Beige is Back: The Commodore 64 and Its Amazing Keyboard Return

By  |  Wednesday, April 6, 2011 at 11:28 am

It’s back! The Commodore 64 computer you may fondly remember from your youth (assuming you were a youth back in the early 1980s) has returned from the place where old computers go to die, reborn as something that looks the same, but acts very different.

The outside is still deliciously two-tone brown, with huge clickety-clackety keys that you can type on as if typing were the only thing that could save your life, rescue fair maidens from the clutches of evil geniuses, and prevent dastardly arrays of nuclear warheads from detonating in all the great cities of the world. Yeah, that kind of typing:

The new Commodore 64 features genuine Cherry brand key switches, which provide a feel much better than the original, with a lovely IBM classic mechanism and click sound. The keys are the exact same shape as the original and are color matched. No expense has been spared. This is the ultimate hackers keyboard on which to wield your key-fu.

But inside…inside it’s a different beast. The new C64 comes with a 1.8GHz Intel processor, up to 4GB RAM, runs Windows 7, and even plays back Blu-ray discs.

There’s a built-in C64 emulator so you can play those retro games, if your yearning for nostalgia stretches that far.

Just remember: If the computer asks “Shall we play a game?”, the possibly world-saving answer would be “No.”

(This post republished from Techland.)

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9 Comments For This Post

  1. Ed Oswald Says:
    April 6th, 2011 at 11:32 am

    I don't know how I feel about this. 😀

  2. Michael Scott Olsen Says:
    April 6th, 2011 at 11:40 am

    You know you got a secret lil hard on going!

  3. Joe Pierce Says:
    April 6th, 2011 at 11:49 am

    The Atari 800 is still a better machine. 😉

  4. Stilgar Says:
    April 7th, 2011 at 4:00 am

    PCjr!!!

  5. Vinnie Bartilucci Says:
    April 6th, 2011 at 11:55 am

    "You think your Commodore 64 is really neato"

    well, yeah, I do, now.

  6. Mike Cerm Says:
    April 6th, 2011 at 12:06 pm

    This is pretty sweet! I'm definitely considering picking up the barebones model and dropping an AMD Fusion Mini-ITX in there. If I had an office where I could show it off, I'd definitely do it.

  7. Bob Spettigue Says:
    April 6th, 2011 at 7:42 pm

    Love it!

  8. joecassara Says:
    April 6th, 2011 at 9:26 pm

    This has nothing to do with the Commodore 64. This is just one of several attempts to revive the old Commodore brand. Under the direction of Barry Altman (whose bathroom fixtures company currently has an "F" rating from the BBB), it will surely fail just like the rest of them. No one wants to buy an underpowered commodity PC trapped in the old C64 breadbox case. I wish these charlatans out to make a buck from a dead brand would let Commodore rest in peace already. (Anyone remember the Commodore MP3 players? Or the custom built "gaming" PCs? Oh, no? Not surprising.)

  9. Lazlow St. Pierre Says:
    April 7th, 2011 at 8:03 am

    Some old brands need to just go away instead of being kept on life support and handed around from owner to owner all of whom make half hearted attempts to relive the glory days. I worked for a PC builder that built gaming PCs on behalf of whoever owned the Commodore brand at the time. We went into liquidation so I never found out what happened with the Commodore gaming PCs, if they simply contracted out the manufacture of them to someone else. It reminds me of the the repeated sad attempts to revive and continue the Amiga legacy. Just let them die. If you're feeling nostalgic, get yourself an old C64 emulator and have some fun, that's what I do.

    Their website is banjaxed as well, keeps giving me 503 errors, but they are also trying to revive the Amiga brand – http://www.commodoreusa.net/CUSA_Amiga2000.aspx