The Return of Commodore?

[KlaxonCow]

And everybody wanted to build a business machine, not some games console. Think about how Clive Sinclair always despised that his machines were used for games instead of more serious stuff.

"Jet Set Fucking Willy", indeed.

But this is kind of exactly my whole underlying point. These companies repeatedly kept smashing themselves against the rocks of being seen as "serious business". Embarrassed that they were doing so immensely well in "childish" gaming, when they wanted the "status symbol" of being seen as "serious" and "important" in the business world.

But this is just snobbery. Gaming today nets more money than Hollywood, than the music industry, than all the streaming services. It's the biggest entertainment industry of them all.

Whereas, Gabe Newell took the polar opposite journey. Working for Microsoft, who commissioned a survey into what actually sells the most, realising that "serious business" is a mug's game. When a tiny 12-person team in Texas could easily outsell the biggest software company on the planet:



And Valve was born.



If you have a massive popular gaming platform in your hands then don't be a fucking idiot. Double-down on that shit.

Who cares if it's "serious business" or not? If it's a "status symbol" at all the fancy dinner parties - Gabe hosts his own dinner parties on his half billion gaming yacht, and he's fucking laughing at you.

Because he's making way more stupid money than you ever will, not doing anything particularly serious, and having loads of fun doing it.

This is the point. Commodore were too concerned with taking their "Commodore Business Machines" name too literally, when it was just a rip-off of IBM. And no-one was ever going to compete with the IBM PC in the end, and it was dumb to even attempt it.

Indeed, as PCs are the state-of-the-art today, it might be easy to forget that they were utter shite back in the day. Pretty much all the competition had better graphics and sound. Talking of CP/M, DOS was a shit x86 knock-off of CP/M.

So my suggestion that you don't bother with the Z80 chip and stick with the 6510, but just expect CP/M software to be ported over is not that daft - the big "serious business" machine didn't even have real CP/M and just some "quick and dirty" knock-off of it for the x86 and it did okay, making Bill Gates a billionaire - on his way to becoming the richest man on the planet - that his company's still around, trying to make us all use AI to justify their "sunk cost fallacy" of putting more money than God into "cloud services", like IBM before them, after they died a death unable to control the IBM PC..

...and what pushed the PC? Why could Intel make a fortune selling new models of CPU with only modest 1 or 2 MHz speed improvements, to a market of clones trying to outdo each other?

Yes, "serious business" was part of the mix. But what made PCs into multimedia powerhouses and kept pushing the CPU clocks, and the "SuperVGA" graphics improvements, was games, games, games. Folks upgraded from 386 to 486 because DOOM, then later Quake.

These people were actually terrible at business. Because they think business is just "being serious" and wearing suit-and-tie at dinner parties. Being accountants. Doing business the way business has always been done. For respect and admiration, over how "serious business" you were.

Yeah, fuck that. Business is actually spotting the holes in supply to meet growing demands - whatever the fuck it is - and making a mint as the leading supplier of the shit that no-one else has yet worked out that they should be investing all their money into.

They were terrible at business, and that's why they all went bankrupt. Because they let some notion of "serious business" - not taking a market seriously, because it's games - and their own "status symbol" snobbery get in the way of seeing where all the serious $$$ money actually was. They had this shit handed to them on a silver platter and they actually rejected it, because it's not grey and boring and wearing a suit-and-tie, as they expected "serious business" to be.

If you're selling millions of units on the back of Jet Set Fucking Willy, then throw money at Matthew Smith to make Jet Set Fucking Willy 2 and 3. Ask him what he needs from the hardware to make these games amazing, then that's what your new model should do - to sell even more units, to make even more money that, sure, waste a ton of it on your C5 electric cars (honestly, good idea, Sir Clive - today's EV market shows he was not wrong in principle, he was just far, far, far too early technology-wise to actually pull it off).

Exactly. "Jet Set Fucking Willy" - he failed to recognise a good thing, even when it was right there under his nose, keeping his business alive.

[KlaxonCow]

The Beebon was no dearer to buy than the C64, if the C64 was cheaper to build, that's probably what kept Commodore from going bust. I remember because I was looking for a computer to buy at tge time.

The C64 was cheaper to build because Commodore owned MOS technology.

Vertical integration. Their chips - including the custom VIC and SID - were manufactured "cost price" for them by the fab they owned.

And this was totally Commodore's advantage. Even for the time, a 1MHz 6502 was not impressive. The CPU wasn't very good - it didn't have the clocks to scroll a bitmap screen.

It was all down to the custom chips - the VIC and the SID. The VIC being originally designed for arcade games, with hardware scrolling and sprites built-in, and the SID being a real synthesiser chip while everyone else had "beepers" at best.

Yes, absolutely. "Computing for the masses, not the classes". But what are the masses doing with it? Not fucking spreadsheets. Peasants have no fucking money to have anything to put in a spreadsheet - and the average "household accounts" for a poor person doesn't require a computer, as you don't own much of anything to keep track of.

Again, the C128 had two CPUs in it, it had two graphics chips inside of it. It had effectively three computers inside the same box.

What I've been suggesting here is simply to make the VIC-II able to operate at 2MHz - as noted, you could even do this, by having it ignore every other tick at 2MHz, so it continues to operate at 1MHz, so we could have had "CPU, VIC, CPU, nothing" - and then that's it. Ship it.

Because now you've got a C64 with 128KB of RAM, whose CPU can run at 2MHz. But with 100% compatibility with the VIC - except the CPU can shift twice as much graphics to it and / or "race the beam" more comfortably. Maybe bung in a second SID for 6 voices.

That's cheaper than trying to bundle multiple computers inside the same box, for an application - CP/M - that almost nobody wanted or used, at far more time, cost and expense.

It's a bizarre design choice. You put in a better CPU. But your graphics chip can't run that fast. But instead of fixing the graphics chip so that it could operate with a faster CPU, let's bundle in a completely different video chip as well. So now it's 1MHZ VIC-II or 2MHz VDC, but never the twain shall meet. One or the other but not both. Then lets put in a second CPU as well - a whole CPU was added to the machine, just for the sake of running CP/M (!), so that's absolutely not looking for the cheapest solution, was it? - so now we have effectively three machines into one box, all incompatible with each other.

When in "GO 64" mode, the Z80 and VDC were doing nothing. When in C128 mode, the Z80 and VIC-II was doing nothing. This is a very bizarre design choice to have extra components that actually sit there, doing nothing, in a "never the twain shall meet" way. That's not good economics at all, is it?

Rather than just a 2MHz-capable VIC-II, add 64KB of RAM, maybe a second SID and then ship the bloody thing. All components that you already have and produce yourself (unlike the VDC or Z80), but you're just tweaking one of the custom chips to keep up with the CPU.

That's it. That's all I'm asking. Ship the bloody thing immediately.

But, yes, of course, if you are modifying the VIC-II, then some modest improvements at the same time wouldn't go amiss. So, as I said, I'd have added "character scroll" because that's a really cheap and easy way to make full-screen smooth scrolling of bitmap graphics work, that actually requires almost no CPU at all (There is a bug in the VIC-II that was later exploited, which actually does this by accident. You can trick the VIC-II into delaying graphics, giving you a "coarse" character scroll - often called VSP - but the trick here is that I'm talking about just making that officially how the "VIC-III" works, no need for timings or worrying about it crashing. Just two more hardware registers and some in-chip byte rotations and a look-up table).

Double the hardware sprites to 16 (as 8 was too easily reached by games). Another simple change - like character scrolling - that would have brought a massive difference for little work would have been a programmable palette - we can scroll bitmap screens with all 16 colours, and if those colours were programmable, we're actually incredibly close to what the Atari ST had graphically. If there was a proper 320x200 graphics mode as well, then you'd basically have had Atari ST graphics - with CPU-less hardware scrolling of the full screen - in 1985, at the same-ish price as a C64.

And this would have been totally what the market was expecting - "a better C64" - and would have sold like hot cakes.

(Seriously, I've had a lot of time to think this through. It absolutely does make sense, and absolutely would have been possible, economically feasible and I argue would have been cheaper and easier - keeping the C64 alive for years longer, as old games would 100% work but new games could exploit the new capabilities. But thoughts of CP/M and "serious business" made them go down a stupid route and produce a weirdly overly complex thing instead, rather than the obvious "better C64" that, honestly, the market was wanting and expecting.)

[zip accident]

I remember that period, and you are wrong.

The IBM and its clones were rubbish compared to all the 68000 based machines, but every business had to have as many IBM compatibles as it had typists, and business had money, so they could afford to throw it at the clones, which were as cheap (relative to the selling price) to build as you're telling me the C64 was. Almost nobody bought genuine IBMs. In terms of sales there were probably two clones bought for every eight bit games machine, at best part of four times the price.

By 1985 the eight bit era was effectively over.

Business by and large refused to look at the ST or the Amiga, even though they were better computers than the clones, which no eight bit machines were. 1990-3 was a totally frustrating time to be a computer user, you were using the better business computer, but business wouldn't buy them, so they were being overtaken for lack of sales.

Thinking further, maybe the reason they wouldn't look at the ST was a lack of clones, so if Atari keeled over, then they'd have no alternative source of supply? Whereas, if IBM went tits up. who cares, they don't make most of the clones (not that theirs were clones).

[tufty]

And don't forget "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM". That lasted until the end of the '80s at least, when the clones got good enough and compatible enough for the giants to start dipping their toes in the water (and after they'd been arse-raped on PS/2). In the early '80s, around '82 / '83, before the clone market really got off the ground, IBM had 80% of all personal computer sales, and that number includes the 8 bits. All those VIC-20s and ZX81s and C64s being sold? Add them all together, multiply that number by 4, and that's how many 5150s and XTs IBM were selling to business.

That's why the PC platform was the standard. It's why it's still pretty much the standard getting on for 45 years later. Not just market penetration, but absolute market domination.

[KlaxonCow]

you are wrong.

...and then you proceed to back up what I just said about the complete pointlessness of even attempting to compete in "serious business" against IBM.

Your words:

The IBM and its clones were rubbish compared to all the 68000 based machines, but every business had to have as many IBM compatibles as it had typists [...] Business by and large refused to look at the ST or the Amiga, even though they were better computers than the clones[...]

My words:

These companies repeatedly kept smashing themselves against the rocks of being seen as "serious business" [...] And no-one was ever going to compete with the IBM PC in the end, and it was dumb to even attempt it.[...]

I think you misread what I wrote. Because you've just confirmed exactly the point I was making.

There was no competing with the IBM PC compatible for the "serious business" market. It was just pointlessly smashing yourself against rocks, because you were never going to steal the "serious business" market from the IBM PC compatible. "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM". The Atari ST and Amiga had better graphics and sound, the Archimedes better CPU, graphics and sound.

It doesn't matter shit what the capabilities were - because these machines were actually better in those capabilities than the IBM PC of the time was - nobody was buying anything but IBM PC compatibles for "serious business".

Ergo, all these attempts to make 8-bits - and later 16-bits (and 32-bits, with the Acorn) - better than the IBM PC were pointless.

You can add Z80 and CP/M. Doesn't matter, IBM will win. 80 column mode. Doesn't matter, IBM will win. You can put spreadsheets and word processors in ROM. Doesn't matter, IBM will win. You can curse "Jet Set Fucking Willy" all you like. Doesn't matter, IBM will win.

All these attempts by Sinclair, Commodore, Atari, etc. to try to compete against the IBM PC compatible for "serious business" was a complete fucking waste of time. They were never going to win against the (unintentional) internal "open market" of the IBM PC clones. Indeed, IBM themselves couldn't win against the internal market that they themselves accidentally created.

So, in light of the complete pointlessness of even attempting "serious business" against the IBM PC clones - you could actually have BETTER capabilities than them, and this still didn't budge the needle on businesses buying PCs by the truckload - what was the point of bothering with CP/M and 80 columns, on an 8-bit games machine?

And that's the point. It was a games machine. Accept that it was a games machine. Understand that you're not "breaking through" into the "serious business" world with your games machine. Even if your games machine has superior hardware to the business machine, no-one is buying your games machine for business, they're buying it for games.

Don't lament "Jet Set Fucking Willy". Understand what you've been given on a sliver platter and double-down. Make the best games machine.

And, again, the C128 was not a commercial failure at all. It sold 4.5 million units - comparable to the Apple II and the Spectrum at 5 million each. In 1989, when the 8-bit era was definitely dying its final death, Commodore still sold 1 million C64s in that year.

You were never going to de-throne the IBM PC. Don't even try.

But you absolutely could have sold another 10 million units of a "better C64". Because even the shit C128 you created shifted nearly 5 million - comparable to every Apple II or every Spectrum ever sold - and it wasn't very good as an upgrade. It was a terrible disappointment. Even at the end of the '80s, when 8-bits were long gone for most people, you could still have been shifting millions of these things - because the C64, which was very long in the tooth by then, was still moving a million units in 1989.

These companies had games machines, but were embarrassed that it was games - "Jet Set Fucking Willy" - and they chased a market that they would never win, poorly serving the games markets that they owned and could have fostered to sell millions of units. You were never going to de-throne the IBM PC for "serious business", but these companies kept smashing themselves against the "serious business" rocks and repeatedly ignored the millions of units they were shifting as gaming machines. They were ashamed of what they were, and tried to become something they couldn't be, disregarding the thing that made them successful in the first place - gaming.

I was around at the time as well. I absolutely remember that, despite where we are today, games were looked down on. Nerds were insulted in Hollywood movies. Comic books were pathetic. None of this was given any respect at all.

And history ever since proved how totally wrong that attitude had been. "The revenge of the nerds". Now Hollywood won't make anything but superhero and Star Wars movies. Gaming is the biggest entertainment industry on the planet, by a healthy margin.

History proves the point. They had a bad attitude, made the wrong business decisions on the back of prejudice, and died a death that their successors, who didn't have that bad attitude to gaming, are now soaring high and mighty in silly profits.

[Mayhem]

The Beebon was no dearer to buy than the C64, if the C64 was cheaper to build, that's probably what kept Commodore from going bust. I remember because I was looking for a computer to buy at tge time.

When the C64 launched in the US it cost $595 to buy and $135 for Commodore to manufacture. That equated to £350 here in the UK when it launched, which with the exchange rate at the time, was about the same price. The gap rapidly decreased over the next two years, it was down to $250 in the US (and I think £199 here in the UK) by then but the manufacturting cost with improvements in the process by then was down to around $80 per unit.

A BBC model B if I recall was about the same price in the UK in 1982. I can't honestly say I know precise trajactories of the pricing of each model over the next few years, but when I started secondary school in 1985, there were a couple of kids who had a BBC at home in my year, and they said it was still more expensive to buy than a C64 or Speccy. So I'm assuming B was over £200 in 84/85 time, let alone the cost of the Masters we had in our computer lab.

[zip accident]

The Beebon was no dearer to buy than the C64, if the C64 was cheaper to build, that's probably what kept Commodore from going bust. I remember because I was looking for a computer to buy at tge time.

When the C64 launched in the US it cost $595 to buy and $135 for Commodore to manufacture. That equated to £350 here in the UK when it launched, which with the exchange rate at the time, was about the same price. The gap rapidly decreased over the next two years, it was down to $250 in the US (and I think £199 here in the UK) by then but the manufacturting cost with improvements in the process by then was down to around $80 per unit.

A BBC model B if I recall was about the same price in the UK in 1982. I can't honestly say I know precise trajactories of the pricing of each model over the next few years, but when I started secondary school in 1985, there were a couple of kids who had a BBC at home in my year, and they said it was still more expensive to buy than a C64 or Speccy. So I'm assuming B was over £200 in 84/85 time, let alone the cost of the Masters we had in our computer lab.

I distinctly remember the C64 being sold for £399, there may have been odd shops selling it for more or less, but I suspect the shops selling it for less sold out pretty quickly. Dunno what year that was. I know I wanted word processing and in 1983 didn't buy a games machine when I bought my first computer, but I didn't at that point understand most printers needed a centronics port, so made a mistake.

As I understand it, the Beeb sold millions, but didn't make enough profit to sustain Acorn.

The IBM PC and clones were absolutely vulnerable, they were after all running a poorer CPU slower than the Mac, ST and Amiga. What kept these out of contention was that they were incompatible with each other. There were earlier 8088-6 machines, the name Victor survives in my mind, Victor 1000? 2000? 9000? There were others, but that one was shiny. They didn't survive either. The PC Bios was cloned in ?82? ?81? from then on, clones sold more than IBMs is my guess.

If DR had been left to continue making GEM, that might have ruled the world as Windows now does, but Apple under Jobs decided to sue (eventually it came to court and they rightfully lost against MS), and DR folded GEM to avoid that.

[venusian]

I just picked a typical advert from Your Computer, July 1983 (page 136, fact fans).

Atari 800 - £470
BBC'B' - £400
C64 - £345
Dragon 32 - £200
Atari 400 (16/48K) - £160/£230
Spectrum (16/48K) - £125/£175
Oric 1 (48K) - £170
TI99/4A - £160
VIC-20 - £130
ZX81 - £50

[SuperMappy]

[Mayhem]

I distinctly remember the C64 being sold for £399, there may have been odd shops selling it for more or less, but I suspect the shops selling it for less sold out pretty quickly.

They were up pricing it then, the official launch price was £299.99 + VAT (15% at the time) = £345 as Venusian notes. Most places that I saw listings for in old mags were asking £349.99 at the time.

[KlaxonCow]

For the BASIC beige model, they've actually sold all 10K of the first batch and there's a second 10K batch.

(Well, strictly, the site says that there's "10417" units remaining, so it looks like they commissioned another 10K batch and just added the remaining 500-ish units to the counter. But, effectively, the first batch is on the verge of selling out and they've re-upped it with another 10K second batch. So, at least for the BASIC Beige model, they nailed the right number to manufacture for the first batch.)

The Founder's Edition has shifted 3.5K of its initial 6,400 run. And the "Starlight" RGB model has 3.5K left to go from its 10K batch.

Again, in hindsight, the RGB model was probably a slight miscalculation, in that nobody had RGB back in the '80s - that's a modern "gamer" thing - and so though it's cool to have RGB lights in a transparent case (with transparent keyboard), and you can appreciate the thought process there, it probably would have actually made more sense, to the retro community, if they'd actually gone with a "C64C" case, alongside the breadbin, for the nostalgia of those who had the old "C" case (as my mate did back in the day).

I was "umm'ing" and "ah'ing" over this, as though I myself had the breadbin back in the day, I always preferred the "C" case my mate had, then I'd have snapped one up much sooner.

But I pulled the trigger on the BASIC beige and one will be winging its way to me eventually (though at the back end of the batch, as I did only pull the trigger about a week before Christmas, deciding this was going to be my Christmas present to myself). Basically, I saw a YouTube review of it and it confirms that they have done a perfect job of it, so they can have my money. Including for a joystick, as I have no original vintage joysticks anymore, so I'll need one of those as well.

Maybe I can find a suitable C64C case and transplant the motherboard into it, as long as the holes are basically in the same places?


p.s. Quick check with AI: the two cases are "functionally identical", so it sounds like it's a definite possibility.

[snaff]

For the BASIC beige model, they've actually sold all 10K of the first batch and there's a second 10K batch.

(Well, strictly, the site says that there's "10417" units remaining, so it looks like they commissioned another 10K batch and just added the remaining 500-ish units to the counter. But, effectively, the first batch is on the verge of selling out and they've re-upped it with another 10K second batch. So, at least for the BASIC Beige model, they nailed the right number to manufacture for the first batch.)

The Founder's Edition has shifted 3.5K of its initial 6,400 run. And the "Starlight" RGB model has 3.5K left to go from its 10K batch.

Again, in hindsight, the RGB model was probably a slight miscalculation, in that nobody had RGB back in the '80s - that's a modern "gamer" thing - and so though it's cool to have RGB lights in a transparent case (with transparent keyboard), and you can appreciate the thought process there, it probably would have actually made more sense, to the retro community, if they'd actually gone with a "C64C" case, alongside the breadbin, for the nostalgia of those who had the old "C" case (as my mate did back in the day).

I was "umm'ing" and "ah'ing" over this, as though I myself had the breadbin back in the day, I always preferred the "C" case my mate had, then I'd have snapped one up much sooner.

But I pulled the trigger on the BASIC beige and one will be winging its way to me eventually (though at the back end of the batch, as I did only pull the trigger about a week before Christmas, deciding this was going to be my Christmas present to myself). Basically, I saw a YouTube review of it and it confirms that they have done a perfect job of it, so they can have my money. Including for a joystick, as I have no original vintage joysticks anymore, so I'll need one of those as well.

Maybe I can find a suitable C64C case and transplant the motherboard into it, as long as the holes are basically in the same places?


p.s. Quick check with AI: the two cases are "functionally identical", so it sounds like it's a definite possibility.

There are new C64c cases as well.

https://www.retropassion.co.uk/product/ ... dbin-gray/

Compatible with original and 64U.

[KlaxonCow]

There are new C64c cases as well.

Aye. I've been consulting with AI on this.

I'll need a kit for attaching the keyboard - as the C64C attaches the keyboard from the bottom on stand-offs, rather than screwing in above on the breadbin - and then I'll also need to get a rectangular power LED. On the breadbin, the power LED is a cylinder that pokes out, but the C64C used a rectangular LED... and I should be getting the two-colour (red / green) version, as the Ultimate 64 actually uses two colours (it's compatible with a one colour LED, but why give up the extra functionality?).

But the user ports and keyboard layout should be identical enough to just pop it all into a C64C case without much fuss.

As I said to the AI, though, I'll wait until I've actually got my Ultimate 64 first, before I start ordering anything. I only put in my order just before Christmas, so I'm going to be right at the tail end of the first batch deliveries. So this might not show up for a while. But, yeah, I'll probably take on the "DIY" of transplanting it into a C64C case at some point (once I'm confident I know what I'm doing and won't fuck it up, basically, so I'll want to open it up and see what I'm taking on first).

[tufty]

Wouldn't it have been easier and more sure to just - well - send an email to the company concerned rather than trusting to an AI's hallucinations?? After all, it's a field where the companies do actually care about the product, and know about compatibility.

[skab]

The BBC Micro had a 4 MHz bus. Thus it needed 4MHz RAM, which was bloody expensive. So the BBC Micro was bloody expensive. And "expensive" was a word Jack Tramiel never wanted to hear. He wanted "good enough so people will buy a lot of it" and "cheap to build". And he wasn't alone, think Clive Sinclair, his machines were even cheaper constructed and built. There was never a race to make the best machine possible, everybody just wanted to build a cheap machine that sold millions.

The Beebon was no dearer to buy than the C64, if the C64 was cheaper to build, that's probably what kept Commodore from going bust. I remember because I was looking for a computer to buy at tge time.

Well, what was "the time"? Must have been late 1982, since the price of the C64 plummeted in the following months.