# Really miss the Commodore 64?????



## bobukcat (Dec 20, 2005)

If you are waxing nostalgic or just want a retro-looking piece of tech gear this may be just the key to scratch that itch:

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/...updated-with-its-old-exterior/?ref=technology

I thought it was a late April Fool's joke at first but it appears to be legitimate. A "modern" PC packaged to look exactly like the original C64....


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## AttiTech (Feb 21, 2011)

bobukcat said:


> If you are waxing nostalgic or just want a retro-looking piece of tech gear this may be just the key to scratch that itch:
> 
> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/...updated-with-its-old-exterior/?ref=technology
> 
> I thought it was a late April Fool's joke at first but it appears to be legitimate. A "modern" PC packaged to look exactly like the original C64....


*Heaven*


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## Cholly (Mar 22, 2004)

Bleah! :icon_lame -- I'd be more impressed if he were to come out with an updated Amiga (which in my mind should have been an Atari product, being that the original chipset had been developed by Atari engineers who jumped ship). A look back at the history of Commodore, Atari and Amiga shows a remarkable number of business missteps.


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## adunkle (Aug 19, 2006)

There is an updated Amiga coming soon.

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/04/commodore-64-goes-on-sale-amiga-vic-20-coming-soon/


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## Mark Holtz (Mar 23, 2002)

I missing playing M.U.L.E. on the C-64.


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## koji68 (Jun 21, 2004)

I learned to program in Basic in HS in a VIC-20. When I was able to get my hands on a C-64, it was awesome. Way better that anything I had seen before. But those were the 80s. I'm not nostalgic about it. Technology keeps moving on.


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## phrelin (Jan 18, 2007)

The idea of missing an old 8-bit computer feels a little weird in the era of the iPad2. But nostalgia, I guess....


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## sigma1914 (Sep 5, 2006)

LOAD "awesome",8,1


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## The Merg (Jun 24, 2007)

Mark Holtz said:


> I missing playing M.U.L.E. on the C-64.












- Merg


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## Davenlr (Sep 16, 2006)

phrelin said:


> The idea of missing an old 8-bit computer feels a little weird in the era of the iPad2. But nostalgia, I guess....


Yea, but in this day and age of bloated high level languages, you have to be really amazed at the speed the machine code programs of the 8 bit computers was able to maintain considering the limited ram and processor speeds. Can you imagine what kind of speed the current DVRs would possess if it was all programmed with machine code by hand?


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## Stewart Vernon (Jan 7, 2005)

Yeah... the advances in hardware have been cool... but they have far outpaced the ability of software to keep up efficiently.

In the olden days of computers... programmers were squeezing every bit not just for smaller program size but for performance too.

Modern programmers are kind of lazy in a lot of ways... and not optimizing code like they used to have to do... I don't even know how many people are capable of full machine "assembly" code... or even moreso, bit-level programming.

I know the chip designers would be... because they design the chips... but the average programmer is working with a higher level language like "C" that has some built-in inefficiencies... then pile onto that a lack of time to develop further.

I'm not just blaming programmers... Companies push for release dates and consumers want everything now... so a programmer who wanted to put the time in, likely wouldn't be permitted to do so.

The embedded systems or home appliances (like your Dish/DirecTV receiver, Blu-ray player, etc.) are the closest we have to that in modern programming... because they are forced to develop for a fixed CPU speed and limited memory capacity.


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## matt (Jan 12, 2010)

Stewart Vernon said:


> I don't even know how many people are capable of full machine "assembly" code... or even moreso, bit-level programming.


:lol: I can do bit level on MIPS platform (we're building one from scratch with verilog for my computer architecture class) but why in the world would you want to?! Job from hell!


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## Stewart Vernon (Jan 7, 2005)

matt said:


> :lol: I can do bit level on MIPS platform (we're building one from scratch with verilog for my computer architecture class) but why in the world would you want to?! Job from hell!


Want to... and need to are different things.

The programmers who do for a living what you are doing in your class are top notch programmers.

If that was just applied a little better across the board, we could have way better stuff than we have today.

The example given earlier (someone else, not me) of how much the 8-bit platforms were pushed to their limits years ago... IF we were pushing today's hardware to those same limits we could have some amazing things today!


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## matt (Jan 12, 2010)

Yeah they are top notch! It would be crazy to see what computers would be like if they still programmed like that. I have an old PC that is just worthless with Windows but hey guess what, Ubuntu runs fine on it. That says something right there about the power of the computer working with what software it is given.


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## Stewart Vernon (Jan 7, 2005)

matt said:


> Yeah they are top notch! It would be crazy to see what computers would be like if they still programmed like that. I have an old PC that is just worthless with Windows but hey guess what, Ubuntu runs fine on it. That says something right there about the power of the computer working with what software it is given.


Yep...

Another example is some of the available old-school emulators.

IF you want to run the emulator under Windows, you need a much more powerful computer than if you run it under Linux or MS-DOS.

Linux is good because you can really customize what you load and what you don't load... and you can really scale back on the O/S to just have the things you need for your app running.

Imagine, if your watch needed to be able to run Windows in order to run a clock app instead of just having a very small program that does nothing but be a clock!

Also... look at the technical specs of an XBox or Playstation... even the most recent ones (XBox 360 or PS3) are nowhere near the CPU power of most home computers... but they don't need to be as they are more specialized.

I wish I had stuck with things back in the day to be able to keep up with modern programming and be able to apply the way I used to program on my C-64 and other older computers to my modern hardware.


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## Dude111 (Aug 6, 2010)

bobukcat said:


> I thought it was a late April Fool's joke at first but it appears to be legitimate. A "modern" PC packaged to look exactly like the original C64....


Yes but if i remember it has Windows 7 on it...

I would take that off of there and put 98se on it before i would use it!


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