It's an interesting time for people who remember the old Commodores. A fan scooped up the trademark for Compute's Gazette, and is planning a revival.
posted by JHarris at 1:17 PM on June 24 [6 favorites]

+1 for the Commodore PET, the first computer I ever used! Our teachers mostly had us typing and printing stories, but we'd get rewarded with some time to mow the lawn.
posted by Kabanos at 1:58 PM on June 24 [3 favorites]

+1 for the Commodore PET, the first computer I ever used! Our teachers mostly had us typing

As someone who typed on a PET keyboard, I’d call that child abuse.
posted by Lemkin at 2:18 PM on June 24 [4 favorites]

I'd strongly recommend Wally Beben's C64 sonata, Tetris. Completely unlike the Nintendo soundtrack, weirdly ethereal. A half hour of electronic music in 13kB.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 2:24 PM on June 24 [5 favorites]

I worry he's making a rod for his own back by advertising this so soon. If he drives the hype up for these trademarks, then surely that will also drive the price up, won't it?
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 2:26 PM on June 24

In fairness, there were PETs with full keyboards (like the one I cut my computing teeth on), not the horrible Chiclets on the original 2001.
posted by delfin at 2:33 PM on June 24 [5 favorites]

I don't see this driving the price up. If he has to crowdfund to get the money to buy the company, and there aren't any other serious takers, odds are that the current owners will take what they can get.
I'm curious how big a market there is for retro 64s. The 64x is a PC running Ubuntu in a keyboard. RetroGamer sells something called TheC64, which looks to be a modern replica, with a bunch of games in ROM. I know that there are also upgrade chips, but I doubt that they work with this system.
It'd be neat to see a successor built with more modern hardware, OS in ROM/SD Card, and be simple enough to be really low latency, like the original 64 and Apple ][ were. Not sure that would be in the cards, though.
posted by Spike Glee at 2:51 PM on June 24 [2 favorites]

Naturally the retrocomputing community have been supplying some of their own analysis, including this sceptical view from Tech Time Traveller.
posted by Chef Flamboyardee at 2:55 PM on June 24 [2 favorites]

why is this man sitting in front of a Commodore-themed wall talking about his Commodore plans wearing a ATARI t-shirt, if you're gonna obsess over an eighties brand then stay ON THEME ffs

and I say this as someone whose computer history through the eighties and nineties was zx80>c64>Amiga 1000>Amiga 2000>Amiga 1200, I certainly chose my side on the playground platform arguments
posted by egypturnash at 3:49 PM on June 24 [4 favorites]

I’m an Apple retro hardware developer rather than a C64 retro hardware developer, but it’s similar enough that I can answer reasonably- complete reconstructions aren’t really in that much demand. The vast majority of people are completely happy just playing on emulators. There’s a little bit of demand for doing it “authentically”, but at least at this point in time, there’s enough working hardware still in existence that one can get an operational rig together reasonably cheaply. I paid like $700 or so for my IIe Platinum and a selection of cards- including a VidHD hdmi-out card, and a CFFA hard drive/floppy drive emulator, about 2 years ago.

Doesn’t stop people from wanting to make new stuff, including me! My project can replicate most of what the VidHD can do (and good thing, mine blew out early in my development) as well as Mockingboard sound. Ultimately I intend to support almost every major category of card you could have in an Apple II, all at once.

There will never be any real money in it of course. That’s not what it’s about, everybody doing this stuff is doing it for fun, and maybe to partially defray costs.
posted by notoriety public at 4:46 PM on June 24 [4 favorites]

I kinda hope he doesn't succeed, because small groups have been putting the chickenhead on projects and events for years for no cost, because the name and mark has, to all intents and purposes, lapsed. If he owns the IP, that means those groups (some of whom have been using the mark for 20+ years) will have to fork over cash now. And you can bet all his little Youtube chums will do the snitch work to ferret out every last transgressor. And I don't feel too inclined to give money to a part-time Walter Sobchak cosplayer.

Also, he can't touch Commodore-Amiga, 'cos Cloanto have that tied up. There is no company I'd like to burn to a crisp than Cloanto (hey, at least Tesla move people, occasionally) but they are not going to budge.
posted by scruss at 5:03 PM on June 24 [2 favorites]

Another thing contributing to the longevity of this era of hardware is that it is really quite repairable. Most failures are power supply or chip failures, and it is quite possible (with a nontrivial amount of learned skill) to diagnose the failed parts and replace them. If it's a fairly standard part anyway, although most of the chips on the boards are standard and easy to come by (but not all). Such repairs are beyond my personal pay grade though, I never even picked up a soldering iron till starting my project 2 years ago, and while I can read schematics and might have a chance at diagnosing a hardware problem, my soldering skills are so rudimentary that I would be too terrified to try to operate on a vintage machine myself.

But the Apple II Plus I have, showed up nonfunctional at the KansasFest Garage Giveaway last year, somebody resuscitated it in order to use it in one of the demos, and let me take it home afterward. Again, at least at this point in time, the people with the repair skillset still exist, and are not too hard to find.

My project partner's //e died this week as well, which is definitely a cause for concern, but 1) his brother is an extremely talented hardware guy and is likely to be able to get it back on its feet, and 2) Project partner just acquired another //e last week, only it's still in Paris because he didn't bring it back home with him. He wasn't expecting to come home to a dead machine.
posted by notoriety public at 5:50 PM on June 24 [3 favorites]

Is it okay to mention here that I've been put in charge of selling and organizing the 22-year run of a C64 disk magazine? Is that too Pepsi Blue?
posted by JHarris at 5:59 PM on June 24 [10 favorites]

→ it is really quite repairable

That may be the case for Apple II hardware, but for Commodore kit, it's far from true, mainly because they used so many different custom chips that only their fab (MOS) ever made. Try sourcing an NTSC VIC-II, or a SID of any kind. The hardest to find are apparently the 7501 CPUs and TED graphics chips for the C16/+4: both were made in relatively small quantities, and have a reputation for self-destruction.

As for most Amigas, they were made at the height of the crap electrolytic capacitor years, have motherboard batteries that can leak and melt away whole tracks, and are well past the 20 year data retention life of the logic GALs. Big fun!
posted by scruss at 6:58 PM on June 24 [3 favorites]

Well I stand corrected then. That kind of thing was just starting to happen with the IIe, which has one very custom chip which sucked in a lot of the formerly discrete logic in the Plus. The IIgs has a lot more custom stuff, but I care a lot less because it was never my love.

I didn't realize Amigas had GALs in them. Yeah, that's a lot harder to fix if it loses its programming. Not impossible, but the programmers for those kinds of chips were never exactly common in the first place. Not sure how hard it is to get the proper programming files to reload on them either.
posted by notoriety public at 7:06 PM on June 24 [2 favorites]

I think that they have new, better custom chips for the C64. That's one of the things that the guy referenced in the video.
posted by Spike Glee at 7:47 PM on June 24 [1 favorite]

And these days there are FPGAs for replicating the function of many kinds of chips, though I don't know how suitable they are for reproducing the C64 custom chips.
posted by JHarris at 8:50 PM on June 24 [2 favorites]

JHarris: "And these days there are FPGAs for replicating the function of many kinds of chips, though I don't know how suitable they are for reproducing the C64 custom chips."

The SID chip, in particular, was famously revolutionary, and while there are some hardware reimplementations, they're all either incomplete or expensive, to the best of my knowledge.
posted by adrienneleigh at 9:21 PM on June 24 [4 favorites]

I used them extensively in high school, but the only Commodore I ever owned was a Pet 4032 in mint condition I picked up at an IEEE college sale back in '92 for 50¢. I dragged it around for a couple years but eventually left it on a sidewalk in downtown Toronto one hot summer day. It disappeared in minutes.
posted by CynicalKnight at 10:02 PM on June 24 [2 favorites]

There seems to be a lot of activity around modern SID replacements, both microcontroller and FPGA, judging from all the videos on youtube about "sid replacement"
posted by Sauce Trough at 11:04 PM on June 24 [1 favorite]

Sauce Trough: yes, because it's a hard problem! Seriously, those chips are a goddamn amazing feat of engineering even 40+ years later!
posted by adrienneleigh at 11:13 PM on June 24 [2 favorites]

The weird-PC-in-a-C64-replica-case project is the one he showcased in the video, but there are a large number of people making frankenboards for C64 maintenance and resurrection. I think that the trademarks can be defended and kept going without requiring every little dev to pay cash, the same way that the Linux trademarks are managed in ways that allow people to publish a Linux distribution without needing to pay fees.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 5:16 AM on June 25 [1 favorite]

I'd trust the Linux Foundation to do that properly for the public good. This guy, though ...?
posted by scruss at 11:11 AM on June 25 [1 favorite]

@adrienneleigh oh no doubt the SID chip is S-tier. But I'm seeing youtube videos where good-sounding sid replacements based on the rpi pico can be had for <10 euros so it seems like the cost problem is solved. And since the pico sid is software-defined hardware it can evolve to refine any sound quality deficiencies.

(sorry for constant references to youtube, but that's where I get all my retrocomputer news. Also am away from computer so can't link easily to specifics)
posted by Sauce Trough at 11:50 AM on June 25 [2 favorites]

back at home, here's some links:

SIDKick Pico Assembly video (eeek, requires SMC soldering)

SIDKick Pico github

SIDKick Pico retail

for those who need modern VIC-II chips, Adrian did a video on the Kawari FPGA Vic-II replacement. Lots of links there to retail and open source resources.
posted by Sauce Trough at 3:30 PM on June 25

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