The Commodore 64 is back!
As long as nobody brings back the CoCo.
Stranger
Nobody I know ever called it “CoCo”. It was known widely as the “Trash 80”. 
It was certainly a piece of garbage, although I did spend a lot of time unsuccessfully trying to get to the fourth level of Dungeons of Daggorath. I really wanted a C64 but apparently that was too high class, although I did eventually get a 5.25” disk drive i stead of having to load programs from tape.
Stranger
Pretty cool and interesting that they’re using FPGA chips instead of an emulator for a more authentic experience. I don’t know that I’m down to spend $300 on one to play Paradroid a few times until the novelty wears off but it feels like they’re being pretty faithful to the original.
It isn’t the hardware that I find most interesting. What fascinates me is ther Christian “Perifrantic” Simpson – actor*/youtuber is now the CEO of Commodore - he spearheaded buying the company.
Brian
Bite your tongue! I went through all three US iterations of the Trash-80 CoCo and loved all of ‘em.
I had a 1st generation ‘CoCo’ with 32k of RAM and thought it was pretty janky. I got a C complier for my birthday after much begging, hoping I could write real programs instead of BASIC but it always seemed to create compiled code with errors and memory leaks, and the documentation was too poor to aid me in debugging. The pair of BASIC manuals which came with it were quite good and I ended up wearing them out and taping the covers back onto the spine but I wanted to write modular adventure games with an interactive map (basically what would now he called a game engine) which was just beyond the capabilities of programming in BASIC.
Stranger
They’re not saying any of the things they really need to say. Like, “this is a blend of nostalgia and innovation”… OK, so what’s the innovation? You’d think that’d be kind of relevant. And they talk about the cost for a license to develop software for this, but what’s the cost to buy, you know, the actual machine? And for that matter, of what relevance is a software development license? If it actually works like a real Commodore, anyone will be able to develop for it.
My brother really wanted a commodore, but my parents decided the that’s trash 80 was better in some way. We started with 8k of RAM! I could do arithmetic faster than it could. Then we upgraded to 32k.
I played asteroids (written by a friend’s father, and very playable) and Zork on that computer. Fun times. And playing Zork, i always knew when the thief was in an adjacent room because of the distinctive sound of the tape drive as it load his code.
I would not have understood when “CoCo" meant. So I’m going with, “no one i knew called it that." But maybe Stranger was a next-generation user.
But it does have some nostalgia value. I wonder if my brother, who pined after the commodore as a boy, would but I’ve today, just to have it.
Same here, but GOTO hell was not that much fun.
Turbo Pascal, which only ran on the single Commodore Amiga we had in our computer lab was much nicer, but time with it was very limited.
I did really, really push the limits of LOGO, even networking two machines for (semi!) synchronised LOGO with the single RS232 cable my school owned. I had to borrow it from someone in admin - though I am not sure why they needed it - for my experiments.
The actual machine (base model) is $299, see here:
Looks like they ask 6.4% of net sales IF you use official logos or branding but
If you’re making compatible products without using official trademarks, you’re free to continue.
https://www.commodore.net/faq
I’m not going to get one or do any development, and am dubious of their viability, but again I just find the whole thing fascinating.
Brian
* The star in my earlier post was to link the new CEO’s IMDB page:
I only knew one person with a TRS-80, and we called it the CoCo 2. (He obviously had the second generation one.) I hadn’t heard the appellation “trash 80” until much later. It was mostly a Commodore neighborhood around here. Apples in school. And one person had a TI99/4A, and another one of the Timex Sinclairs. But those were outliers.
That it’s an FPGA hardware emulation instead of your typical software-based one, I’d assume. That’s interesting. I’m wondering how well the SID chip is emulated and whether I’d be able to swap in a real SID chip if I had one around. (Which I do.) This is a pretty cool project and definitely appeals to the retro-nerd like me, but I’m unsure whether I’d lay out $300 to have one for myself when I can find a real Commodore 64 for about $200. But that transparent case and LEDs do look pretty cool.
The Motorola 6809-based TRS-80 Color Computer was known by enthusiasts as the “CoCo” to distinguish it from all off the other Tandy/Radio Shack microcomputers, all of which at the time were confusingly referred to as “TRS-80”, including a line of B&W business-oriented Zilog Z80-based ‘workstations’ (complete with build-in monitor, disk drives, and a full stroke keyboard) and the Model 100, which was a rebranded Kyocera machine that was the first really portable ‘full-featured’ computer. (I wanted one of those, too, imagining I could hack into computers remotely by dialing in on a 300 baud modem; ah, the heady days of Wargames and Wiz Kids!)
I had a first model Color Computer circa Christmas 1982 with the extended memory and all of the knock-off cartridge games Radio Shack included with it, which weren’t very good or challenging. I also had a membership with the CoCo Users Club (something like that), which basically sent out a monthly magazine with BASIC programs and tips & tricks on how to do pointless things with the poorly documented peek and poke commands. It also had some articles on how you could run multiple programs and users simultaneously because the underlying OS-9 system was actually a multiuser, time-sharing system but as I did ‘t have another terminal or any way to interface with it. It was a weird combination of really advanced and distressingly limited, and Tandy basically let their early lead in business and home computing markets decay even before the Intel x86-based PCs took over almost the entire market and shoved nearly all competitors (Atari, Commodore, NEC, Acorn, Tandy, et cetera) except Apple into the waste bin of computing history.
Stranger
Oh, ours was the original black and white version. As were all the other ones i knew of. So it was never called “coco”.
Yeah, that was basically a totally different computer with zero compatibility with the Color Computer despite both being labeled a “TRS-80”. I had to use one of those (Model III, I think) in a mandatory “computer literacy” class in high school. To say that it was unimpressive even in comparison to the ubiquitous Apple IIe is an understatement.
Stranger
Anyway…any discussion about the new C-64?
Honestly, I think this is superb news - I’ve been following him for ages and his passion for the C64 is deep and real.
Well, i sent a link to my brother, thinking he’d be interested, and might even want to buy one for nostalgia. He already knew about it.
It seems like an odd product, though. Unless it’s all about the nostalgia market.