second best to the C64. It should have been, it was much older. A steel frame only counts for so much.
On the other hand, there really isn't anything in this article about what the new 'Commodore' gaming computers really are... and it sounds like just more leeching off of a dead name.
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Commodore 64 - could be used as a doorstop
Atari 800 - could be used to break down a door
just a hunch (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
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You only need to be 30 to remember Commodore with fondness.
Try 25. That's how old I am, and I remember my C64 as the first home PC my family had, till we upgraded to an 8088! I still remember it and its blue 'bootscreen' glow with fondness.
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Re:just a hunch (Score:5, Funny)
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I remember when I had that and an Apple IIe... The poor fruit didn't get any attention...
Also, I build my own computers for the convinience... It's sad, but I find it easier to deal with the merchants and manufacturers of components when something goes wrong, than to deal with the tech support of most pre-builts. I get faster results too.
Re:just a hunch (Score:5, Funny)
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..."
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Re:just a hunch (Score:5, Interesting)
However, I'm 40, and every machine I own (ten atm) is home built.
I guess you're right then.....
Re:just a hunch (Score:5, Funny)
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Sadly it turns out that if you build your own ATM the banks expect you to fill it with money yourself.
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No, they hide in dark places from the Atari users, who've been workin' out since the 1980's. We have Ninja skills, nunchuck skills, firearms skills, benchpress skills.
ATARI POSSE! REPRESENT!
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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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.
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You do realise that there have been Commodore PCs before - in that Commodore when it existed as a company made PCs?
There was a lot more to the Commodore brand than the Commodore 64, and all this is is reusing the brand. Is it pointless to use such a seemingly old brand? Well, it nonetheless seems to be getting them lots of extra publicity, which is really the whole point of using well known brandnames...
And as someone else poin
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20th Century PCs (Score:5, Funny)
-- 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."
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-- Bala Keilman, CEO for Commodore Gaming.
There's a CEO with vision for you. Best PC of the late 20th century.
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Hey! Mine still works you insensitive clod!
-Eric
Nostalgic name, but that's it. (Score:5, Insightful)
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I just wish that they'd use original C-64-like cases..
Re:Nostalgic name, but that's it. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Nostalgic name, but that's it. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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-Eric
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But I fear your right; they'll just use the logo on generic hardware.
I'm hoping some rich geek is going to buy the entire Commodore brand and logo, and just bury it, where it can't be mollested any further.
FWIW, there's a C64 system-in-a-joystick out there with a number of games. It's actually quite cool and, AFAIK, it contains the hardware for a fully functioning C64. I'm dreaming they'll someday make a C64-compatible box with
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How about if they manage to fit some miniature system in an A1200-lookalike case?
Might please a few Amiga diehards, but too far past C='s (and the Amiga's) commercial peak for commercial nostalgia exploitation; more people would have fond memories of the A500.
But if they really wanted to exploit the nostalgia market that way, they'd be best advised to slap something in a repro C64 case (classic "breadbox" version, of course). In fact, if they had the case, it would probably be trivial to stick a small form-factor PC in there, with some sort of emulator onboard; possibly using the C64
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As usual, a hardcore geek has beaten the rest of the world to it. [mini-itx.com]
Loading games (Score:5, Funny)
LOAD "*",8,1
RUN...
Re:Loading games (Score:5, Informative)
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)
You betcha!
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Not at all
I wrote a few autoloading programs myself for the C64. They'd use the ",8,1" suffix and load into the stack area, which (fortunately) was located south of location "x0101", if I recall correctly. You could just make the first few tens of bytes "x01" so that the return from the LOAD subroutine would start executing your program immediately (usually a small machine language program at x0101 that would finish the loading process). It was probably
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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 :(
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I paid $99 for Fastload the day it came out, and it was worth every penny... that program absolutely saved my sanity.
Don't RTFA (Score:5, Interesting)
<sigh>
backward compatable (Score:2)
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And it doesn't even have to be hardware compatible, they could just include an emulator in BIOS or even just preload it in Windows.
Is it gonna be called (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Is it gonna be called (Score:4, Funny)
3583 MEGABYTES FREE
READY.
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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
Why PC? (Score:2)
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).
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I for one have fond memories when computers came with a basic compiler and you could do extremely cool (for then) things with them straight out of the box. You got fed up with a game? Write a crack. You didn't want to pay for some shareware? Write a crack. You wanted to see see what cool stuff your computer could do? Write a small demo.
However those days are (sadly) long gone. As todays computers are ridiculously cheap, it wouldn't make sense to buy a sperate one just b
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Back to reality that is one thing I do wonder about. Why did
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That's a good idea. A better one would be an ARM9 notebook with 802.11b (or g or n) functionality and a 9-hour battery life.
Then, at least, I'd be able to get a reasonable notebook computer.
Sheesh. (Score:2)
I loved my C64 and my Amigas but, really, isn't this just the retail version of domain squatting?
TV output? (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
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Yeah, good luck finding one. The company that made them apparently went out of business about 5 seconds after releasing the first batch. It's a shame too. I know a LOT of people who would have bought one if they had only heard about them (the greatest product in the world won't sell if no one knows about it). I'd still love to have one, but they're impossible to find unless you're willing to spend a fortune trying to win one on eBay.
-Eric
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In other news... (Score:4, Funny)
Awesome! (Score:3, Funny)
And it that gets boring, I can play all of Raid over Bungling Bay in 27 millisecond!
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I can't wait to play Zork on a 64-bit Athlon 5200+!
Then why don't you? I mean, seriously, unless you don't actually have an Athlon 5200+, what are you waiting for?
World Wide Web
There is a program called Frotz [csubak.edu] here.
There is a game called Zork [csd.uwo.ca] here.
> USE FROTZ ON ZORK
You're not holding the Frotz.
World Wide Web
There is a program called Frotz [csubak.edu] here.
There is a game called Zork [csd.uwo.ca] here.
> GET FROTZ
You now have Frotz.
World Wide Web
There is a game called Zork [csd.uwo.ca] here.
> USE FROTZ ON ZORK
You're not holding the Zork.
World Wide Web
There is a game called Zork [csd.uwo.ca] here.
Machines optimized for gaming... (Score:4, Funny)
Already have one (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Let me guess (Score:2)
(that's for all you old Amiga fans)
So... (Score:2)
I would say that this is doomed to fail, except that I know there is a market of 30 something virgins with $$ to burn who are going to impress each other with their fancy new Commordore stickered over-priced PCs.
Thi will piss off commador enthusiasts (Score:2)
Good thinking.
When Commodore... (Score:5, Interesting)
- 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.
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The machine would include a few different programming languages (such as BASIC, JavaScript, Perl, etc...), topping off in power close to Flash. It would have limited networking capabili
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I feel exactly the same way you do.
And, actually, I've been looking for a new portable computer on which I can do programming, remote administration, and other basic work tasks without being tied to a desktop or tied to a wall after 5 hours. Like a 13" ARM notebook with a 9-hour battery life. Wouldn't that be just the thing?
I just had to (Score:2, Funny)
Is Nostalgia Enough? (Score:2)
More like a tragedy (Score:2, Troll)
It's tragic the same brand used by excellent and original personal computers like the PET, VIC-20, C-64 and Amiga is now glued to x86 computers that still have some form of an ISA bus inside its chipset and whose processor still wakes up thinking it's an 8088 inside a
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The fact that Commodore did that (build and sell x86 boxes) to postpone its bankruptcy does not diminish this. It was sad then and it is sad now.
There was a time a company called Commodore distinguished itself from other computer makers, by designing and building great computers. I regret to tell you, but your PCIII-20 was not among them.
The Fraud that is Branding (Score:2)
In any case, it's not a Commodore unless I can LOAD"$",8,1
Commodore made x86 machines in the 80s & 90s (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Branding! What jolly fun (Score:2)
Got just one question. (Score:2)
Chris Mattern
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You saw that one too? What did you think of the plot?
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Oh, yeah, right. Like anyone who's watched that flick paid any attention to the plot.
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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.
[1] I think it was a Cyrix CPU.
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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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Today, even AmigaOS would be a top seller if only those bastar^H^Hkind folks who own the rights would open source it or actually do something with it, like porting the system to tablets and portable computers, instead of letting it die slowly.
IMHO, AmigaOS (regardless of its status) would only sell to the diehard hobbyists still using their Amigas. From a mainstream point-of-view, the Amiga OS has been too long dead for any new version of it to have any advantage over a written-and-launched-from-scratch operating system. (See here for more discussion on that subject [slashdot.org]).