Tag Archives | Commodore 64

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

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.

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The Commodore 64 vs. the iPhone 3G S: The Ultimate Showdown

Sad news: Apple has rejected a Commodore 64 emulator for the iPhone. It’s not surprising, and arguably not an utter outrage given that the iPhone developer agreement expressly forbids emulators, and the C64 app’s creator knew that when he began work on his brainchild. I’m still unclear on how a Commodore 64 emulator–one fully licensed by the relevant copyright holders–hurts the iPhone, iPhone owners, or Apple, though. Especially since other iPhone apps that use emulation techniques and which sound less delightful have apparently snuck their way into the App Store. Thinking about all this got me to thinking about the fact that the Commodore 64 was considered to have a lot of RAM (64KB) at a surprisingly low price ($595) back in 1982. The iPhone 3G S  has 4,000 times the RAM (256MB) for one-third the price (with an AT&T contract), and that’s not even taking into consideration the fact that it also has an additional 250,000 times as much memory (or 500,000, if you spring for the 32GB model) as the C64 in the form of its flash storage. Or that the starting price of $199 for an iPhone 3G S is really more like $90 in 1982 dollars. Did I mention that that the 3G S fits in your pocket? After the jump, what is almost certainly the most comprehensive comparison of the Commodore 64 and the iPhone 3G S that anyone has done to date. I’ll let you decide which one comes out on top. Continue Reading →

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