The Return of Commodore?

[Mayhem]

Things will sour quite quickly...

https://commodore.inc/press-release-of-23-july-2025/

Based on what I know and have been told, the lawyers were on it immediately after publication, and they haven't a leg to stand on, especially now Christian owns Commodore BV (he's not just bought the rights, he's bought the company).

[Mayhem]

And I really don't understand the "toxic tech" and "social media is evil" stuff, when he's, like, promoting his things on social media to people who're currently using PCs running Windows in the majority. So, surely, it can't be all bad or you wouldn't be using this medium in the first place? He very possibly has a coherent position on this, but I simply can't tell, because it's just an alliteration - "toxic tech" - in the midst of a hundred other things, so I'm not even sure I know what he's even getting at.

Doomscrolling on your phone. Or getting angry at someone 6000 miles away on a screen. He is very very anti FB, X etc, and YT is about the only medium he really uses at all. The company itself will be a different matter I imagine. But personally he thinks social media is evil.

[venusian]

If your target market is all over 50 and you're selling nostalgia, being against modern things is also a marketing tactic.

[KlaxonCow]

If your target market is all over 50 and you're selling nostalgia, being against modern things is also a marketing tactic.

True enough.

I'm a weird exception in that I've gotten more liberal with age, but I realise that's arse backwards to how it works for most people, who progressively become more racist and penny-pinching from prolonged exposure to "the Sun" and "the Daily Fail".

[venusian]

I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

[grue]

If your target market is all over 50 and you're selling nostalgia, being against modern things is also a marketing tactic.

I'm still very much in a state of constant confusion as to what kind of nostalgia will have the target market buy again the same old tech. Most of us already have a [product name] already and unless there is something nostalgic and fresh at the same time, I don't know who will be buying in the years to come.

[Space Cowboy]

Well it was good enough for me to decide to put an order in.

For me the appeal was nostalgia, but the kind that comes from having missed out on owning one back in the day, although a family friend had one I got to enjoy. I think there's also an opportunity here for Llamasoft to release a compilation of their C64 software for this machine. Of course the images are pretty easy to find online, I would imagine - I haven't looked, but the kind of people who have this nostalgia for the C64 are also the kind of people who'll have the disposable income and would, I imagine, love to buy the software officially.

I've also backed the ZX Spectrum Next kickstarter 3, and will be in the queue to by the new 'The A1200'.

[KlaxonCow]

The next chapter in the story.



(As usual for a Peri Fractic video, it's very "ADHD", as I've put it before, with a million different things whizzing by and many tangents. But I don't necessarily dislike the style, honestly. Just saying that it is the case that his videos are always like this. I can't criticise too much because one could say that his videos are effectively the video version of my "long posts", really.)

[Whiteball]

If your target market is all over 50 and you're selling nostalgia, being against modern things is also a marketing tactic.

I'm still very much in a state of constant confusion as to what kind of nostalgia will have the target market buy again the same old tech. Most of us already have a [product name] already and unless there is something nostalgic and fresh at the same time, I don't know who will be buying in the years to come.

I believe they've already said they will be doing new products too, not just the retro stuff.

[KlaxonCow]

I believe they've already said they will be doing new products too, not just the retro stuff.

Indeed, in the new video, he suggests that they hope to do two good new projects every year.

And he's always said that part of the reason for acquiring the Commodore brand would be to make some of the community projects out there "official". Back them up, licence out the Commodore brand.

You can already see this with the Commodore 64 Ultimate. Gideon's already been making the cartridges and the motherboards himself. But, with the backing of the new Commodore, they can be sold pre-assembled in vintage cases. It can get better publicity and sell more units. Gideon can still do his thing and, I'm sure, improve the product going forward. But now he's got a team backing that up and can operate on a much bigger scale with a pre-assembled product rather than offering just "a kit" for DIY assembly. If done right - and hopefully without big behind-the-scenes dramas, which do sometimes happen with these things - then it can be a mutual symbiotic thing. Commodore can bring some "weight" and a team of people to back things up, sort out manufacturing and distribution at a larger scale. It can be beneficial for all, if done right.

[KlaxonCow]

Looking online, WDC did design a 32-bit 65C832, as a successor to the 16-bit 65C816:
https://downloads.reactivemicro.com/Ele ... asheet.pdf

But it was never mass-produced

Hackaday has an article on this.

https://hackaday.com/2025/08/24/the-32- ... never-had/

The 32 Bit 6502 You Never Had

In the beginning was the MOS6502, an 8-bit microprocessor that found its way into many famous machines. Some of you will know that a CMOS 6502 was created by the Western Design Center, and in turn, WDC produced the 65C816, a 16-bit version that was used in the Apple IIgs as well as the Super Nintendo. It was news to us that they had a 32-bit version in their sights, but after producing a datasheet, they never brought it to market. Last October, [Mike Kohn] produced a Verilog version of this W65C832 processor, so it can be experienced via an FPGA.

And here's Mike Kohn's website about his FPGA-32-bit-6502 project:

https://www.mikekohn.net/micro/w65c832_fpga.php

So though the 32-bit W65C832 was never actually produced, it's been recreated via an FPGA.

[mamemeister]

I got my Ultimate 2 board a few months back and popped it into a breadbin case, it's a cracking bit of kit and if this new Commodore thing makes them more readily available at a decent price this is a great thing.

[KlaxonCow]

I got my Ultimate 2 board a few months back and popped it into a breadbin case, it's a cracking bit of kit and if this new Commodore thing makes them more readily available at a decent price this is a great thing.

Yeah, it's basically a pre-assembled Ultimate 2 board in one of three available cases - standard beige breadbin, transparent RGB lights case, or the special "gold edition" case.

Commodore are just pre-assembling them and, because they own the trademarks now, they can legally have the proper "Commodore 64" badges on them, as official Commodore products. But it is just the Ultimate 2 board put into a breadbin case - one of the photos on their site shows the internals and its an Ultimate 2 board (albeit that they've printed "Commodore" on the motherboards now that they officially can do that).

Because, yeah, I've been um'ing and ah'ing about whether to get one of these Commodore Ultimate computers - it would be nice to support the effort - as I'd rather have the more Amiga-like C64C case.

While I personally had a breadbin, my mate had a C64C and I always liked that case better. Was a bit jealous he got the better case because he bought his C64 later.

Looks better. Had a better keyboard. Is actually slightly bigger, with space for ventilation holes on the back for better thermals, if needed. And, like, if you're DIY'ing a kit, then the extra room could be useful - for cable management, if not fitting some extra stuff inside the case.



(The perfect case would be the C64C but with the original breadbin keys, so that the symbols are printed on the side, not on the face. That would be the best of both worlds, I reckon.)

The RGB lights one really isn't selling as well as the classic breadbin or "gold edition". I think that was a miscalculation - retro gamers aren't interested in RGB, because we never had any of that back in the day. It might have been wiser - in hindsight - if they'd offered the C64C case instead of the RGB lights one. I'd have snapped that up without hesitation and there would have been plenty of folks - like my mate - who had a C64C back in the '80s and it's the "C" model that's nostalgia for them.

But, hey, everything's 20 / 20 vision in hindsight, eh? It's easy to point out the mistakes after they've already been made.

(And, also, this is just the first batch of these. A future batch could just replace the RGB lights for a C64C version instead. Which actually might be a clever idea to make the RGB lights version an "exclusive" to give it "collector" weight to help sell them, if they don't ever make any in future batches.)

[skab]

Looks better. Had a better keyboard. Is actually slightly bigger, with space for ventilation holes on the back for better thermals, if needed. And, like, if you're DIY'ing a kit, then the extra room could be useful - for cable management, if not fitting some extra stuff inside the case.

Wait a second. Better keyboard? The white is better looking, but otherwise it should be the exact same keyboard, or wasn't it? I always thought those ultra-tall keycaps looked outdated even then, the C128 keyboard was way better looking.

My version of a C64C would have had the flat C128 case and keyboard, just less wide and deep. The C64C always looked like the C128's fat little brother.

Back then one of the main complaints when the C64C emerged was a distinct lack of "extra room", many tall expansions didn't fit anymore.

[KlaxonCow]

I was comparing it to the classic breadbin, not the C128.

The C128 would be "in the future" at this imagined point in time and, also, "new" Commodore are not offering a C128 yet.

Also, don't get me started on the awful over-complicated missed opportunity that the C128 was. Another sacrifice to the "serious business" bonfire that killed off so many early home computers, thinking their success as "a games console with a keyboard" could translate into crushing IBM and all its clones in the business space. Which was never going to happen.

Looking down their noses at their gaming success as "childish" - throwing away their lead in an industry that, you know, is worth multi-billions today and rakes in more cash than Hollywood or the music industry... or, frankly, selling fucking word processors and databases to "serious business". No, no, throw away your multimedia legacy as pioneers of the soon-to-be biggest entertainment industry on the planet, because "I work in games" sounds a bit childish at your posh dinner parties with "serious" professionals.

So, yeah, instead of correctly doubling-down on the C64's strengths - quite literally doubling, with double the RAM, double the clock speed, etc. - let's make an over-complicated beast that has both a Z80 and a 6510 inside it, and two graphics chips (the old VIC-II and the VDC because you can't be taken seriously in word processing without 80 columns, of course) because of all the legions of people, who didn't exist, that wanted to run an already out-of-date CP/M in 80 columns.

I've always imagined a C128 that, instead of trying to become a "serious business" machine, actually doubled-down on the C64's actual strengths.

So this alternative C128 would have thrown out the Z80 and VDC nonsense. Instead, what we need is a VIC-III chip that can keep up with a 2MHz CPU. Basically, the exact same trick - 1MHz CPU, 1MHz VIC on a 2MHz bus, taking turns so they never get in each other's way - but now at twice the clock speed - 2MHz CPU, 2MHz VIC on a 4MHz bus.

And, you know, while we're making this new VIC-III chip - a VIC-II that can operate at 2MHz - then we can also throw in some modest extra features.

The big one - being realistic to what was possible at the time - would be that Commodore had hardware smooth scrolling in the VIC-II because it had been intended for arcade games. Continue that realisation and include two new hardware registers. The "horizontal character scroll" and "vertical character scroll". These would have been fairly easy to implement. When the VIC-III grabs a "bad line" of characters, it rotates them according to the "horizontal character scroll". When the VIC-III is deciding what line of characters to grab in that "bad line", it offsets it (modulo 25 lines) by the "vertical character scroll".

What this creates is a screen where you can smoothly scroll it, in hardware, to any character and pixel location with zero CPU. But, unlike the "any given Screen position" AGSP hacks, this is just simply built into the VIC-III. Instead of tricking the VIC-II to delay writing lines and characters, this alternative VIC-III would just have two extra registers that does all the wraparound rotating in the hardware directly.

This would have been massive. Because then you could have a bitmap screen - all 16 colours on screen - and then smoothly scroll it around, using no CPU at all. And, of course, the same old trick of pulling in the borders and then writing new columns and rows of graphics under the border to scroll them in, gives you full 8-way smooth hardware scrolling of a bitmap screen (on a CPU now clocked at 2MHz, remember).

Heck, even without these extra registers, if you had a 2MHz 6510 and 2MHz VIC, then you've now got a machine actually capable of copying the full bitmap screen within 8 frames of smooth pixel scrolling, with cycles to spare to actually run a game, so you could have scrolling bitmap games. But, as I say, while we're fixing the VIC to run at 2MHz, might as well throw in those extra two registers and make it a "zero CPU" operation. Which would have been immense.

Other simple additions to the VIC-III could be another set of 8 hardware sprites, taking the total to 16. I mean, we might as well keep up this "doubling" idea - double clock speed, double RAM, double sprites, etc. - and the big one that the 16-bit machines brought: a programmable colour palette. So in our new scrolling bitmap mode, using all 16 colours, those can be any colours we like.

Basically, this imagined alternative C128 would have been a proper "stepping stone" from the C64 to the Atari ST / Amiga.

But totally 100% compatible with the original C64, because you just run it at 1MHz, ignore the extra RAM you can bank in and the new "VIC-III" registers could just be hidden behind a bit flag somewhere (you have to set a "1" somewhere to say "please enable the new features" - indeed, we've already got this for setting the 1MHz / 2MHz switch, so it could work that way, and the new registers and features appear when you switch to 2MHz operation, because if you're doing that, then you already know you're on a C128 with a VIC-III).

A renewal of their 8-bit line, with an actual "better C64" - which is what those buying a C128 were surely expecting and hoping it to be - easily making it the best gaming machine available, until the Atari ST and Amiga show up (and it still has life, even with its 16-bit superiors around, as it's sold at the C64 price for the "budget" conscious - and then, of course, we didn't need the C16 or Plus/4 as the "budget" options).

Yeah, as I said, don't get me started on the C128. What a wasted opportunity.

I'd love to find the 3 people who actually wanted the C128 to be an 80-column CP/M word processor over the millions of people who just wanted a "better C64" - more RAM, more clock speed, improved graphics and sound (I didn't mention the SID but, yeah, if we carry on the doubling theme, we could have a SID-II with 6 voices and stereo panning - like running dual SIDs, but let's just stuff it all into one new SID-II chip).