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Commodore - Back In The Hardware Biz At Last?
Aphrika writes "Commodore is back in the hardware business [via current owners Tulip Computers] and this time they're taking on... Apple? Due for release in August are three MP3 players; the eVic, fPet and mPet. The eVic is a 20GB (hence the name) hard drive-based player, while the mPet and fPet are closer to the Muvo/iRiver styled flash players. They'll also be hoping you pay a visit to the Commodore World Music Store once in a while to stock up on tunes..." We also recently mentioned Commodore's 'TV Game' and ROM-store projects over at Slashdot Games.
I guarantee this will go nowhere. There's no market for yet another mp3 player. Sheesh. Plus Commodore never gets anything done anyway.
I was a fan, owning Vic-20, C64, various Amigas, all of which I still have. Then they died. They have yet to come back and probably never will. Stop beating the dead horse, morans.
This makes about as much sense to me as using the GE brand name to sell fresh carrots.
And how in the world does the name eVic imply 20GB of storage? Is it something in another language (like vic means 20), or was the poster meaning that the eVic was supposed to compete with the iPod based on similarities in the way they are capitalized and the lengths of the name?
None of this makes any sense. They should sell C64s today for hobbiesests and nostalgia. They could be very tiny, still use a TV, be tons of fun. Or make another hobbiest platform. But... MP3 players? Like the market needs more MP3 players.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
... a new venture from Jack Tramiel, assuming he's still alive, than someone who just bought or co-opted the Commodore names.
Tramiel was a master, a guy who could read the market in real time and act quickly and ruthlessly. He was Commodore.
The eVic is a 20GB (hence the name) hard drive-based player...
Um, am I missing something here? How does the name eVic in any way imply 20GB of space???
Do not read this sig.
I want a handheld C64 system. No, not a Game Boy Advance emulating a C64. An actual handheld C64 gaming system. Maybe with a little keyboard a la the Zaurus. And I want it under $100.
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
On a possibly unrelated note, I loved my Commodore 64 so of course I clicked on the link for "C64 DTV". This crashed my Mozilla. Since the people who hacked on old commodores are probably more likely to use Mozilla than IE, this worries me.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
I hope they can play .SID files
Screw that. It damn well better be able to play my MOD files! I have such classics as "Girl from Ipanima" and "All that She Wants" just waiting for a portable player! I mean, who *doesn't* want to listen to "Ace of Base" while out and about?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Wow.. I have an ipod.. .but for nostalia purposes alone, I'd use the Pet - back in early public school, monochromo monitors and all, I remember pets. We had two pets. Tape drives... and Games. I'd stay in from recess and develop my video game addiction on these things... Buying a pet will be like paying tribute to my first teacher in the school of geek.
Commodore is a single entity under law. As a corporation, or more literally, as an "embodiment", it can sue and be sued, hold property and so on as a single legal entity.
In other words, stop using the plural. It's just wrong. Commodore is not the Borg.
I'm curious if these are even being made by Tulip, or if they're just placing the Commodore brand on some cheap Taiwanese imports.
Or Apple, for that matter. The iPod doesn't run DOS 3.3 or ProDOS. Companies evolve...or they die. Interestingly, Commodore has seemed to have done one, and now is trying to do the other postmortem.
There ain't no rules here; we're trying to accomplish something.
Why should you feel ashamed by hooking up again with a C-64? As lite as Linux has gotten, certainly you can find at least one flavor to satisfy your taste?
I mean, come on, I remember when the TRaSh-80 was around and used a tape recorder for persisting data or TI-99/4A which you could be paid for $0.50 in its final days. It was selling for $49.50 at K-Mart and there was a $50 rebate from Texas Instruments.
All of this is nicer unless you want to "adopt a mainframe" (someone begs & pleads for someone to come get a mainframe and give it a good home (usually basement or garage) before it's towed away. I think the CFO would not find the sharp spike in the electric bill very funny when she sees it, providing it doesn't blow something on the way to the house first.
I'm guessing it would be in the neighborhood of contest to see whose houses stand the greatest chance of being seen from Jupiter. (In a recent year, one of the houses said their December bill was $5kUS more than average.
So did the Apple, if you remember. In fact, it could be said that Apple's devotion to Microsoft BASIC is the reason we have Windows today.
The basic premise is this: in exchange for the rights to license AppleBASIC from Microsoft, some pinhead (who had been tasked with the deal because Jobs didn't think the Apple II had a future) gave the software company full rights to the Macintosh look and feel. Viola! Windows, all nice and legal -- and basically for free.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
I take your point onboard, but even there, Apple was founded by Jobs and Woz and since 1997 it's Jobs again, so it's actually closer to being the original Apple company now than in the wilderness years. The spirit of the company is also closer to what it was originally. It had become a beige box shifter - now it's back to producing innovative hardware again.
Today's "Commodore" however is just a brand name owned by a company called Tulip from Holland. AFAIK it's not the original Commodore in any way, apart from the name.
Getting nostalgic in my older years I found this site with a bunch of commodore commericals:
m me rcials.htm
http://www.commodorebillboard.de/Commercials/Co
But the one they're missing is the one with that jingle 'I'm playing games with my 64!'
The reason I want that one is my friend was actually in that commerical and it would be cool to see it again.
I prefer the alternative spin, that 'NeXT Computer' was the Redwood City skunkworks division of Apple that got rolled back into the mothership :-P
As a long devout Commodore user, who had made his way through multiple C64s, and a huge array of Amigas, I find it almost criminal to view this new site. What next, are they going to release an "A-a-a-a-a-a-amiga"? (in the style of the ebay scam Powerbook thing). Not only is the grammar on that site shockingly bad, but the only thing on there that has ANY resemblence to the Commodore brand is a crappy joystick with 30 games that no-one would want to play. Where's Wizball? Where's The Last Ninja?
So, basically, they are attempting to wipe out all of Commodore's history post-C64, and jumping straight to MP3. Why? Because they don't have the rights to the Amiga (thank god). Want to see what's happening with that little flagship? Go here - a darn sight more interesting than that little bandwagon of naffness.
I find it really depressing when some company buys a legacy name (such as Infrogrames did with Atari) and begins peddling merchanidise using that name, hoping for the retro-cool aura surrounding it to bring it sales.
An mp3 player with a little 320x240 screen running C64 in a chip. And a rom with say 64meg of c-64 games (ie all of em) would sure rock!!! Especially if it plays SID files too.
Sure those games look crap on a big tv/monitor, but on a 1inch screen they wouldnt look that bad and be actually very playable still (assuming you map the right joystick ports to the buttons)
The WinCE based c64 emulator was slow-assed, and discontinued (any new ports out there?)
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
No really, I'm not even that old (21) but I did have an A500, and I find this really disgusting as well. Even if they were selling something worthwhile I still wouldn't buy it out of principle.
The story I heard is that Commodore paid a one-time fee to use Microsoft Basic (Version 2.0) essentially forever with no further payments to Microsoft. This was very early in the development of the industry and Bill got what he thought was big bucks for the transaction. Turns out that Commodore got a huge bargain compared to what Microsoft was later able to charge everybody else (on a per computer sold basis). That was a hunk of the reason computers like the Vic-20 and the Commodore 64 could be considerably cheaper than other computers of the era. Unfortunately it also made it difficult for Commodore to come up with improved versions of Basic without giving up that cost advantage. Bottom line: Jack Tramiel (then head of Commodore) was one of the few people in the computer industry to outsnooker Bill Gates on a business deal, and Vic-20/Commodore 64 owners used Microsoft Basic while contributing essentially nothing to the Microsoft empire.
Well, not exactly true. Actually, not true at all. First off, Apple traded a few million dollars in stock for the right to bring their programmers -- already well versed in graphical user interfaces, having done work on them in college -- to the Xerox PARC, where he saw a prototype system with NO relation to the Star. In fact, this system didn't even have a file management UI. Apple invented that, and it was Xerox who stole quite a bit of the UI that eventually showed up on the Star, thanks to the close ties between Apple and Xerox. Besides the concept of visual file management, Apple also invented the concept of icons that WERE things and could have actions performed on them...in the Xerox model, icons DID things, like physical buttons. Windowing existed solely to permit multiple command lines.
Apple "won" the Xerox case because what Xerox was doing -- moving a cursor around on a screen and manipulate windows and buttons -- they didn't invent, anyway. It had been done in colleges for years.
Apple vs. Microsoft, on the other hand, was a big deal. Apple HAD invented something new. They HAD created a new interface. But, in hopes of getting Microsoft as an application developer for their new OS, they accidentally licensed them core technologies and were vague enough to infer that they'd licensed the whole system. A more vitriolic and pro-mac argument can be found here.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
There was an easter egg in the Apple //c, too, you know...
//c. You can't tell whether it's Revision 0 or Revision 1, as the only difference in 1 is that a modem bug is fixed.
Since these first IIc's had nothing emulated in slot 5, the firmware authors immortalized themselves by making a "ghost" peripheral appear to be present in that slot. Entering this Applesoft program:
]100 IN# 5: INPUT A$: PRINT A$
and running it would print the names of the authors. (They used a decoding scheme to extract the names, character by character, so a simple ASCII scan of the ROM would not show their little trick). This "feature" had to be removed in later revisions of the IIc ROM, because an actual disk device was added then to slot 5. [4], [5]
You can actually use this to ID a
Also, the IIGS had an easter egg, where you'd actually get audio of the developers.
A feature that was added to the ROM 03 firmware that was entirely fun, instead of functional, was accessed by a specific key-sequence. If the computer was booted with no disk in the drive, a message that said "Check startup device" appeared, with an apple symbol sliding back and forth. At that point, if the user pressed the keys "Ctrl", "Open Apple", "Option", and "N" simultaneously, the digitized voices of the Apple IIGS design team could be heard shouting "Apple II!" Also, the names of those people would be displayed on the screen. If running GS/OS System 5.0 or greater, the user would have to hold down the "Option" and "Shift" keys, then pull down the "About" menu in the Finder. It would then say "About the System". Using the mouse to click on that title would cause the names to be displayed and the audio message to be heard.