The Return of Commodore?

[KlaxonCow]

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.

I was only researching with the AI. I'll actually make sure everything's 100% correct before I buy or do anything.

As mentioned, I've not got my C64 Ultimate yet (and will be at the back of the queue, as I only just ordered it), so there has been no commitment to anything.

[zip accident]

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.

The time I was ready to buy was spring 1983, the time the C64 was the same price as the Beeb may have been late 1982. I don't remember a price drop on either, but I don't remember much.

This machine is strangely powerful, 42MHz was fast in those days, I want to see an ST with that sort of speed up, but then again, Windows was always a power hog, I suppose a Ras pi could pretty much do it all now.

[KlaxonCow]

My C64 Ultimate is "en route to your Commodore Hub".

I don't know how long that takes, but at least something's moving with my order, and presumably that's the UK Commodore Hub and it won't be long to delivery after it gets there.

[KlaxonCow]

They're not exactly fast.

I ordered the basic beige just before Christmas and now, over 3 months later, the status has shifted to "shipping", so it's on its way, apparently.

Okay, they're a new company, owned and run by hobbyists, so I'll be kind. But let's just say that if Commodore want to keep to that schedule of bringing out at least one new product every year and so forth, they really need to scale up their logistics a lot.

They have aspirations to be a return and continuation of the classic Commodore brand. Excellent. But, well, Jack Tramiel would never have tolerated such inefficiency.

Because, after all, they're only dealing with batches of tens of thousands here - the original Commodore worked in the many millions, year after year, with a wider array of products to juggle.

But, as I say, they're new and getting on their feet, so I'll be kind and wait for my shipment to arrive.


I have plans. When I was 9 and first learnt to code BASIC with my Commodore, I had these bold imaginative plans for, quite frankly, ridiculously over-ambitious game ideas. No possible way I could have done anything approaching it back then - I didn't learn proper assembly coding until years later. But, like, these days, the C64 is completely mapped and understood, I'm a much better coder and we're all able to cheat like hell, by using PC tools and emulators, to produce stuff you never could back in the day. I plan on making some of those games a reality - suitably tamed to something a stock C64 could actually pull off.

That's really what my Ultimate's going to be for. Retro coding. So, having been essentially "over 40 years in the making", I can wait a little longer for delivery.

[zip accident]

Excellent. But, well, Jack Tramiel would never have tolerated such inefficiency.

Jack Tramiel was a ****, he's the main reason DR were skint and had to fold over to Apple when they came round demanding everybody paid them royalties for the GUIs that they all bought from Xerox.

[KlaxonCow]

Excellent. But, well, Jack Tramiel would never have tolerated such inefficiency.

Jack Tramiel was a ****

Yes, but there's no contradiction there.

A greedy cunt, chasing all the money, would never tolerate losing money to inefficiency. He doesn't have to be doing it for a good selfless motivation, in order to do it.

"Enlightened self-interest" and all that jazz.

[KlaxonCow]

[double post]

[Mayhem]

Commodore had its own chip and manufacturing plants though back in the 80s. That isn't the case here, the production in China takes turns with everything else that is going through it. I guess you can argue there seems to be no logic to how long you wait, but I suspect the distribution to the regional centres is dependent on reaching a certain number first to make it cost efficient. Plus the current worldwide conflicts have slowed down matters in terms of delivery and cost.

[KlaxonCow]

Commodore had its own chip and manufacturing plants though back in the 80s.

Yeah. And, apparently, the cost price of CPUs for them back in the day was pennies, that they were making a ton of profit on units sold.

It's strange how the West has given up on manufacturing and "vertical integration". If you know what you're doing, there's a gold mine to be made with that.

And - though I hate to say it - the "Western wages are too high" thing honestly doesn't apply because no-one actually manufactures with real human beings anymore. Like, not even in China or Taiwan or Korea. It's all robots now. Because, honestly, even paying slave wages in a sweatshop can be beaten with an "all robot" factory - bigger upfront costs to get going, sure, but then your running costs are next-to-nothing. Particularly if you also invest in renewable power to feed all your robots.

We sent manufacturing away - still don't really know why - but the truth is that it changed while it was elsewhere and, if we brought it back, it's a completely different game, where you're not at a disadvantage over wages, because no-one's actually using human beings to do things anymore.

Like, some manufacturing doesn't happen in Asia, but this is what it looks like these days, where it's all robots and you play "spot the human being" in the modern factory:



It's actually kind of dumb for natural-resource-heavy nations like America or Australia to be shipping all their raw materials to an island (Taiwan) or a peninsula (Korea) for assembly.

Indeed, a big reason why Intel fell into lagging behind AMD was that they had the decision to invest in lower process nodes for home-grown chip manufacture, and they choose poorly. Exporting it out and creating the horrid "RAM-pocalypse" situation - because there's only three manufacturers for this stuff on Earth, and one of them has completely pulled out of consumer-grade products.

But the grand irony is that the machines they use to make all those chips? The IP and design is from a company in the Netherlands. We need to stop exporting "the means of production" to the other side of the world.

[grue]

https://www.commodore.net/post/commodor ... 4-ultimate

Well, that's underwhelming...

[KlaxonCow]

https://www.commodore.net/post/commodor ... 4-ultimate

Well, that's underwhelming...

You did check the post date, right? It was posted on April 1st.

Nicely self-depreciating, though. As there's very silly "gold" and "RGB disco bling" versions of the paper shredder. When, yes, all we ever wanted was the "BASIC Beige" model all along.

[grue]

You did check the post date, right? It was posted on April 1st.

Ummmm, no...

[KlaxonCow]

Okay, this might explain why the C64C case was not in the original line-up for the Ultimate and that, soon enough, maybe it will be,

[KlaxonCow]

Yup. They've only gone and released C64C case versions of them all - original, starlight and founders - alongside the breadbins.







So if only I'd waited just a little but longer, I could have totally had the Ultimate in a C64C case I wanted.

Well, shit. I'm reminded of that TotalBiscuit quote, that early adopters pay the most money for the worst version. Which is entirely true.

Never mind, there's nothing actually wrong with my breadbin Ultimate. It's great - and they've now delivered me a new joystick for it as well. I have zero complaints. It's just, well, you know, I was saying I totally wanted a C64C version and then, after buying the breadbin model, they only go and release a whole range of C64C versions.

The gods of cosmic irony strike again.

[Whiteball]

How much did it all cost with the shipping etc?

I was very tempted but put off initially because once the shipping was added it was just about too much for me to justify a purchase at the time for what will mainly be just a nostalgic trip.