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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."
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 If they do, and it works, I wonder how many other companies will attempt to by rights to long and outdated software just to attempt to raise their bottom line by sueing everyone.
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?
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...
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
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
It was all they could get... names already taken were:
Geronimo
Jironimo
Ghironimo
Geeronimo
Goshronimo
and
Gollyronimo
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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.
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.
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
Better than GORF, Radar Rat Race, or Lock N Chase?
How dare you.
I remember when a bunch of my friends had Vic 20s, and I wished I had one.
Then for christmas, lo and behold, there's what looks like a Vic 20! Hooray, I rushed over, red-cheeked with excitement. Commodore 64?! What the fuck is that! I had one from the very first shipment to Canada. There was nowhere to get software for it in my area.
I was bummed, and all my friends mocked my useless PC.. Until a few months later my old man took me to the World of Commodore show, where I picked up a Choplifter! cartridge. Then it was: "WHOS LAUGHING NOW, BITCHES!".
I swear I had like 20 kids coming to my house at a time to play it. It just blew away anything we'd seen before, back in the age of Atari's and Colecos.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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.
Nothing like the promise of lawsuits to drum up business.
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
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.
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 +
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.
New Amigas? Kinda late for that don'tcha think?
When Jobs came back to Apple, people were saying "New Macs? Kinda late for that don'tcha think?"
Not that that's going to happen here. They just want some trademarks to sue people over.
Though I'd love to see the Amiga updated and rereleased, a la the newer Macs. One can dream.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Remember that little C64 in a joystick that they recently started hawking on QVC? I wonder how clean their implementation really is, and whether they are violating the brand name.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
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
Hungry like the wolf.... :P
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!
There are three more recent clones:
Traders
TZ-Colony
and
Subtrade:Return to Irata
They dont add much though.
The original is still the best.
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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..."
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.
The C-64 DTV (the little joy-stick thing) was actually marketed by Tulip. The had info about it on the website commodoreworld.com.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
They can't "sue those people" because they are "those people".