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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You mean my Vic-20 based games console is already out of date?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.
Extra hot grits, please.
(Please browse at -1 to read this comment.)
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
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.
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
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.
She's the one on the right.
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!!!!
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