Commodore Returns with New Gaming PCs

JamesO writes "Commodore is a name which will bring memories flooding back to many a gamer and it's been announced that the legendary brand is to return with a new range of high specification gaming PCs. The new Commodore PCs optimized for gaming will be launched at the CeBIT show in Germany on March 15 and attendees will be offered the chance to play the latest PC games using the purpose-built PCs."

Comments

Its about time Lionel Ritchie changed career

[Timesprout]

nuff said.

Re:Its about time Lionel Ritchie changed career

[MysteriousPreacher]

He designed the case of the Commodore PET and worked on the Commodore 16 ROM. He enjoyed his time at Commodore so much that, after being fire by Commodore for exposing himself to interns, he formed a band called The Commodores.

Commadore 64(bit)

[drspliff]

Are these machines 64bit too?
It'd be nice bragging rights: I've got Linux/Windows running on a C64!

Re:Commadore 64(bit)

[mlk]

You can get a Unix/Linux a-like for the C64. :)

Re:Commadore 64(bit)

[KDR_11k]

Even better if they replaced the Windows key with a Commodore key (or should that be alt?).

Bit Early?

[EveryNickIsTaken]

It's a bit early for Slashdot to start posting lame April Fool's articles, right?

Re:Bit Early?

[rhyder128k]

Seems like the old ploy of slapping a respected old brand name on some unrelated kit. There is a company selling Acorn branded equipment in much the same manner:

http://www.drobe.co.uk/riscos/artifact1698.html

I won't consider one of these machines to be a true Commodore until they start to do things like:
Refuse to give the currently running Star Trek series a free machine as a prop forcing paramount to acquire a Mac instead.
Make a cut-down budget machine that is more expensive to manufacture than the regular machine (a600).

When I have some *guarantees* that they are running the business into the ground even though they have massive lead over their competitors, then I'll consider this to be a Commodore. And not before!

Re:Bit Early?

[Anonymous Coward]

You'll know this is the real C= when all the engineers quit and they axe development of a really cool machine in favour of a slapped together piece of crap that even the Taiwanese wouldn't ship.

Yes I am still bitter about the A3000+, A4000 and the post-AGA chipsets, why do you ask? Medhi Ali can...go do something very rude to himself.

Re:Bit Early?

[Anonymous Coward]

You work for Sony? ;)

Atari was a better system

[xzvf]

My Atari 800 was way cooler than the C64

Re:Atari was a better system

[pipatron]

That's because no one ever bothered to turn it on.

Re:Atari was a better system

[Disoculated]

I owned just about every home computer of that era, and the 800 was definitely second best to the C64. It should have been, it was much older. A steel frame only counts for so much.

On the other hand, there really isn't anything in this article about what the new 'Commodore' gaming computers really are... and it sounds like just more leeching off of a dead name.

Re:Atari was a better system

[steveo777]

Hey! Mine still works you insensitive clod!

Re:Atari was a better system

[Anonymous Coward]

The 800 _was_ superior:

Commodore 64 - could be used as a doorstop
Atari 800 - could be used to break down a door

Re:Atari was a better system

[SCPRedMage]

Everyone on Slashdot has a Thing that works, but isn't used much. I call mine "Playstation 3".

Re:Atari was a better system

[laffer1]

It works?

Re:Atari was a better system

[AmberBlackCat]

I call mine "husband".

just a hunch

[gEvil (beta)]

I have a feeling this is doomed to fail. Anyone who is old enough to remember when Commodore was a decent gaming platform has probably grown into the type of person who builds his own machines. And the Amiga users will just sit there reminiscing about the good old days...

Re:just a hunch

[rucs_hack]

I was going to argue with you.

However, I'm 40, and every machine I own (ten atm) is home built.

I guess you're right then.....

Re:just a hunch

[gEvil (beta)]

I wish I owned ten ATMs. I'd be able to buy just about anything I wanted...

Re:just a hunch

[mlk]

I disagree. I don't want to piss about making a PC. I just want a powerful box that does what is says it does.

Re:just a hunch

[j00r0m4nc3r]

Many will have got bored of tweaking and now be happy to buy a prebuilt machine

You're right about that. There are so many different bus speeds, and CPU types, and memory types, and chipsets, and video cards, and so on and so on... Who wants to keep track of all that shit and build their own computer nowadays just to save $100? It used to be fun back in the day, but nowadays I just feel like, "Sheesh. Just give me something that works already so I can get back to re-drywalling my stupid living room..."

Re:just a hunch

[Nasarius]

I'm 21, and as my lame sig probably indicates, I played C64 games as a kid. And yeah, I've been building my own PCs since the early Athlons were around.

Re:just a hunch

[Hal_Porter]

I have a feeling this is doomed to fail. Anyone who is old enough to remember when Commodore was a decent gaming platform has probably grown into the type of person who builds his own machines. And the Amiga users will just sit there reminiscing about the good old days...

No, they hide in dark places from the Atari users, who've been workin' out since the 1980's. We have Ninja skills, nunchuck skills, firearms skills, benchpress skills.

ATARI POSSE! REPRESENT!

Re:just a hunch

[GrumpySimon]

Since this is sounding like a support group of recovering addicts: Hi, I'm Simon, I'm 27, and I owned an Amiga. It affected me so much that I spent an afternoon recreating the good times in XHTML.

In separate news...

[squiggleslash]

...the new Cray MCX, an amazing new supercomputer with a 2GHz Core2Duo, 512Mb of RAM, and a 40GB hard disk, goes on sale tomorrow.

I fail to see the point in this product being branded Commodore. It's another PC.

Re:In separate news...

[newrisejohn]

Macs are just another PC - despite this people still froth at the mouth for them. Maybe Commodore is trying to build on whatever brand power is left. (I am a Mac user and used to be a C64/C128 user, fyi)

Re:In separate news...

[mdwh2]

I fail to see the point in this product being branded Commodore. It's another PC.

You do realise that there have been Commodore PCs before - in that Commodore when it existed as a company made PCs?

There was a lot more to the Commodore brand than the Commodore 64, and all this is is reusing the brand. Is it pointless to use such a seemingly old brand? Well, it nonetheless seems to be getting them lots of extra publicity, which is really the whole point of using well known brandnames...

And as someone else pointed out, this isn't really any different to using the Macintosh brand for more than one platform (multiple CPU changes, and more notably, two entirely different operating systems). Apple did it because they knew that a "Mac" would have better chance than a new "NeXT".

20th Century PCs

[Otter Escaping North]

"25 years ago, Commodore launched the best selling personal computer of the late 20th Century, the C64"

-- Bala Keilman, CEO for Commodore Gaming.

There's a CEO with vision for you. Best PC of the late 20th century. Would've been best all time except for getting pwned by the mid-16th century's "Conquistador 200."

Re:20th Century PCs

[slim]

"25 years ago, Commodore launched the best selling personal computer of the late 20th Century, the C64"

-- Bala Keilman, CEO for Commodore Gaming.

There's a CEO with vision for you. Best PC of the late 20th century.

Best selling, fool!

Nostalgic name, but that's it.

[Rob T Firefly]

I hate to be the cynical one this early in the morning, but it's worth noting that the Commodore brand name has been bought, sold, lost, found, and liquidated ridiculously often since its 1980s heyday. The current owners of the Commodore logo and brand name have about as much connection with the people who made the C64 and VIC20 as the current telephone companies have with Alexander Graham Bell.

Re:Nostalgic name, but that's it.

[mdwh2]

The current owners of the Commodore logo and brand name have about as much connection with the people who made the C64 and VIC20 as the current telephone companies have with Alexander Graham Bell.

Welcome to business. This is true with an awful lot of brandnames. They get bought and sold (e.g., in the UK, the cable company NTL recently renamed to Virgin Media, but it's still basically NTL and not Virgin). But then, even within the same company, over a period of decades you often won't have the same people working there anymore, so it's hard to see there's really a connection, plus of course, even whole companies can be bought and sold, not to mention made public, so often the "current owners" have nothing to do with the people who originally started it.

I suppose I can see why geeks would be more likely to prefer that brandnames were used on technical similarities rather than for reasons of marketing. Although then again, no one seems to care about reusing the Macintosh brand for different operating systems, or reusing brandnames like "Playstation" for completely different consoles - for some reason it only seems to be the Commodore (and perhaps also Amiga) brands which people complain about here.

Re:Nostalgic name, but that's it.

[elrous0]

I suspect they'll basically just be selling the Commodore logo sticker slapped onto on a modern PC. Of course, anyone could just make a sticker themselves, slap in on their existing computer, and save a lot of money.

-Eric

Re:Nostalgic name, but that's it.

[Rob T Firefly]

I suppose I can see why geeks would be more likely to prefer that brandnames were used on technical similarities rather than for reasons of marketing. Although then again, no one seems to care about reusing the Macintosh brand for different operating systems, or reusing brandnames like "Playstation" for completely different consoles - for some reason it only seems to be the Commodore (and perhaps also Amiga) brands which people complain about here.

Still, some brand names remain a bit constant. If you happened to be hanging around Apple headquarters, you might bump into Steve Jobs or Woz. The current Apple grew directly from the guys who were building the IIc in the 1980s. You could conceivably still find Shigeru Miyamoto running around the Nintendo offices, and you'd know that you're at the birthplace of the NES you were so glued to way back when. Hate Microsoft all you like, but you can still point to Gates and Ballmer and know that these are a couple of the guys responsible for that ubiquitous MS-DOS stuff you used to play with.

Brand loyalty can be a funny and superficial thing, and I'm not usually a practitioner of it myself, but I still prefer to see it used by those who earned it rather than third parties who scoop up names that others built. As another commenter on this story wrote, it feels pretty much like the retail version of domain squatting.

Re:Nostalgic name, but that's it.

[mdwh2]

Still, some brand names remain a bit constant. If you happened to be hanging around Apple headquarters, you might bump into Steve Jobs or Woz. The current Apple grew directly from the guys who were building the IIc in the 1980s. You could conceivably still find Shigeru Miyamoto running around the Nintendo offices, and you'd know that you're at the birthplace of the NES you were so glued to way back when. Hate Microsoft all you like, but you can still point to Gates and Ballmer and know that these are a couple of the guys responsible for that ubiquitous MS-DOS stuff you used to play with.

Sure, you can point to some companies where important guys are still around, but similarly there are other brands used where the original guys involved have long since left (Atari would be one example).

Brand loyalty can be a funny and superficial thing, and I'm not usually a practitioner of it myself, but I still prefer to see it used by those who earned it rather than third parties who scoop up names that others built.

As I do too - although there isn't just the case of brand loyalty, there's also brand awareness. Consider the free marketing they get with using this brand...

As another commenter on this story wrote, it feels pretty much like the retail version of domain squatting.

See my reply to that comment.

Loading games

[nodrogluap]

To load the games, will you still need to do

LOAD "*",8,1
RUN... :-)

Re:Loading games

[Experiment 626]

Programs loaded into the C64 with LOAD "*",8 loaded into the beginning of BASIC memory and had to be executed with RUN, but LOAD "*",8,1 loaded the program into a specific location in memory. This could be done for programs started up with SYS (execution jumps to a specific address in memory), as another reply mentions. The most popular use of ",1" however was to overwrite memory such that the address the system returned to after it finished loading would contain a run instruction, causing the program execute with no further intervention after the LOAD command. Or am I overanalyzing the joke and being pedantic?

Re:Loading games

[ElephanTS]

Or am I overanalyzing the joke and being pedantic?

You betcha!

Re:Loading games

[sharkey]

...load into the stack area, which (fortunately) was located south of location "x0101"...

So THAT'S why SuperHuey kept crashing after I turned my desk to face the window. That put the stack west of "x0101"! Sure wish I'd known that at the time :(

Don't RTFA

[PadRacerExtreme]

The whole thing is in the summary. Why bother linking to a blog with no real information in it?
<sigh>

Is it gonna be called

[$RANDOMLUSER]

the Vic 2.0?

Re:Is it gonna be called

[operagost]

** CBM BASIC V2 **
3583 MEGABYTES FREE

READY.

Re:Is it gonna be called

[Dogtanian]

Ooh... let's hope you weren't planning on loading any games from the tape deck.

If Wikipedia is correct that the tape deck was 300 baud, then that's 37.5 bytes per second, 135,000 bytes per hour.

3583 megabytes = 3.757 x 10^9 bytes, divided by 135,000 this means your program would take...

27,830 hours, or 1160 days, or 3.17 years to load a game that filled the computer's memory.

And let's put this in perspective; that's less than a single-layer DVD's worth. The equivalent of a full 8.5GB dual-layer DVD would take approx 7.7 years to multi-load, and 44,968 standard C90 cassettes to store.

Take these figures with a pinch of salt; also IIRC a lot of C64 games were auto-decompressed upon load which would have speeded up the raw figures quite a bit. But..... yeah. *cough*

Re:Is it gonna be called

[gregski]

From what I remember of the C64, 3.17yrs to load a game sounds about right.

TV output?

[tepples]

The original C=64 could output to a TV, and most games for the platform anticipated this. They also were optimized for joystick or joystick+partial keyboard control. But unfortunately, few games for Windows anticipate reading input from two USB gamepads and displaying output on a standard-definition TV. Does Commodore plan to revive the development of TV-friendly computer games?

In other news...

[broller]

Abraham Lincoln announced his candidacy for president this morning. Abraham "Honest Abe" Lincoln, a businessman from Chicago announced Tuesday before an invitation-only crowd of "four score and seven" supporters that he intended to "officially throw my stove-pipe hat into the ring." Mr. Lincoln, born Abraham Leibowitz, says that he changed his name last year, "because Leibowitz is hard for voters to spell." His opponents have said that Lincoln is merely trying to capitalize on the popularity of the sixteenth president's name. Lincoln asked that his supporters help to suppress this rumor, adding, "Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed."

Awesome!

[DoofusOfDeath]

I can't wait to play Zork on a 64-bit Athlon 5200+!

And it that gets boring, I can play all of Raid over Bungling Bay in 27 millisecond!

Machines optimized for gaming...

[jez9999]

So they're running Linux, right?

Already have one

[Zedrick]

I put a nice, thick Commodore sticker on my homebuilt 64-bit desktop.

It's just as much "Commodore" as these machines. Perhaps even more so, since I've also got a real C-1541 connected to it.

When Commodore...

[smokin_juan]

When Commodore -

- returns to making computers that boots in one second -
- creates an OS that has programming languages built-in and ready to go -
- designs a machine that will fit in a backpack -
- invents a clock that keeps time without power -
- does something revolutionary -

that's when I'll buy another Commodore. I'll be damned if I let a group of people manipulate my nostalgia to sell me something as common as air.

I just had to

[spudnic]

I just had to post to make sure my sig got into this discussion.

Commodore made x86 machines in the 80s & 90s

[zsazsa]

In the 80s and 90s, Commodore made a number of 8088/8086, 286, and 386 desktops and laptops!

There's also the bizarre "Commodore 64" Internet Computer.

So this use of the Commodore brand isn't completely ridiculous, just a little bit ridiculous.

Re:Ironically

[Dogtanian]

I have a Commodore PC at home. It's just a standard 486 beige box[1] with a Commodore label on. I bought it second hand and used it as a firewall. When one of my friends saw the label, he assumed it was some kind of joke. I had to explain that Commodore sold PCs before they went down. At least that was made (or at least sold) by the "real" Commodore, though, despite the company's crapness. "Commodore Gaming" are just a bunch of unrelated guys that bought the name... so what?

As another poster said, buy an old name, slap it on any old equipment; Commodore's brands have been exploited this way before. Things is, these tactics seem to get some attention from the press. Does the "new" Napster have any more relation to the original service (or its owners) than any other legal download service? No; but the press hyped up its "rebirth" as if it did. Or perhaps it was just an excuse to write some articles about the download market; whatever. At least new Napster was doing sort of the same thing as the original company.

Personally, I don't mind Infogrames using the Atari name, because the original company is long dead (and was latterly crap). What pisses me off is that- for no reason I can see other than a third-rate designer justifying his salary (FOAD)- they mucked about with the original "Fuji" logo. Yeah, I know, they just changed the middle bar; but the original's brilliance *was* that it was so simple, yet well-designed.