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Commodore Returns with New Gaming PCs

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the everything-old-is-new-again dept.

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."

32 of 281 comments (clear)

  1. Its about time Lionel Ritchie changed career by Timesprout · · Score: 5, Funny

    nuff said.

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    1. Re:Its about time Lionel Ritchie changed career by MysteriousPreacher · · Score: 3, Funny

      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.

      --
      -- Using the preview button since 2005
  2. Commadore 64(bit) by drspliff · · Score: 4, Funny

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

  3. Bit Early? by EveryNickIsTaken · · Score: 4, Funny

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

    1. Re:Bit Early? by rhyder128k · · Score: 5, Funny

      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!

      --
      Michael Reed, freelance tech writer.
    2. Re:Bit Early? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      You work for Sony? ;)

  4. Atari was a better system by xzvf · · Score: 4, Funny

    My Atari 800 was way cooler than the C64

    1. Re:Atari was a better system by pipatron · · Score: 4, Funny

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

      --
      c++; /* this makes c bigger but returns the old value */
    2. Re:Atari was a better system by Disoculated · · Score: 4, Insightful


      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.

    3. Re:Atari was a better system by SCPRedMage · · Score: 4, Funny

      Everyone on Slashdot has a Thing that works, but isn't used much. I call mine "Playstation 3".
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    4. Re:Atari was a better system by AmberBlackCat · · Score: 4, Funny

      I call mine "husband".

  5. just a hunch by gEvil+(beta) · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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...

    --
    This guy's the limit!
    1. Re:just a hunch by rucs_hack · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.....

    2. Re:just a hunch by gEvil+(beta) · · Score: 5, Funny

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

      --
      This guy's the limit!
    3. Re:just a hunch by j00r0m4nc3r · · Score: 5, Funny

      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..."

    4. Re:just a hunch by GrumpySimon · · Score: 4, Funny

      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.

      --
      henry -- the human evolution news relay
  6. In separate news... by squiggleslash · · Score: 4, Funny

    ...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.

    --
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  7. 20th Century PCs by Otter+Escaping+North · · Score: 4, Funny
    "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."

    --
    Running Windows^H^H^H^H^H^H^H OSX and Linux in the home. (I don't have time for Solitaire any more.)
  8. Nostalgic name, but that's it. by Rob+T+Firefly · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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    1. Re:Nostalgic name, but that's it. by mdwh2 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Nostalgic name, but that's it. by Rob+T+Firefly · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.
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  9. Loading games by nodrogluap · · Score: 5, Funny

    To load the games, will you still need to do

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

    1. Re:Loading games by Experiment+626 · · Score: 5, Informative

      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?

    2. Re:Loading games by ElephanTS · · Score: 3, Funny

      Or am I overanalyzing the joke and being pedantic?

      You betcha!

      --
      spoonerize "magic trackpad"
  10. Don't RTFA by PadRacerExtreme · · Score: 5, Interesting

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

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  11. Is it gonna be called by $RANDOMLUSER · · Score: 3, Funny

    the Vic 2.0?

    --
    No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
    1. Re:Is it gonna be called by operagost · · Score: 4, Funny

      ** CBM BASIC V2 **
      3583 MEGABYTES FREE

      READY.

      --

      Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
  12. In other news... by broller · · Score: 3, Funny

    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."

  13. Machines optimized for gaming... by jez9999 · · Score: 3, Funny

    So they're running Linux, right?

    --
    == Jez ==
    Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
  14. Already have one by Zedrick · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  15. When Commodore... by smokin_juan · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  16. Commodore made x86 machines in the 80s & 90s by zsazsa · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.