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Commodore 64 TV Game for Sale
KodaK writes "The Commodore 64 Direct to TV is on sale at QVC. QVC bought all available units (250,000 or so) so, for now, this is the only place you can get them. This is a full C=64 in a joystick form factor with 30 games included, meaning you can hack this sucker to add a keyboard and/or other IEC peripherials (like a disk drive). The full BASIC ROM is included. Buy one now and impress your friends. BTW, this was developed by Jeri Ellsworth, the engineer responsible for the C-One. Cool stuff." We mentioned the development of this earlier.
You mean my Vic-20 based games console is already out of date? But it had "Blue Meanies From Outer Space" on it!
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
I feverishly search the list of included games.... No M.U.L.E.?!?!! Useless!
Can you really 'add a keyboard' and 'disk drive', etc?
To do that, I would think this device would need a lot of exposed I/O hardware, i.e. pins, etc.
I suspect that rather, this is all embedded in some sort of an ASIC or FPGA.
Can anybody add more info?
"What's the frequency Kenneth?"
After all, MAME cabinets are a pain to build, and are limited to a few free designs. With this, and a switch box, I can legally play all of my favorite arcade games from those arcade-in-a-stick controllers, and now all of my C64 favorites. Here's to hoping that they do the same for the Apple IIe series, because I can't wait to play Wizardry again "Jump down, turn around, and kill a bunch of wights"...and so on.
Remove the spamfreak to speak.
Without that I'm not interested. Playing a game where you get to be a pigeon that shits on cars was the best part of my childhood.
Only in a Slashdot fantasy can a Slackware install turn into several hours of sex . . . . .
Extra hot grits, please.
(Please browse at -1 to read this comment.)
Impossible Mission is just crying out for a modern day remake. Excellent game that was ahead of its time. Highly recommended if you have the patience for yestertech graphics.
It's the "Learn More" link. The games are:
* Bull Riding
* Championship Wrestling
* Cyberdyne Warrior
* Cybernoid
* Cybernoid 2
* Eliminator
* Exolon
* Firelord
* Flying Disk
* Gateway to Apshai
* Impossible Mission
* Impossible Mission 2
* Jumpman Jr.
* Paradroid
* Pitstop
* Pitstop 2
* Rana Rama
* Silicon Warrior
* Speedball
* Summer Games
* Super Cycle
* Sumo
* Surfing
* Sword of Fargoal
* Tower Toppler
* Uridium
* Winter Games
* World Karate Champion A
* World Karate Champion B
* Zynaps
Nice idea. Too bad you can't use an AC adaptor in place of batteries. Any idea what the battery life on these units are anyway?
The PC Weenies: 11 Years of Online Tech 'Too
Problem I see with this is that if you break the unit by 'waggling' to much, you've got a heftyish replacement fee. Maybe that's why QVC are sellin em in packs of two.
On the hardware front, hope it is hackable to a degree, I'd like to see some of the Rowland Twins (or ACP) masterpieces like Creatures, Creatures 2 (LOVE those torture chambers) and Mayhem in Monsterland.
And Park Patrol and Wizball and.....snip!
Now there's been plenty of ads disguised as stories on slashdot before, but actually including the text Buy one now and impress your friends is a little ridiculous.
Should've included Alley Cat and Gribbly's Day Out. But I guess Uridium and Paradroid makes it go a long way.
Archon, M.U.L.E., Bruce Lee...
And it's been 20 years, and I still can't get that damn Forbidden Forest theme song out of my head.
Damnit, it doesn't include the game I most wanted!
There used to be an old Spy vs. Spy game for the commadore 64. (Yes the MAD magazine spy vs spy.) I used to LOVE that game. Its a shame this system doesn't have it. I also had frogger for the commadore 64. Its missing too.
I do security
I believe by making the C64 and its SID audio chip open source it would benefit a lot of households in the US, Canada, Mexico, and Iceland that do not have a home computer.
With the dedication, foresight, and marketing-savy of the Open Source Developer Community they could create new custom applications for the C64 such as HDTV media centers, 24-track mixers, webmail appliances, state firewalls, and of course bioryhthm generators. These are elusive markets that have escaped Microsoft, OS/2, United Linux and the fairly-sucessful BeOS.
By using the powerful processor and the ability to POKE and PEEK values in the registers directly, highly efficient code could be generated which would allow us to wrestle away from the stranglehold that Gateway and Alienware have on the blade server market.
Which is nice.
Wearing pants should always be optional.
Other classic consoles are also available including Atari, Activision, Nameco.
It need's to be in a Wico Command Control, or "the Boss" to truly recreate the experience.
Anyone remember those sticks? Solid steel shaft, heavy duty construction, bad-ass leaf switches inside. They were every bit as durable as an arcade stick, hell probably moreso.
Hell, I still have a Command Control that's going on 25 years old. Still as good as the day I got it.
Compare to those "arcade sticks" they sell for PS2/XBox, etc. Cheap plastic pieces of shit that are broken inside a couple weeks. Look inside and see the cheapest microswitches Radio Shack can offer.
I know there are a couple on the market that are made with real arcade components, but they cost a bundle.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I got fed up a few years back of the sheer amount of consoles i had sitting under my tv (nes, snes, mega drive, mastersystem, saturn, N64), the wires were getting some what cumbersome. These individual controllers go a long way to solving the problem but the best solution now adays seems a unit like the xbox or a tiny computer. to be honest i wouldn't play any new games on it, bit of a retro fan, i would mainly stick with emulators, offers a host more functionality, i.e. saving games, screen shots, four player support, and you can more or less drag and drop games as and when you like. For the moment my 300+ cartidges and cd's are very much retired to the loft. Is there really a need for these fancy game console controllers for anyone with a reasonable budget?
"all through my house i set up traps, it seems like the rats have a map, so now i feed the rats crack" - Donald D
This is awesome because of the technical merits, but also because the developer isn't your run of the mill parent-mooching-freak.
She's an attractive woman.
And, no, she doesn't want to date you.
Mad Software: Rantings on Developing So
I've been thinking about upgrading.
./ from my decrepit AMD Athlon(TM) 64 box (which I'm about to trash). My next comment will be from my super-ultra-modern-high-tech Commadore!!!!!!!111
The QVC sales guy says this will run Duke Nukem Forever, this is fucking awesome!
It will take a NVIDIA GeForce 6600, right?
This will be my last comment on
Or did she do something else to create this thing?
..
And are all the pins/ports available or is 'attaching a keyboard' just not an option here...
Something like this could be put into a 1541 disk drive
---- Booth was a patriot ----
So much time passed between the Apshai/Hellfire series and Gateway, that I think the term 'inspired by' is better than 'sequel'. Here's a shout out to Jon Freeman, designer of Apshai and most all of Automated Simulation's first games. He is one of the half-dozen founders of computer games and he deserves a hell of a lot more recognition in the development community.
Just kidding... if they have Raid on Bungeling Bay on this thing, I'm totally buying it!
The CB App. What's your 20?
Provided that these prove wildly succesful, the C-64 installed base will increase by a cool 1/4 million. I know there is still a lot of folks out there that use their C-64 on a regular basis, mostly for games (but not only).
What are the chances that a small software company ("one-man band") will find some financial interest in developing C-64 software? Same goes for hardware: I guess you could make an adapter to hook your existing carts and C-64 periferals to this thingy.
Sigged!
You don't, at least not simultaneously.
Most games on the list are single player, and Winter Games was mostly turn based, though my memory is hazy.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
From what I've gathered through Google, it was the Atari 7800 version that was impossible, due to some puzzle pieces that were hidden behind terminals (which can't be searched like the other items).
I can say that the Commodore 64 version didn't suffer from this (or if it did, it was rather sporadic) as I've beaten it over a dozen times. In an interview with Commodore magazine (I don't remember when, but it was quite some time ago), the developer of the game stated this his best time for beating the game was about 45 minutes (of real time, not game time).
My best time is somewhere around the 55 minute mark. Impossible Mission II on the other hand took me over six hours to beat, and I've only done it once. Seeing how difficult Impossible Mission II was, I'd hate to see what they would have done for Impossible Mission III...
-- Joe
When can we expect a version that comes with 30 different Linux distros preinstalled, so interested folks don't have to meddle with these live CDs anymore? Oh, wait, it would cost 30 x 699 US$ then, right?
http://www.dreamfabric.com/c64/
The CB App. What's your 20?
Buy one now and impress your friends
:D
If you're friends get impressed with a Commodore you (and you're friends) need to get out more often.
It's just going to be too weird to play a C=64 game that doesn't say
+_+ CRACKED BY THE FANTASTIC FOUR +_+
*** CALL OUR BBS FOR MORE! ***
*** TWO LINES! 1200 BAUD! ***
*** JOHN IS A HOMO! HAHAHA! ***
when it starts up. What will the kids of today think about classic gaming? That people actually paid for their games back then? I mean, if we're going for authenticity, let's go all the way, people.
Please, think of the children.
Trust me, for Paradroid alone it's worth it. Or at least worth seeking out the rom and an emulator.
Though Karateka and the Archons are sorely, sorely missed.
I find it interesting that QVC bought the initial run of these. It may be of interest to readers here that QVC Studios/HQ happens to be on the very sight where Commodore Business Machines was once based.
Grab a copy of Vice, download the .d64 file, and realize that the puzzle fragments you have to find make up a punch-card that you will use to exit the facility.
Though I personally recommend Power64 for your retro gaming needs, it does kind of need a Mac.
I ran into Jeri at a conference recently and we talked about why certain games are available (or not).
Its often an archeology problem - figuring out who owns the copyrights and getting them to respond.
For example, most of the Bally/Midway games that I was involved with at DNA (Dave Nutting Associates) are in this limbo. My contract with Midway had the game rights reverting to me, and we think that Dave's contract with Midway has the same thing, but he lost all the paperwork, so he does not know for certain. Thus we cannot assure potential distributors that the title is clear. (I actually kept my contract in a file box I was able to dig out, so MAME has Robby Roto).
Its too bad - because we would love to see Gunfight (the first game on a frame-buffer system), Sea Wolf, Gorf, Wizard of Wor, and a host of other titles available on MAME and neo-retro systems like Jeri's.
-- Jamie
stay awhile..... staaaaaaay foreeeeeveerrrrrrr!!!!
Most of the games are dogs but Sword of Fargoal? Man, was I ever addicted to that game. I played it so long a few times that the C-64 was as hot as the power supply.
You want to know who isn't running Firefox 2.x? They spell it "definately" and "rediculous".
DAMN YOU!!!
Now I gotta get my C64 out of the closet and get me some of that action.
*curses and waves fist in what I hope is your general direction*
-FlynnMP3
Ps. Thanks for the good belly laugh.
So there you go - support your local C64 cracking crew. Even though I have a real C64, I might look at this for the convenience when the PAL version hits Europe. But please...Way Of The Exploding Fist! Ghosts'n'Goblins! One Man And His Droid for the music, the Monty Mole stuff...
Cheers,
Ian
all this time I tought AOL created that game
Just get a used Dreamcast for $20 and emulate everthing, C64, Atari 800, 2600, 5200, Apple, NES, Genesis, Gameboy, MAME and more.
Some day when they come out with an XP3200 in a joystick, you'll hear them scream "I can't believe they didn't include HL2 in this thing."
I've got 101 mod points and you can't have them!
For one, it has 256 colors instead of 16. None of the games support it, but your own code could.
athf...you will be missed :(
god bless it...