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Reviving a Commodore 64 Computer Using a Raspberry Pi
concertina226 (2447056) writes "A group of Commodore fans are working on a new emulator with the ability to turn the Raspberry Pi £30 computer into a fully functioning Commodore 64 fresh from the 1980s. Scott Hutter, creator of the Commodore Pi project, together with a team of developers on Github, are seeking to build a native Commodore 64 operating system that can run on Raspberry Pi. 'The goal will be to include all of the expected emulation features such as SID sound, sprites, joystick connectivity, REU access, etc. In time, even the emulation speed could be changed, as well as additional modern graphics modes,' he writes on his website."
Agreed. These systems had a lot going for them at the time (I was a Spectrum guy myself) but so much has moved on. What would be interesting would be to bring the spirit of these old systems into the modern age rather than just replicate them wholesale. Boot into a system which allows you immediate programming (preferably with a modern OO syntax) and access to video, sound and peripherals. If there's anything that has suffered over the past three decades, it's easy access to I/O.
Indeed - I still have my original Commodore VIC-20, and a second one, because I was careless with the first one day while poking around in it with a voltmeter as I executed code. Schematic and memory map were not only fun but really needed to do anything powerful beyond BASIC. I'd never want to go back to hand-assembling and poking machine code or laying out arrays of ASCII characters on the screen, then changing their bitmaps to plot graphics on screen, but having done so once was priceless.