Tulip to Relaunch C64

Ola "4pLaY" Jensen writes "The Dutch PC manufacturer Tulip who bought the Commodore brand name has decided to finally do something with it and re-launch the C64 in some form. Exactly what it will be is still a puzzle in my mind but from reading their news it seems to be a PC with some OS flavour with a C64 Emulator." I spent many hours on a C64 when I was in elementary school, and this brings back a lot of memories.

Comments

Well, I have it on a phone

[mccalli]

Don't know about a watch, but it's certainly available on phones.

Got a Symbian Series 60 phone (Nokia 3650, 7650, Ericsson P800)? Well then, go here for a C64 emulator. Works well on my 3650.

Cheers,
Ian

Re:Well, I have it on a phone

[ultrapenguin]

can't say for other mobile operators in japan, but NTT DoCoMo with its 5 manufacturers doing their cellphones (Sony, Mitsubishi, Sharp, Fujitsu, and someone else I cant remember), does not have anything even remotely similar to what you describe. I know for a fact there is no development environment which would allow hardware-access to the phone, and definitely not anything in the hundreds of kilobytes we are talking about with a project such as this c64 emulator.
There's the Iappli java which is horribly limited, incompatible between different manufacturers, slow, and does not let you directly access any hardware except the vibrator / screen backlight, and is limited to 20k .jar size.

I think the target market here is different.
in Europe they go for usability and computer connectivity.
Here, they go for useless shit like hello kitty backgrounds and 64 voice ring patterns and washed out 640x480 pinhole cameras for underskirt photography.

Re:What's in store for a moderm C64?

[WWWWolf]

Games on tape are replaced with a CD rom... AUDIO CD roms :)

*Yawn*... that was already done for Commodore 64 around late '80s, if I remember correctly. There was an adapter that plugged in the tape drive connector, and the cable was plugged in CD player audio out.

And everyone was amazed on how much stuff you could fit on the CD, even when this particular method wasted space tremendously compared to plain old data CDs. =)

VICE emulator

[DGolden]

If you want VICE, an excellent, essentially perfect, C64 (and C128, and some other CBM-machines) emulator, then it's here.

I still use it about once a week when I feel nostalgic - while the graphics of C64 games totally suck, some of them still have better gameplay in my opinion than many of today's.

Plus there's some games I had in primary school that I've never completed (or looped, for those games that don't really end).

It's about 2 to 4 times faster than a real C64 on my now-ancient 400MHz PC.

I remember laboriously translating 6502 assembly into DATA statements, by hand, when I was learning to program in the 80s - the C64 BASIC was so unutterably pants (yes, it was made by MS), that people jumped to assembly to get anything non-trivial done. Then I got a C128 with a built-in assembler.

C-one.

[pmsr]

Been there, done that.

http://c64upgra.de/c-one/

/Pedro

err, no. learn to read please.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you could actually *read* you'd see that they want to sue about 300 commercial sites which are using the commodore trademark, then release the only "official" C64 emulator (and work towards shuttig down distribution of any other emulator), work with one software distributor who currently holds many rights to a lot of games and in general give up up the buttocks to every project which currently keeps the C64 "alive"

-t

Danish C64 band

[henriksh]

There's a danish band called Press Play On Tape that makes music based on old C64 games. The music's very good.

You should especially check out their "Game Boy Band Video" (downloadable from the band's website) - it's hilarious!

a bit of history

[wdebruij]

As a dutch citizen I have seen many Tulip computers through the years. The company has been on the brink of bankrupcy a number of times. To divert this they have tried to reuse the commodore brand name previously.
I'm not quite sure when it was. Even google
(= god) couldn't tell me. It was probably somewhere around 1995

Re:What's in store for a moderm C64?

[avij]

Forget the "low-powered FM transmitter", try the official radio stations instead. When I was young (circa 1987 or so), there was a weekly radio show for computer enthusiasts. It had an interesting feature: they were broadcasting C64 programs on the air, and anyone with a tape recorder and a radio were able to record the programs and then run them. It actually worked pretty well, all the programs I received that way worked nicely. A really efficient method for transmitting programs, I'd say.