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US Company Buys Commodore Brand For $33 Million
inKubus writes "Tulip Computers International BV -- which has held the rights to Commodore since 1997 -- said Thursday it will sell the once-mighty Commodore computer brand to U.S.-based Yeahronimo Media Ventures Inc. for 24 million euros, or $33 million. A company spokesman said they would "take actions" against possible copyright infringements of the Commodore name in the United States as well as release a new MP3 player and rerelease classic games."
why? its kind of a waste.
There is a major problem with people swapping tape cartridges full of programs. Somebody needs to fight these pirates.
Another Canadian icon to the US attack-lawyers.
A group of investors actually wants the name associated with a company whose business strategy was best summed up as:
Ready
Fire!
Aim
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
...abandonware isn't really abandonware. Now, I'm wondering if they bought the name just so they could make money out of lawsuits. If they do, and it works, I wonder how many other companies will attempt to by rights to long and outdated software just to attempt to raise their bottom line by sueing everyone.
that buy's a company to go out and sue people using there name....
some true innovation!
a 6502-based MP3 player! (Or is that 6210?) Whichever, the "Commodore name" to most people isn't a modern-centric concept. It's a historical relic (an important one, sure, but has no basis in modern computing).
I'm sure "SlashdotMedia" will improve on all the wonders that Dice Holdings blessed us all with
"A company spokesman said they would "take actions" against possible copyright infringements of the Commodore name in the United States as well as release a new MP3 player and rerelease classic games."
Seriously. Is Commodore really still popular?
Isn't infringing on them, like infringing on a dead body?
Yeahronimo Media Ventures. Yes, this sounds like a reputable company. Seriously.
rerelease classic games."
I wonder if this means we'll get C64 games on those little joystick-that-plugs-into-the-tv things that are so popular nowadays.
I mean, really, it's pretty much been empty promises since about 1992 from the Commodore/Amiga crowd, and the Commodore kicked the bucket.
ShortFormBlog: Writing a little. Saying a lot.
A company whose primary product seems (from their website) to be a DRM scheme is buying the commodore brand - remember, this is the company that gave out schematics with their computers. Doesn't sound like it makes sense to me. The only people who care about C= are geeks who will know better...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Perhaps they could release a kit commodore as well, it has been a long time since beginners to computing could sit down and build their own computer from the chips up. Be a great learning tool to see again... Or, I could take the 6502 and finish work that bending robot in the garage...
You won't see this on techtv, despite the fact that they are now a gaming channel. Why? They're reruns 23 hours a day now! And the screen savers is now a comedy show with no actual content.
...the 'Commodore Digital Media Player' _and its subscription service_, according to http://www.yeahronimo.com/corporate/
I would really like to see a fully licensed Amiga 500/1000 emulator and for all the programs to be released in bundles.
I can't imagine what the brand would have to do with me wanting to purchase an Mp3 player though. I suppose for some it might give some credibility to a product, but most Mp3 purchasers either look at the specs or are the types that are influenced by media and will not even have any exposure (in the US) to the brand.
Branding is such a scam... Like putting the name Commodore on any crap box is going to make it magically like a C64 or an Amiga.. People are not that stupid... Same goes for Napster. The old Napster is gone, forever. Using the name won't make it anything like the real thing.
The perfect sig is a lot like silence, only louder
You can tell this is just another company that bought the name so they can go around making $$$ suing people.
The company who purchased the name is probably just a group of MBAs and lawyers - I bet there is not a single techie there. Any acutal product they sell will likely just be re-branded Chinese goods.
The market for retro video games must be really big right now. I have seen those little atari /arcade /namco controllers that plug on the TV to play our all time favorite 8 bit video games popping out on every single toy store.
The question here is, how the emulation scene will be affected and more important when will the ready-for-TV-ZX Spectrum arrive.
I know many people remember the commodore brand, but what kind of opinion people have on the brand ? An old computer brand that went bankrupt ? Is it worth that much money ?
I still love the old commodore computers but i doubt this is the general opinion about the brand.
I still don't fully understand why infogrames revived the Atari brand since everyone constantly said that Atari sucked when Nintendo came on the gaming scene...
Now is the time for me to start the new coleco brand. I'll bring out exciting products such as plastic pools and overpriced dolls.
100% of statistics are wrong.
Commodore rocked back in the day. However, about this new company declaring it will "go after" infringers: the only reason anyone still knows about the Commodore brand is because of the dedication of those who could be considered infringers on the name. Great tactic - use the community to keep a brand name from totally dying out, then turn around and unleash the legal dogs on the very ones who kept it viable. Whatever...
SYS64738
Is this really a US company ? Looks like a EU company or did I miss something ?
Sports & Events
E-mail: info@yeahronimo.com
Yeahronimo Media Ventures Inc.
Ms. Roxanne Pons
Public Relations
Tel: +31 35 543 05 07
E-mail: press@yeahronimo.com
Company Address Europe (Operational Offices)
Hermesweg 15
3741 GP BAARN
The Netherlands
Company Address USA
Yeahronimo Media Ventures Inc
433 N. Camden Dr., Suite 600
Beverly Hills, Ca. 90210 USA
Phone: +1 213 379 0540
Fax: +1 310 362 8608
:-) 33 Million for a company name that has been dead for 20 years.
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/games/pirates.ars It may be too much to hope for, but if they would release versions of the old games with improved graphics, I'd buy their stuff.
"If they do, and it works, I wonder how many other companies will attempt to by rights to long and outdated software just to attempt to raise their bottom line by sueing everyone."
OK, so why's the software "outdated"? And isn't getting upset over the whole thing like getting upset over the design plans for the Edsel, or Yugo possibly being unavailable?
As a former Commodore user (only got rid of my Amiga about a year ago) one really has to wonder what the point is?
New Amigas? Kinda late for that don'tcha think?
A shell for nothing but endless litigation? Maybe Darl can get a job there after SCO's shareholders call for his head. Even then sounds like Tulip pulled a coup actually getting a sucker to spend more than 2 cents for the name.
Commodore is dead. They had sushi in the Amiga and they sold it as fish
Would the Commodore name have that value today if it wasn't for all the C-64/Amiga User Groups that kept the legacy alive for all these years? These are the same people that will get sued first, I'm willing to bet.
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
Why would you want to release an MP3 Player under the Commodore brand name? Was/is the Commodore really that popular of a brand name? Is it even popular at all among the crowd that would buy an MP3 Player?
Portland, North Dakota Puppies
Looks like they want to own content and push it to their own playback devices.
from their site:
Below, they reference their own media player (and compare it to the iPod), but the but the bulk of the wording talks about secure transmission and ownership of the entire chain....
maybe they're looking at all the failed set-top box starts that Commodore did with the Amiga chipset, I wonder how far along their player *really* is or if that is why they bought Commodore....
viral games, contageous fun. http://www.DaddySculpin.com
If people with C64s could play MMOGS, those special characters would be making some wacked out letterings.
And one of the funniest things to do on a c64 is make it acid trip. You do this: Randomize(some int), get 2 random numbers, poke one number into the other's address, loop it. So its one crazy poke fest. I've seen the screen split into 4 pieces change colors and scroll wildly. Its funny because your computer goes nuts. You can't do it on a PC because it might erase your harddrive or something serious. But C64 were like a sandbox who's OS wasn't succeptible to viruses or permanent damage.
God spoke to me.
Yeahronimo is not "a US based company", it's Dutch company. According to their web site, they are the first company to offer legal music download services in the Netherlands.
Looks like the only thing they are interested in is making money with other people's creations, and sue the crap out of anyone who uses those creations without paying them money.
Names can't be copyrighted...they'd be taking action against uses of the name under TRADEMARK law.
There are a couple of issues they might run into:
1) continuous use -- has the trademark been in continuous use over the years? They can't just abandon it and pick it back up
2) passing off - if no one else is "passing themselves off" as the Commodore computer company, they probably don't have an action.
overall, if their investment plan is litigation, i think they are in a craptacular situation
"Another Canadian icon to the US attack-lawyers."
Uh huh. I can just see how they brutally savaged Corel.
...that QVC is selling? I remember reading in the artical on Slashdot about the "hot" girl who developed the design for that product that there was some question about licensing.
In other words, I doubt there is much money in going after people writing C64 emulators, but there might be in chasing the company supplying QVC, or even QVC.
Just curious and hoping some more knowledgele people will add real information to this.
Yeahronimo's CLEAR Vision
* Create new revenue streams
* Leverage existing archives and libraries of content
* Establish new customers
* Achieve greater market share
* Reduce distribution costs
What could be clearer!
Our mission statement: make money raping your childhood memories.
Sigh. I wish they'd clone Jack Trameil so he could revive Commodore the way Jobs revived Apple.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
24 million euros * 1.36 (US dollar rate) = $32.64 million
yea, it's only off by ~1%, but still...36K is a lotta money to just be rounded off
This sig contains repetition and redundancy.
Tell SCO, who are still chugging away on nothing more than threats of lawsuits. Laws are made by lawyers, for lawyers.
I wonder how long it'll take them to sue all the emulator writers, both entire machine and SID players? Will they take action against folks who enjoy the offerings of the HVSC and game archives?
"Apparently so, but suppose you throw a coin enough times. Suppose one day, it lands on its edge."
to buy a legal copy of the Blue Meanies from Outer Space. The best game EVER on my VIC-20. Oh yeah... :)
Soon I'll be able to clean up by selling my stash of 5.25" floppies! Sweet!
I'm not good in groups. It's difficult to work in a group when you're omnipotent. - Q
...was going to happen, this is precisely why I ftp downloaded the net's largest archive of C=64 games a few months back. I'd post a link, but the last thing that this company needs is a target for their money-hungry ways.
This could be a real market potential... turning those power supplies into home heating units.
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
Branding is such a scam... Like putting the name Commodore on any crap box is going to make it magically like a C64 or an Amiga..
Which begs the question; WTF is happening with the Amiga legacy at the moment?
I stopped following Amiga developments circa 1995, when the new Amiga owners wanted to re-release the ageing A1200 for 100 pounds *more* than it had been selling for when C= went bankrupt. (Even then I knew the difference between trying to get the Amiga back into the mainstream, and squeezing the last drops of cash from the fanbase).
From thereon, it seems the story gets very complicated, as the Amiga OS and hardware rights got sold off, split up, sold off again, and...
Okay; back to what you said. What the *hell* does Amiga anywhere (seemingly a built-on-Java ME games environment, or something) have to do with the Amiga?!
Quite frankly, it seems to me that people *will* buy because of the name; or at least some Amiga fans will (is this trying to con the hardcore, or going for the Amiga nostalgia market?).
Another thing; what on earth is happening with Amiga OS 4.0? Version 3.0 came out in the early 1990s, version 4.0 has been gone on about for *ages*. I don't see how it can have any relevance now; things have changed too much in the intervening years, and it seems to be used to string die-hard Amiga fanatics along.
BTW, I agree with you about Napster. It's just another paid service that happens to have the rights to that name, but the way it was reported in the news was some kind of corporate rebirth. Annoying...
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
I should be able to make a few bucks from all these infringers of "The Quest for the Rings"!
from http://www.emulationstation.com/systemlist.asp "The Commodore 64's sound is what really set it apart from other computers of the time. The system featured a Sound Interface Device called SID. The SID was a synthesizer chip capable of producing a wide variety of unique music and sound effects. It handled the sound output by itself, freeing up the CPU for other duties. The SID was the first dedicated sound chip to be used in a home computer." The settlements from patent infringement on this could be sizeable.
You know I always thought that things like commodore and mamiga shoulda been retransported to the solid realm again, the replay action is super. Tell another japanese element pixel drawn ga-ga go-go girl. Slam it thtoh another flick. Ok. Res-Trans The amiga had a lot of possibilities thaqt have only been relaised in the bedrooms of dreamers. Same for so many smaller and lesser known fruits... The OS you study mate, it's in there.
sig!wind down the juuice, let the tubes roar with the glow of alternative powers, not they that be." me, today...
What will happen to the Open Source Emulator VICE? Everyone should download the latest version along with the source in the event they get a Cease and Desist letter.
...if you create a MP3 player named "Commodore" instead of "rf32erf" or whatever, it isn't going to sell much more under the name "Commodore"- There is nothing about the "Commodore" brand name that would make the guy/gal on the street think it can make a good MP3 player, the way the "Apple" brand name did.
...the "classic Commodore" game business is pretty worthless, too: Can you name one IN-HOUSE Commodore game? Do you think "Aunt Tilley" can when she's looking for Christmas presents for her nephews? All the good games were written by EA or somesuch and not by Commodore directly.
The real money is in Rear Admiral (lower half) Computers.
Damn Slashdot for forcing me to post before previewing. ;)
Personally I think Sarah is on coke now.
Bring back the VIC-20!
I want my 1MHZ of screaming power, with 5K of RAM!
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
Is it really a US company? All the board members and the advisors have dutch names, and their pressroom sites a dutch press release on their intent to buy the Commodore brand from Tulip.
I really wonder how this will affect the C64 DTV stick just released. I'm in Europe, so I still haven't been able to get one of these.
AmigaOS 4.0 is in public beta. Read http://www.amigaworld.net/
Nothing like the promise of lawsuits to drum up business.
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
No kidding - I wonder what "Silicon Graphics" or "sgi" would fetch - for the name alone (no IP).
:\
Half that?
What times we live in.
Sod the MP3 player. MP3 is dead. What they need is a portable SIDfile player.
Though I'd probably get some strange looks as I rock out to the "Commando" theme on the bus.
I don't see how. Synthesizers haven't been done in hardware for ages except for curiosities and by the people making sid-chip sound cards for PC - which use the actual SID.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Do their plans to clamp down also include going after harmless emulators? Both software and in FPGA's ?
Good thing i got my DTV already..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
'New' Pontiac GTO
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
But I'm assuming your post was sarcastic..
However, many others wont know this ( which is apparent by you being modded as 'interesting', and not 'funny'.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Gee, I hope they're not going to make me take down my Commodore 64 "emulator" (actually, a 2-image GIF file)
k s best with Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox)
http://www.yeahblah.com/virtc64n.htm#c-64
(wor
The Commodor 64 had 64k of RAM. the 20K of system rom was "over" the last 20K of RAM, and the 16K of RAM before that could be banked out so a Cartridge ROM could reside there. The 6510 had the ability to look at several address in zero page memory and use that information to "bank" certain ROM and memory mampped I/O out so that the RAM underneith could be used.
vi +
There have been little improvement in video games since the c64 days. What's the different between skyfox on c64 and MS flight simulator 2003? graphics.. The gameplay is still the same. PS3/xb2/gc2 will have better graphics but not much else... there is no thinking outside of the box in the video game industry.. it's the same old same old recycling of ideas... the first first person shooter began with the stupid duck hunting game in nintendo in 86' and doom3 or hl2 is still same the same game play... lame. lame I tell you.
1) Buy old, fairly defunct company
2) Decry copyright infringements about defunct company (that nobody knew existed anymore)
3) Sue people
4) Make Profit!!!
Hey I was able to complete all the steps...sound's like a familiar tactic from our favorite companies.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
36K is a lotta money to just be rounded off
33 million - 32.64 million = 360K, not 36K.
Anyone here remember the PC1?
The problem is that the folks that buy brand names don't get what's it all about. I would buy an Amiga, even with a propriety OS if it would do what the Amiga did. Wich was from my definition:
- look cool in my living room
- have a slick gui with extreme ease of use
- interoperate with my stereo and TV
- run software that gets the job done
- offer all this at an affordable price
So far I could just get out and buy an iMac, but here's the hurdle:
- be the perfect gameconsole, run every hot game out there AND is easy to use a "real" console.
- Ah, and while you're at it, get rid of the Guru Meditation.
Didn't a similar situation happen to Atari?
blog & fiction: jd87
It just occurred to me that they could sue Rockstar for their Commodore-like intro in GTAVC...
I hope not though
"The settlements from patent infringement on this could be sizeable."
What is the patent number that covers the MOS 6581?
Nobody is producing this chip today, counterfeit or otherwise. I wish they were. I have to scavenge them from breadboxes, and I hate doing that. Yeah, I know where to buy them, not reliably, but I can always find C64s. Sometimes for free, and rarely for more than $5.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
With respect, is this intended as a serious commercial product, or is it just something for the hobbyists? If the former, *why* should the rest of us care about Amiga OS 4.0?
(Yes; I know the Amiga OS beat the heck out of Windows/DOS in its day. I was one of those defending it. But now it's dissociated from the hardware, and OSs have changed a lot in the past 10 years.)
The problem with the Amiga sites is that they all seem designed for people already familiar with the current situation- i.e. die-hard Amiga fans, and from the outside, all I'm seeing is a confusing mess of products, developments and intellectual property being shuffled around, appearing and disappearing.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Your must be in marketing right? It only had 3.5K for user storage.
look cool in my living room
IMHO, none of the Amigas ever *looked* cool. They all came in beige, which was boring even then (irony of ironies, the now 'anti-beige' Apple probably kick-started beige-fashion when they chose it as a sensible colour for their Apple II). Neither the pizza boxes nor the A500/A600/A1200 looked that good (*); the Atari ST (grey, angled function keys) looked better, IMHO, though it wasn't as good a machine.
The 68000-based Amigas were great in their day, but they'd probably seem crude as hell if you fired them up now, and not all that slick.
(*) Okay, the A600 was kind of cute. But it was still beige, and in every other sense, risible.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
It's not about the *smart* girl that produced the DTV's. ( some of us have repsect for Jeri )
Jeri is a small fish. Its the fact the larger 'retro gaming' industry is starting to take off, and scum like these folks smell money.
The first to come are always the lawyers. ( and the last to leave )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Getting rid of the guru meditation is the same thing as making the OS never crash - good luck. Of course, you could always do it the WinXP way, and just make the system reboot without warning... Or you could use GOMF which made most meditations recoverable enough to save your files before rebooting.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It's not dead....it's undead
Anyone else read this as "We want the brand name and then we're going to sue people who play roms of games they owned 20 years ago, but can't find in their attics under the clutter"?
The way they put that... it sounds so... slimey... oh well I own over 400 C64 games, if they wish to check which I own and which I illegally downloaded they can go through them, because I'm sure as hell not!
I like muppets.
Ok, the A500 looked like a kitchen machine. But hey, I got a A1200 sitting right here on my desk and I think it looks cool in a StarWars-toy way, not in a "Phillip Starck bathroom" way...
;-)
Of course it feels crude today, but still, it boots fast, it has a small laptop hardrive (it's really quiet), it's pretty fast at everything it does and it still works.
And personally I think the A600s biggest strength was is cool design. Sooo much Computer in sooo little space. Cute. And it's not really beige, it USED to be a shade of white.
I mean, those hard edges and everything, much cooler than todays biomorphic, ergonomic stuff. But maybe it's just me. I also like IBMs Desktopline...
My point was I would buy an Amiga that lived up to the promise of yesterdays Amigas using modern technology. Maybe a Mini-ITX box with a custom Linux distribution, although this wouldn't solve the Games dillemma. Actually the iMac comes as close as it gets (it's white, too). And I would NEVER get one. I think an iMac is one ugly box of technology.
Well, it's all a matter of taste.
--C. Montgomery Burns in Simpsons 4F17
I once owned 400 shared of Commodore stock and still get sent a bank notice that it is worth something like 0.125 cents. Can I cash that in now?
How can the Commodore brand be worth $33 million when Hasbro bought Atari for $5 million in 1998.
What, me worry?
Remember when there was a big Internet boom that turned out to be a bubble? Remember when the bubble popped and the nasdaq fell to one quarter of its value? Things like that tend to affect the dollar.
And personally I think the A600s biggest strength was is cool design. Sooo much Computer in sooo little space. Cute. And it's not really beige, it USED to be a shade of white. ;-)
Well, it came out five years after the A500; considering it was no better specced (okay; better in some areas, but poorer in others- balances out, but it should have had at *least* an A1200 spec to compete ('Red Queen' moving forward to stand still) and compensate for the fact that it wasn't too hardware-compatible with A500 stuff), they should have had no problems in fitting the technology in.
And I'd forgotten about the colour; well, it *was* beige, just a lighter, more creamy shade than the greyish beige of the A500 (if it had actually been white in that type of moulded plastic, it would have looked incredibly nasty).
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Who the hell are they kidding? This thing is so dead. Stick a fork in it already. Or stop trying to sell it. The people that really want their C64's actually still have them. Give it up, call it quits!
Anybody wants to buy my Commodore? Is $1 Million ok?
echo "getuid(){return 0;}" > e.c; gcc -shared -o e.so e.c; LD_PRELOAD=./e.so sh
It's called a cycle.
Up. Down. Up. Down. Up. Down.
Much like gas prices. Up. Down. Up. Down. Up. Down. (down now - I thought the Saudis were supposed to drive gas prices down before the election for their friend Bushitler, not after... strange)
Hungry like the wolf.... :P
yes, exactly
People need to be a little less reactionary with these things. People went f'e crazy over the gas prices. Now they're going crazy over this. And when this reverses itself, they'll go crazy over something else.
Really basic idea here: Dollar down - American goods cheaper abroad, foreign goods cheaper in America. More American goods sold, less foreign goods purchasec. Dollar goes back up and the trends reverse. I mean, come on people.
Having sold more Amiga equipment than I care to remember, I can assure you that the A4000, A1200, and A600 were white.
Does anyone know what type of copyrights Commodore might have had (or has) or what type of IP they may still own.
It sounds like the standard business practice of buy a company, scrap everything besides IP, sue sue sue.
I dont think we can really expect to see any new hardware or software (if they even do come out with an MP3 player it wont matter much, because it wont last long at all), so why else could they be buying the company.
I know a name can go along way, but the only products I can see them selling would be focused on people that would know better.
TruePunk | Games
Ahh, MULE was one the best games I've ever played - I've bought a C64 emulator just for that purpose, but it's not the same :(
Anyone want to write a new version of this game?
(for that matter, Mail Order Monsters was fantastic too...)
Need Geek Rock? Try The Franchise!
I would have sold them mine for a lot less- AND I would have thrown in two 1541 disk drives and a lot of home-made double sided disks....including Raid on Moscow, one of the best games ever!!!! I think I even still have some carts and a modem!
Repant. Thy end is sheer.
I wonder if the reason they want to make Commodore branded mp3 player is that there are already fake Commodore mp3 players on the market?
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
here
Euro doesn't have the plural
http://europa.eu.int/comm/economy_finance/euro/
Oh no! They aren't going to go after Jeri Ellsworth, are they? She can hide out at my place!
Jeri! You read Slashdot, right? Send me a message. In the meantime, I'll go get our, uh.. I mean YOUR bed ready!
I have been trying to find a reason to dig that old C-64 out of the closet and this just might do it. I hope they release a sequel to Buggy Boy. That is such an awesome game.
Who owns the copyright to Pong...I think I might have a plan....mwhaaa-haaa-haa
Having done so much with so little for so long, I now can do anything with nothing at all.
correction:
"American goods cheaper abroad, foreign goods cheaper in America." ->
"American goods cheaper abroad, foreign goods more expensive in America."
Oh no - they're going to sue Strong Bad!
[Insert pithy quote here]
Actually, Yeahronimo is setup and owned by Dutch people. They only registered it in the US.
It is a digital media company (look at their homepage which is at http://www.yeahronimo.com/) which sells digital music, but also have sold sports content.
The foundation of this company was laid by people who where in the music branche forever. They are the owners of the famous Wisseloord Studios in Hilversum (in the Netherlands). In those studios not only Dutch artists recorded, but also famous international names like Elton John, Tina Turner, Mick Jagger, ELO, Simple Minds, The Police, The Cranberries, Stereophonics, Noa and Erykah Badu.
They have been playing with the idea Yeahronimo since I think 1998 but had serious troubles to get the licenses and technique right.
Them buying the Commodore brand might be actually a good thing. Don't forget Napster was dead too...
Actually, I suspect Commodore doesn't have any valid patents today. Even Amiga Inc, a seperate entity with the rights to the Amiga IP, may have a handful, but the bulk of the cool stuff was done in 1985 with that. This year we can probably see AROS switch to using the Amiga's drop down menus instead of the context-menus they've been doing up until now.
Commodore will have two collections of valid, useful, IP. One is the copyright of certain Commodore produced software. There isn't a lot of that, and little of it is in use today. There's the BASIC ROMs, I guess, but I suspect that Joystick-with-a-C64-in-it thing has licensed them anyway.
The other is the Commodore brand. Fortunately for this company, Commodore didn't become generic in the time taken for Commodore to die, but there's a reason for that - nobody's using it. So it's highly unlikely to net much revenue.
Despite the submitters comment about "copyrights", I suspect this operation will have very little to do unless they get off their arses and release actual products, cashing in on the Commodore brand name. And it remains to be seen how useful that will be.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
If they started building more MOS6581 chips they could sell them to Elektron.se who makes the SidStation synth http://www.sidstation.com/
Thier availability is limited by the amount of chips left out there in the wild they can get thier hands on. It's an awesome synth!
Talking of the latter, wasn't the CD32 dark gray? I don't think it was beige.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
The Commodore brand will now be squeezed out and discredited (come on, release a new MP3 player and rerelease classic games doesn't sound too innovative, more like cheap rebranded stuff) until nobody remembers what the name stood for originally.
Nobody? Almost. But a handful of doters with long beards will remember their C-64 youth, invest their retirement pay into the (by then cheap) brand name, free it and release a linux-based open source console with true Commodore heritage.
Or Yeah-row-nemo.com (or the like) could free the brand now. Maybe if we ask politely...?
If you look at Yeahronimo's website, there's talk about selling ringtones and realtones (presumably for cellphones).
Maybe they want to make a C64 emulator for cellphones and sell/rent old C64 games to cellphone customers.
It was a lot of things.
- It was a CEO making 10+ million a year when his company was going down the tube.
- It was paying $800,000 a month for a huge factory building in West Chester, PA when most of manufacturing had long ago moved overseas.
- It was C= snubbing of third parties like Newtek (Video Toaster guys), until it was WAY too late.
- It was C= thinking they could sell crappy PC's under their name better than their own original product. They lost MILLIONS on those.
The fact that they lost the MHz war meant little as the Amiga relied on co-processing for most everything PC's were using the main processor for. However, C= delayed the production of the AA and AAA graphic chipsets far too long. By the time the 1200/4000 series was released, it was already all but old.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
You'd buy the Commodore name too, if your name was Yeahronimo. What a bad name.
--
RumorsDaily
Sigh. Here we go; now that Cloanto has done all they could to criminalize the Amiga emulation community, we need a company to do the same to Lemon and all the rest of the C-64 emulation sites. Value add? Zero. They serve a purely parasitical role and have NOTHING to do with the original development of the system. All they ask is that we now PAY for what we've been happy enough to enjoy and PROVIDE for FREE. Companies like this are the real pirates.
A company spokesman said they would "take actions" against possible copyright infringements of the Commodore name in the United States. What does Linel Ritchie have to say about that?
It's this retro thing... First there was C= then C+ then C++ then C# now C= again... ( And don't forget pacman - C... )
That's just my 2 cents.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Way to go, Tulip: keep selling things like this to suckers of the world and you'll end up with a nice profit. As for the suckers, good thing there's one born every minute!
It is an off-white/creamy; not white. I have just broke out the 100's of games for the children 7 amd 10; they love it. Yes the games have faded some over the years, but they are still great fun to look at and hear like the Cinemaware titles, FA-18, Lemmings, and the tons of Demos.
Please forgive the recollections of the past;
The Amiga's biggest success was also it's ultimate failure. It had a powerful, but custom embedded chipset and therefore tied to resolution and features, it often could not be upgraded as easily as a board swap.
Despite the naysayers, the 500 was even today advanced in almost every sense of the word; intelligent (or at least autonomous, interrupt driven) peripherals and chipsets, an AGP-style direct graphics bus(es) and autonomous chipset (take that Apple II and Mac of the era where the CPU had to do everything; "Toolbox"?) with extended video synchronization and manipulation down to less than a scan line; one of the early modes switched the color pallette at different scan lines, creating an extremely large color space for the time(16k colors?); PCs and Macs couldn't match it, digital VGA, fixed scan rates and the like.
Oh, the 8 bit stereo sound (PCs were bleeping and blooping), the multitasking which really worked (keep your ideas about having an MMU to yourself; processes in Windows of the time could easily stomp on each other, futzing with an MMU slowed things down, and it worked well). The GUI; it worked very well; the Macs only had one submenu under a menu, and were only black and white IIRC., Windows couldn't achieve folders within folders.
The architecture was good; almost all jump vectors; shared library system, relocatable code,and a FLAT memory space; the Intel guys choked on that; only years later did they figure that out. And, the PC has stubbornly fixed I/O addresses that we have to follow to this VERY day.
The AmigaOS and hardware had the first PlugnPlay I ever heard of; the drivers could FIND their hardware (Sun guys were recompiling kernels). The AmigaOS had logical volumes; is that what udev is to Linux today?
I had scabbed on almost every option on many machines; 500,1200, 2000, 2500?; more memory, SCSI controller, flickerfixer, etc.
To me, as a long time Unix guy, Linux has only recently become my Amiga replacement; faster, quicker and not held back because of a company.
How about a C64 on steroids for the new millenium? a home computer with an object-oriented Basic language booted from ROM that provides complete programmatic access to the underlying video and sound hardware! a hobbyist's dream!
Please, bring back the home computer! and the back-bedroom programming...it is an untapped market with huge potential! don't they see how retro stuff sells wildly?
Basically C= was stuck in a business model where you sold a product until it stopped selling, and _then_ you started looking for something new. Anything that looked like research and development was considered dangerous and subversive, and a threat to a model that has obviously worked out very well (not). Meanwhile the competition was going faster, bigger, better.
Could C= have kept up had they invested in R&D? Some people said it was impossible, that no one manufacturer can possibly have the ability to have a superior video, audio, CPU, OS, etc. solution. However, consider that C= didn't make the CPU anyway, and NVidia now pretty much all other hardware to superior standards. And they already had a worldclass OS. In a nutshell, I believe under proper management C= could not only have kept up, but could in fact have been a leader.
with a miniature LCD screen, a little chicklet kb and a 512MB memory card to store the entire library of C64 games and also allow you to enjoy the pleasures of V2 basic again in all it's glory. ;)
I'm not talking about the joystick thing by undoubtedly talented Jeri Ellsworth, I'm talking about something ENTIRELY different.
GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
"A company spokesman said they would "take actions" against possible copyright infringements of the Commodore name..."
Why does the name SCO pop into my head when I read this?
(C64 most sold system ever)
Wow, and I thought the Commodore brand and Tulip both didn't exist anymore since Escom AG and later it's Dutch renamed-to-Commodore daughter company went belly up in like 1997 or so.
Tulip used to be omnipresent in the Netherlands, but I don't see it anymore.
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
Commodore was started in Canada, and stayed alive because of a Canadian investor, but a "Canadian Icon"? By the time it reached prominence in the PC industry with the VIC20 and C64 it was only Canadian in a nominal sense. Also something to keep in mind is that the corporate behaviour of some of the early Commodore bigwigs would make an Enron executive blush.
Commodore was founded by Jack Tramiel, who was a Polish-born American citizen, established Commodore in Canada to circumvent stricter import/export regulations in the US (some of Commodore's early office products and parts were imported from eastern Europe and relations between US and nations within the Soviet sphere of influence were obviously cooling). Co-founder CP Morgan might've been Canadian but I'm not sure. In any case, CP Morgan's company went bankrupt and the SEC thoroughly investigated Morgan for less-than-honest conduct. Later, Canadian Irving Gould invested in Commodore and kept it alive, but he was ultimately responsible for ousting Jack in the 80s. Gould was also noted for his not-quite-honest business practises. If I recall, Commodore International was incorporated offshore to avoid taxation, although the physical offices were in Canada.
So....the "Canadian Icon" Commodore was founded by an American Citizen (a remarkable one who survived Auchwitz and had quite an acumen for business, but not Canadian) and incorporated offshore. The early Canadian investor (Morgan) had a minority stake and went bankrupt and nearly pulled Tramiel into a legal quagmire with his corporate hanky-panky. The next Canadian that stepped into the picture (Gould) outed the founder and let Jack take some of Commodore's best people with him over to Atari, then subsequently squandered the prize they snatched from Jack at Atari (the Amiga--which was a fantastic machine that was mismanaged into the ground).
Since the Bankruptcy, what was left of Commodore never came back to Canada--it existed solely in Europe.
As a Canadian myself, I think I'd find another Icon to be proud of.
I could not imagine giving up my C64 for $5. We only do it every once in awhile anymore, but my wife and I will occasionally drag that thing out and play some of the games we have for it. They are so 1985, but that is just fine by me. They run pretty well and I do not have to load them on my hard drive. Sure, the graphics are not as cool as today's games, but I do not play games for the graphics.
I remember something about them having a musical interface, but I was not into that at that time. Is that what you use the C64's for?
Damn, I think I might have to drag that out this weekend.
Having done so much with so little for so long, I now can do anything with nothing at all.
They'll end up selling t-shirts with the logo, thats about it.
Damnit.
A stake, a stake! My kingdom for a stake!
Die, damnit, die!
And this time, stay dead.
hawk, noting that Amiga has taken long to die than Apple has to go out of business . . .
Bet Atari is on someones 'buy list' now too..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Boy are you late to the game. Bill Gates was the pioneer in the fight against piracy.
Forget about magnetic media...punched paper tape was the scourge of the software industry. You didn't even need a computer to copy it--just a pin and a lot of patience...har har! Bills' been on our A$$es about piracy for nearly 30 years now...talk about an innovative pioneer!
Not sure if there is much money for the "new Commodore" in the SCO-like IP enforcement business though--and aside from the C64-in-a-joystick the rest of the product line as proposed doesn't seem to really fit with Commodore's heritage. Maybe if they went back to its roots and sold nifty calculators (give TI a run for its money) or office equipment (they made good typewriters and filing cabinets I tell ya). Or maybe if they made a PC geared toward high-end multimedia use in honour of the Amiga (oops...forgot...Amiga is a totally different company again).
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"I remember something about them having a musical interface, but I was not into that at that time. Is that what you use the C64's for?"
The sound chip on the C64 is a pretty damned good synthesizer, with a very good analog filter, and it's quite a unique sound generator.
I'm too lame to have any samples of my own music, but check this out:
Fusion of Two Dragons
Yeah, I know the chip doesn't *really* do anything I can't come close to with a soft synth or one of my keyboards, but that's not the point. (Please don't press me about what IS the point, because I'm not sure I could formulate an answer that doesn't make me sound fanatical.)
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
LRC, the best-read libertarian site on the web
Commodore mp3 player
Mentioned in this review
I assume that device was just a knockoff, but its still interesting to see the name being used. Here in the US there is such a demand for "retro" gear that such a player MIGHT just work. I see tons of 13-15 year olds with nintendo and atari gear, which they would never have even played before.
look I got a commodore MP3 player, it has 64KB storage.
I'd be thinking:
"half the RAM is probably used up by a BASIC interpreter as soon as you power it up"
"if it has a data transfer rate anything like the 1541 drive it'll take a century to load songs into it"
"I wonder if I'll have to key an arcane command into it to play songs"
"I wonder if the next model will be almost totally incompatible with this one"
The technical info is correct, but there is a minor point:
The main difference between the MOS 6510 and the original Rockwell 6502
MOS created the "original" 6502 design and licensed it to others--Rockwell probably being the biggest of those (I think they supplied Atari for a time? Cannot remember). The MOS6510 was harware enhanced, whereas the ROK6502 was software enhanced. The ROK6502 didn't have the I/O port, but Rockwell defined ALL the "undefined opcodes" in the base 6502 design.
The "undefined opcodes" are binary numbers that do not represent an assembly-language operation and their behaviour is unpredictable and may change between chip revisions. The 6510 did not enhance the instruction set in any real way (and Commodore warned in its user manual ominously about "not being responsible for the use of undefined opcodes"). Some hackers found that the most popular 6502s had some opcodes that did neat things and ignored Commodore's advice. Rockwell officially "defined" some of those and added more opcodes (mostly to support a new addressing mode). Rockwell defined almost all 255 possible opcodes, andas such the ROK6502 has the largest instruction set of any 6502-variant ever produced.
This was all amazing and cool stuff, until a sharp young high-school dropout put all of it in a single FPGA chip as a hobby and made some money selling it in a retro-looking joystick.
Anyone else notice the Yearanimo Multimedia Ventures can be abbreviated to YMV?
Not isightful, just an insight
The party's over
Someone needs to just go ahead and do a real commodore/MOS 6502 based MP3 player.. Let a STA013 decoder do all the audio worke aand let the 6502 do the rest of the control BS. Maybe find a mini alphanumeric VFD that looks like the ones that came off an old commodore calculator or KIM-1, and put the whole thing in the commodore "shit brown" colored retro case?
They can't "sue those people" because they are "those people".
I cannot comprehend the 'Commodore' brand being worth 24million euros. I'm a huge fan of retro computing, I have a subscription to a couple different retro related magazines. And even do a bit of retro development. But come on, it's not that big of an industry, it's not even an industry in fact.
I could have started a pretty nice consulting company for 1/20th that amount of money. Or for the full wad, a game company.
For $33m they get a brand name and some patent rights. How far can you get selling Commodore branded MP3 players. Would you buy a Commodore MP3 player over an Apple, Sony, Creative or Samsung?
"Yeahronimo will use the Commodore name to increase awareness of its services and hopes to cash in on a recent renaissance of interest in vintage games and computers", Chief Executive Ben van Weijhe said in a telephone interview.
You have to be pretty out there to think you're going to "cash in" on something like this. I'm sorry Mister Weijhe, but I think you're a nut.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I got precious metals when people were buying pets.com. Certainly done better since then. Suffered a few sniggers at the time though. Oh well, rather have the hard and shiny that's worth a lot more now than then, dollars or Euros, then be concerned over some fools opinion on things who can't even look at a PE chart and understand it. "Irrational Exuberance" was a barely polite euphemism for "boneheaded greedy moronic economic retard" a few years back.
Here's the next big one to go. Not advice,not licensed, just an observation, anyone may do with it what they will.
Current scenario, some places worse than others, but over all it's reality. Hordes, legions, platoons, flocks, pods and bevys of real estate "investors" selling the same properties back and forth to each other, so they can all get rich using credit and ever expanding mortgage loans. Egged on by bankers large and small with nothing better to do because their business has become almost unnecessary in the digital age. All deluded this can go on forever and two days. No one has to work, just keep bidding up the same crap to absurd levels, and keep digitising more artifical "wealth" into creation, based on nothing more than crack fumes and alcoholic fantasies and delusions of potentate level grandeur.
That's your next major bubble. It's already popped really, just the effects aren't being felt yet besides of this quiet desparation of the bigboys to try and fix it by slamming in planeloads of toilet paper dollars. That scam is about run it's course.
If it was me stuck in that scenario and relying on currency exchanges that you have no control over, and based in that sector of "investments", I'd cash out now before the buck drop wipes it out, and before the herd moves to dump in a panic, take the money and run with it to something more worthwhile and tangible and priced more sanely. Tulip mania is still alive and well it appears. If you want back in, wait until it's a quarter on a dollar and the pickings are vast and cheap and the sellers are all desparate.
Commodore released some games for the C64 early on, but very few overall and certainly none of the big classics people are remembering. Just because someone owns the Commodore name doesn't mean they can re-release games owned by Electronic Arts and many other companies.
Oh yes, Commodore was Canadian.
... yet none of them had success IN CANADA. Why do you think that is? Because the people that do stay in Canada and make a success of themselves are usually berated for their ambition and because Canadian investors don't take risks. Canadian financiers don't know how to build anything, they study for a living rather than build things.
<rant>
I hate the way Canadians despise risk-takers, business men, and entrepreneurism. Then when someone with ambition heads south and makes good, Canadians embrace them and tout them as "icons".
Steve Case (AOL) is Canadian, James Gosling (Java) is Canadian
I'd ask what technologies Canada has produced but some whiney Canuck will likley answer Avro Arrow (a state-of-the-art jet fighter project the people of Canada shut-down in the sixties) and the Canadarm (that space-shuttle claw NASA out-sourced to us 20 years ago). Wow, that's an impressive output for thirty years.
</rant>
Canadian Sam
You're right in the sense that most people would call it white (at least the A1200; the A600 looks more beige, though that could be the photo- I definitely remember it being much paler than the A500).
:)
I'd still say it was off-white (an AC elsewhere confirms this), because a totally 'white' plastic- as in, put a piece of white paper beside it, and it's the same colour- would look horrible.
But... ah, what does it matter?
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
and one black one (hello CDTV. God you're ugly.)
You thought the CDTV was ugly? Don't see that. Looked like a fairly standard piece of early-90s consumer electronics (black was the standard colour for consumer electronics until some point in the mid-to-late 1990s; personally, I like silver- although I'm bored of it- but a cheap silver finish looks *way* worse than black).
As for the CD32, it was indeed dark grey. It was also fugly.
I mean, it looked like a really cheap (and cheaply-made) knock-off of the Sega Mega-Drive/Genesis. That having been said, it was actually selling quite well (at least in the UK, and probably some other countries; can't see it being such a success in the US as the Amiga wasn't popular there circa 1993/94). Some people would claim that the CD32 was a failure because C= went bankrupt, but it was probably one of the few things they were getting right (even if it was just a repackaged A1200 cash-cow).
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
That doesn't sound too different than compiling processor-specific kernels for Linux. Even Windows has hacks for taking advantage of different features (X86-64 bits, the NX bit, PII multithread, Cyrix had some specific things added some years ago, etc.)
I don't think you can really avoid software patching to take advantage of newer archs.
No, I think what killed C= was the inept (and some would suggest, criminal) management. A lot of bad mistakes were made. They stopped listening to their customers. They they lost focus.
EVERYONE (including the engineers), knew what what working and what wasn't and why. Everyone but management.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
- The 6510 had one less power pin than the 6502
- The 6510 required TWO clock signals at the same frequency offset from each other as input while the 6502 required only one and generated the offset clock signal on-chip. The 6510 did not. This means there is one less clock pin on the 6510.
- The 6502 had a set overflow pin while the 6510 did not
- The 6502 had 3 pins that were not connected, the 6510 used all 40 pins and was not pin compatible with the 6502
- The 6510 did not support the 'sync' pin which was worthless in the design of the Commodore 8-bit computers
In total this freed up 7 pins for the 6510. One was used as an Address Enable Control for implementation in multiprocessor systems to control memory sharing. While this was never done to my knowledge with multiple 6510s, this was used in conjunction with the VIC-II chip which accessed the same memory as the 6510 in the C64. The other 6 were used to implement peripheral I/O pins. These were essentailly just hardwired in-chip to addresse 0001 with directional control register for these pins mapped to 0001. Support circuitry connected to those pins could be controlled to do things. This circuitry was what handled the bank switching and datasette I/O you are all talking about. The 6510 chip didn't support these things on board. Basically, they had 6 pins doing nothing so they were made available to be used for whatever the support circuitry could do with 6 pins. This was nice because without doing this on chip, we would have had more complex circuitry on the PCB to map these hardware components to specific memory addresses. Excellent engineering as far as I'm concerned.
Point of Interest: The 6510 was capable of running at 2MHz. Had Commodore been able to make this 2MHz setup work, the C64 would have had twice the CPU power and may have been able to do some quite amazing things beyond the amazing things we all know it did at 1MHz. I presonally think it could have been possible to make the C64 work at 2MHz with it's other support circuitry. I would have liked to have seen that computer. (And that computer was NOT the C128 even though it ran the CPU at 2MHz.)
1. Poke 95830,1
2. ?????
3. Profit!
It's somehow sad that a name that used to mean so much to me and my generation has become such a base commodity. Most brand names live on or fade into oblivion, but somebody keeps coming up with a reason to flog the dead C=. Having been a huge C= fanboi in the eighties, even I think it's time to just let it rest. Of course, whenever I read anything even vaguely Commodore related I get all nostalgic regardless. The Zzap 64 archive is often just the tonic I need at times like that.
I want the fire back.
I hope they do something good with the trademark other than an MP3 player. I'd like to see C= branded PCs, personally - gamer-oriented ones. That would own.
I can see the commercials now...
+++ATH0
- ATI #1 graphic card maker - Matrox #3 graphic card maker - Bombardier #1 Sea Doo , #1 Ski doo , best regionnal airjet #3 ATV maker - Weston - Intel Bania and Centrino - Rogers - Quebecor Media and Quebecor world - Rim ( BlackBerry ) - BMO - Desjardins etc ...
Thats just from the top of my head , Canadian are the real american leaving the real american dream , whe are the Yoda of the world whe apear weak and easy to beat , but whe are the master of the jedi masters.
Our armed force as never lost a war , our economy is 6 times those of the US when whe are 7 time less people ( in comparative size of population) ( as to do with the fact that whe do business with Russia and China and many others when the US dont or whont.
And stop being negative young Padawan , the avrow arrow is the ancestor of all the aircraft companies today ( Boeing , Airbus , etc ... )which have many subsidiaries in Canada.
And Nasa is manned at 45% by Canadian even do its not even our own project.
Be a real American stop your whinning and get to work at fixing what you dont like and be a real Canadian help all your friends will doing so ;-)
I am a REAL American from Canada , not a wanna-be from the country , self called "last remaining superpower" "of America
The latest official version is over a year old, so try to get a newer beta somewhere (it has better sound support and turnable screen, so the funky aspect ratio is not a problem.
Some games are a bit too slow for the ~100MHz phones like N-Gage QD... but I would assume the newer ~200MHz ones can run even those without any trickery like frameskip.
'Once scientists, even the dim-witted social scientists, get muzzled, the Western Civilization is finished.' - oldhack
I would assume this works with any Series 60 phone that does not have MP3 decoder (like N-Gage QD). Just use sidplay to create 16kHz 8bit mono sound and convert it using sox and the -i -option (IMA_ADPCM).
'Once scientists, even the dim-witted social scientists, get muzzled, the Western Civilization is finished.' - oldhack
Don't worry about sounding fanatical. You are talking to a guy who owns two Macs. Admittedly, I did not join the Mac fan club until after OS-X, but now that I am there...wow. I get a great GUI and UNIX.....ahhh heck, I better not get started :)
Having done so much with so little for so long, I now can do anything with nothing at all.
Commodore made computers, not consoles, for the most part (they did make some early Pong clones, and also released a C64 without keyboard as a console, but it was still a C64). So why is this in games?
FC Closer
What can someone possibly do with commodore brand? Seriously, how do they plan to make money out of this brand?