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The Return Of The 64


Geraldine
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Found this little article about Commodore USA releasing a new and improved C64. Now All I need is a new and improved super powered Amiga! 🙂

Here is the link, will it see the light of day?

http://www.pcworld.com/article/191896/c ... eover.html


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DarkOne
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Nice to see the Commodore get resurrected and its got some decent hardware inside as well. If they can keep the price low it will sell well in my opinion just because of the ability to run all the OS's out there.

I think its nice because it would be easy for me to hook a pc to my entertainment center and setup a nice media center/with dvr.

I want my 5 1/4" drive as a addon 🙂

Go Commodore!


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Geraldine
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Yes I thought it had the makings of a great little machine. I have herd so many resurrection stores of past computing greats (especially so with the Amiga) , falling flat and disappearing without a trace. I do hope this one will see the light of day. As you are in the USA Darkone, it's likely you will get any news first. Who knows, it might not even be sold here in the UK. 🙄


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DarkOne
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Geraldine wrote:
As you are in the USA Darkone, it's likely you will get any news first. Who knows, it might not even be sold here in the UK.

Sure it will that's what Ebay is for 🙂

But I really do think the new Commodore could fill a nice hole if priced right. It has the right internals to be a pretty dependable and stable machine for a few years at least. Not sure if it will have the durability of the original because mine went through hell when I was a kid.

I'm sure you could swap out parts for others like remove the DVDRW and but in a BluRay Writer and over 1TB drive and you have yourself one good entertainment machine that you can use to watch everything from BluRay, Streaming Videos, Netflix and DVR capabilities.

I am interested in the power consumption. Because I have three PC's that are in use everyday and the lowest watt power supply in it is 600w and the highest (mine) is 1000w and if you add them all up I probably have between 1000-2300w of electricity right there that runs at least 8hrs a day. If the new Commodore can have low power requirements that will be another huge plus and I might get them just for that reason alone.

But it all comes back to price. I have tried to spec out a cheap multimedia PC for my livingroom and I cannot get it under $700 for what I want in it.


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Geraldine
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Now your talking Darkone, 🙂 it should be straightforward to customise it to your own specs. I do hope they make it and secure the C64 name. I wonder if any of the old Commodore staff are involved with this. Dave Haynie! Where are you? 🙂


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GUNSMIF
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didnt a company called ESCOM buy the rites to commodore?? well tis good news! i had a vic 20 a c64 n amiga back in the day 😀 😀


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Geraldine
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That was only the start of what happened after Commodore died, here is a Commodore history website

http://www.amigahistory.co.uk/amigahistory.html

And Darkone here is a page of the optional specs http://www.commodoreusa.net/products.html

and the standard specs http://www.commodoreusa.net/tech.html

And some pictures, looks very much like an Amiga 1200, especially the ports in the second picture http://www.commodoreusa.net/gallery.html


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GUNSMIF
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um...yeah that 1200 look a likey is more like a laptop without a screen!! looks very retro too??


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Geraldine
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Just noticed that the "Phoenix" http://www.commodoreusa.net/systems.html (guess they have not secured the C64 name yet) has gone on sale. Prices range from $475 for a bare bones system up to $1295 for the Pro option. That makes it £850 give or take. Having a good think about this, but still no sign of the Amiga emulation. Guessing they will use Amiga Forever.


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DarkOne
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I would really like a detailed break down of the parts inside like the motherboard brand and model, same with the memory, HD and Gfx. It's nice to have a basic solution but I think they would make more as well if they allow some customization options for the buyer.


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Potsmoke66
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as long as everybody hangs on to x86 nothing will change really, only the shell but thats the less important thing.

i don't want to whine here or tell you why. just this not more

if i find the page of the superpowered amiga again i will post it here and you will loose your eyes, ears, teeth and anything that hangs around in your face. of course not a low cost solution, especially not as long as there are only a few freaks hanging on to 680xx tech. only this, that machine even didn't get's warm at full utilization, you will need the vent. only for the power supply and if you would outsource that, even none.

we should start to leave the trail of MK1


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Geraldine
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One of the greatest strengths (and weakness) of the classic Amiga OS, was putting most of it into ROM chips. Doing so made it a very robust and responsive system (good) but difficult to upgrade (bad). Couldn't such a system be built around X86 architecture?


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CaptainKal
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Quote:
One of the greatest strengths (and weakness) of the classic Amiga OS, was putting most of it into ROM chips. Doing so made it a very robust and responsive system (good) but difficult to upgrade (bad). Couldn't such a system be built around X86 architecture?

I think they built one. It was called "XBox".


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Geraldine
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CaptainKal wrote:
I think they built one. It was called "XBox".

Ain't that the truth! 😆


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Potsmoke66
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of course you could also make a toaster of a x86, maybe use it for a hairdryer instead of the heatening wires inside or get the feeling that you are working with grandpa.

i guess yes/no main thing that lacks any x86 is the outsourced memory structure of a M68xxx, there is no way to increase the 720kB of like we miggy users like to say "chip Memory" (those PC "heinies" allways misunderstood that)

a x86 will allways be bound to that and the limits of it.

i really have to search for that A4000 power pc site i discovered once, sadly it was on a different machine, different town, different situation in my life. so it needs some investigations, but i guess worth to try after all.

and of course a OS on a ROM is more stable, fits exactly to the processor, gaming machines used to have such (not only the rotten ms-box) it gets the least drop of power of a CPU, any.

i know i use a x86 to and have to shut up! but only due to lack of funds, you can say.

i guess i made this comparison somewhere before,

a x86 is a worker with a shuffle

a m68xxx is a bucket wheel excavator compared to that

to gain for the worker with the shuffle what the excavator can do he has to work a million times faster

ok, that works, but sometimes he shuffles in the wrong direction or looses some of whats on the shuffle

a lot of helpers are positioned around him to help that (meantime greyhaired) worker so he wont lose so much of the dirt

and didn't dies of a heartattack.

thats the picture

but even that i stated before, bill knewed exactly what he did when presenting his (i still don't believe that) work to HAL excuse me IBM. other developers in those days was sneer at him stating "he's making a contract with the dinosaur"

they thought he would be on a loosing street, because of the overaged technology of HAL and frozen structure of a company like HAL.

but bill knews what he did, might be he's not a good dev, but a clever businessman who could calculate well.

his calculation was that the dinosaur will get him in every office and especially open the doors to industry, knowing the fact that lazy, blindfolding users will take at home what they know from work. time has shown he calculated right 👿

second, what i never will understand, people usually tend to say that anything else is no real computer, only because they worked with such at the workplace, not having a glimpse of a idea what's inside.

third, HAL had a lot of power ($) to invest for merchandising others never had, maybe some other important vitamins i can't tell exactly.

so we have to work with a brother of MKI, we could use as well ZUSE, both are concepted and build in WW2.

one has using tubes (MKI) the other relays (ZUSE).

the direct parents of x86 are waving machines (no joke) feeded by papertape (i used to call mine paper feed slide ruler, when i'm angry) having a then capacity of (wow), if i'm right, ~200 kB of mem. the physical structure of the chip has never been changed since then.

so i'm right when i say a grey

and they call that a real computer

it's like we would listen to a CD on a tube radio (mono of course).

or watching a digitized movie on a old B/W tube screen (better, a black&green one).

i won't say with that tube amps aren't good at all, they are even better, but thats another field of electronics.

to me it's quite a riddle why people (customers) was so blind, maybe simply because of disinformation and not knowing what heart is ticking in their machines.

many behind that is you can say freely, only prestige thinking.

again a comparison

1985 i was still under education, for my profession as silk screen printer, we was allowed i can say to have a training on "most modern" HAL, feeded by a floppy containing bills wonderful MS-DOS

a very hard to manage stuff for a 19 year old boy from the country

1985 AMIGA presented their A1000

any more to say?

i get a laughing fit "real computer"


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Potsmoke66
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noch was

x86 needs predigested food, else he can't swallow it

even like a tattery old grey, there is no better name for it


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Pinback
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Ta-da the Minimg.

http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/cat ... cts_id=777

Why anyone would want one is aother matter.


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DarkOne
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Why don't they make an enclosure for that? Nice concept and I would hope you can hook this up to a 23in monitor and play away. The SD card concept is nice because you can fit a lot of ADF images on there.


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Pinback
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They did have a casing for it but apparently all sold out,I did read some where that they are working on A1200 version as well and there is a SD card hard drive that can be fitted to the A1200


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Geraldine
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I am getting a 4 GIG SD card drive fitted to my 4000. I know 4 GIGs doesnt sound like much (for Example Mass Effect 2 is 9 GIGs just by itself), but many amiga games were under 1 meg in size, so yes you can get a heck of a lot of games on it. Maybe my whole collection or most of it anyways.


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Pinback
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Geraldine wrote:
I am getting a 4 GIG SD card drive fitted to my 4000. I

Been thinking about getting one of these.


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CaptainKal
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Quote:
Geraldine wrote:I am getting a 4 GIG SD card drive fitted to my 4000. I

Been thinking about getting one of these.

I have a traditional 1,5 Gig and a DVD Rom on my A1200. (And you can imagine the mess, that the cables are creating 😀 😀 ).


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Solace
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I want one.


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Pinback
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You might want try the Amiga emulator first Solace.


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Geraldine
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PINBACK wrote:
You might want try the Amiga emulator first Solace.

Very true, I use Amiga Forever (and C64 Forever) myself quite a bit, still not as good as the real thing though. The very late miggy games would struggle on an emulator unless you had a PC with the very best kit inside it.


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