It was sold many years before the apple IIe was offered. There was the (really interesting) Apple Lisa in between. I mean, it was roughly contemporaneous with the very first consumer pocket calculator, which initially sold for $100, which was a hell of a lot back then. Of course a machine sold in 1983 was a lot more impressive than one sold in 1977.
The commodore 64 looked so much more flexible and powerful than the trs80, at least to us kids. But I’m sure it was quickly overtaken, too.
Does this new version take cartridges too?
The first computer I ever programmed used punch cards. It looked kinda like a photocopy machine in that it was square-ish and fit on top of a cart. It had a punch card loader on the top (I think, maybe on the side) and a place to insert a magnetic strip card (kinda like a credit card but thinner) on the other side. I forget how many punch cards could fit onto one magnetic strip card. 50 maybe?
No one that I have ever talked to has been able to identify this machine. If you know, please tell me. I have no idea what it was. There was a lot of home-made stuff back then, but this looked commercially built.
When I was in junior high school, our science teacher went out and bought a TRS-80 Model 1 with his own money, and set it up in an old storage room in the school. He took a few of us brighter students and we would skip 1 class each day to go and play with the computer (one day we would skip 1st period, the next day we would skip 2nd period, then 3rd period, etc. so that it didn’t impact our other classes much). Our science teacher didn’t know any more than we did, so our entire “instructions” were there’s the computer, there’s the manual, good luck!
We kept notes and shared things that we found. We discovered that el-cheapo cassette tapes and an el-cheapo tape recorder worked a lot more reliably than the official TRS-80 data recorder and the official tapes from Radio Shack. Our tinkering around and what we learned eventually formed the core of the county’s “computer math” classes.
I got a Commodore 64 at home a few years later. I had already learned some machine language programming from the TRS-80 and did not have any difficulty switching to the Commodore 64’s machine code. You could do simple things in BASIC but if you really wanted to do something complex or CPU intensive you had to do it in machine code.
I literally wore out the keyboard in my C64. I got a replacement but it was for a different model and some of the special things on the keyboard didn’t match how the keys were used on the C64. I also ditched the original C64 case and built a crappy looking case out of plywood (and held together with electrical tape) so I could hack in a numeric keypad on the right side. It looked horrible but it functioned great.
I’m tempted to buy one just for nostalgic purposes, but the machine was so limited that I don’t think I could go back to that frustration again. I also tossed all of my original C64 disks many years ago. They were probably suffering from bit rot anyway and I doubt that they would be any good now. I’m sure I could find a lot of the software on abandonware sites now but I don’t think it’s worth the bother.
Everyone I knew called it the CoCo. The “Trash 80” computers were the ones with the black and white screens (Model 1, Model 2, Model 3, etc).
I’m guessing that the SID chip is emulated in the FPGA. I’m also guessing that the CPU bus is available external to the FPGA since the cartridge port is basically the CPU bus. If they give you the code to the FPGA then you could remove the SID and connect your own SID externally to the FPGA (maybe plug it in to the cartridge port).
I’ve seen references on the Board to C-64 emulators for Windows from as long ago as 2000 and as recently as 2024. Is there really a market for a brand new version of a 43-year old computer?
Or maybe I’m just jealous because I had an Atari 400.
The pictures on the web site show a cartridge port, so apparently it does.
As a useful computer? Probably not. Those old 8 bit processors are extremely slow and limited by today’s standards.
But there are a lot of folks out there who cut their teeth on old 8 bit computers and might buy one just for nostalgic purposes. And there are younger folks who are into retro game systems and retro computers who might get a kick out of it.
I learned to code in a Commodore-128 (I still have it but I think I burned the power supply thingy), I may be tempted to buy a new one but I doubt they are going to start building them.
Only $9,995 (in 1980s dollars! 
If you just want to play some games, you can do all that right now in software. I can see it if some people want to have a real one— perhaps they want a replacement for their C64 which they had all along but finally gave up the ghost (and never had any HDMI ports, etc.)
My brother and I grew up with a C64 (our school’s computer lab had TRS-80s): this is fun to look at, but I can’t see ever buying one – even if I do prefer the cheapest version, in classic beige. An Atari 2600, on the other hand? I just ordered one (and some accessories) on Saturday. 
I worked for a security company in the 1980s that also installed small telephone systems. The wholesaler (North Supply) had a promotion where the installer could get C64s, external cassette drives, and external floppy drives as incentives for buying the telephone systems. You can imagine how that went. We sold the heck out of the telephone systems. The first Commodore system and peripherals went to the company owner. The second went to his wife and the third went to the CFO. I got the fourth, since I was VP of Operations.
But there’s always a catch. For the next six months, I got calls at every odd hour imaginable from the other system owners. “What can I do with this? How do I load a program? Can you help me write a game? Can we run our accounting on this? Why are there so few colors? Does the TV have to be turned on?” I think they eventually gave theirs to their kids…which actually stopped all the questions.
I wouldn’t know the exact numbers, but there’s a decent-sized retro community out there, and the C64 demo scene is still thriving and new games are still being developed for it. 8-bit Guy has almost 1.5M subscribers on YouTube and Nostalgia nerd has over a half million. That’s maybe peanuts compared to the really big YouTube channels, but it’s not bad for niche content.
Like here’s an example of the demoscene from last year:
It seems like intrepid programmers are still finding new and novel ways to push the 6502 (well, 6510, actually), SID, and VIC-II beyond their documentation to do things once thought impossible. Now, it helps if you’ve played with a C64 to see how amazing these demos are, as from a modern perspective, they might not look like much.
The C64 cassette drive was HORRIBLE. Their “error detection” scheme was to save every program twice. When you loaded a program, it loaded the first copy then checked it against the second copy. So basically it was twice as slow and half as reliable (if either copy was bad, the load failed). And it’s not like better error detection systems weren’t common by then. Simple checksums would have been a lot faster and a lot more reliable.
There were “quick” loaders out there that simply read in the first copy and ignored the second copy.
FYI - if you’ve ever wondered why the C64 disk drive made an awful racket when it started up, one of the first things it would do was slam the disk head against a stopper on the side of the drive. This had the effect of not only locating the disk head (it used a stepper motor and didn’t have any feedback on where the head was, so this was how it put the head into a known position) and also helped keep the head in alignment.
To this day, I can draw the schematic for a C64 from memory. I wonder how many useful brain cells I have tied up with that useless information.
You know what the C64 disk drive that the cassette drive did not: an extra 6502 processor!
I was a kid in the 80s and my great uncle used to send my grandmother computers and games. My Aunt (then a teen) and I spent lots of time on the C64 and the Amiga - I can’t remember which games went with which system, but some of my most cherished childhood memories were playing computer games with my Aunt.
There were some great adventure games including Alice in Wonderland which captured the essence of the books while keeping everything innovative. Below the Root.
There was Impossible Mission
“Another visitor. Stay awhile. Stay…. FOREVER!” Boy I hated those damned electric floating balls. I also remember the first time my little man fell into a pit I laughed so hard and couldn’t stop. I was maybe six years old. The sound of his death yell was so forced and ridiculous. I just kept walking him into the pit to hear it over and over.
I know Lemmings was in there somewhere, which remains, to this day, my favorite game ever.
This was back when you couldn’t look up hints online and you had to invest so much time in figuring out what the hell you were doing. My Aunt had reams of paper with our notes.
Then I think It Came From the Desert was the Amiga. I don’t remember liking Amiga games as much, though the story of the giant ant aliens was a possible exception.
And finally, Klax. I am known to randomly say, “It is the 90s. And there is time for… Klax.” This usually results in a whole semantic argument with my husband, because while I fully acknowledge it’s not the 90s, that statement never in any way implied that there couldn’t be time for Klax in future eras. He insists the time for Klax was the 90s and only the 90s.
I applaud the efforts of the company in question but I had trouble with all the corporate speak understanding what they are actually going to do. It sounds like they’d be licensing and releasing new games for it? Also that guy sounds a little bit off his rocker, particularly when he started talking about divergent timelines.
For me it seems really expensive for what it can actually do. I know having an FPGA can possibly amp up the manufacturing cost, but I do wonder how much parts and labor actually cost them.
The number of cartridges available for the Commodore 64 is astounding!
Speaking as someone who designs electronic hardware and software for a living, you can’t just look at the component costs. There are up-front R&D costs which have to be spread out over the expected sales of the device. If it costs $100,000 to design something and you only produce two of them, that R&D cost is going to be $50,000 per unit. If you produce 1,000 of them, then the R&D costs are $100 per unit.
It also costs money to set up an assembly line. People have to be hired and trained. If robots are involved, they have to be programmed.
If they managed to get the original molds for the plastic bits, that would save them a lot of money. I haven’t had to make anything out of plastic in a while, but it used to be about $50k to set up the molds. These days you can do rapid prototyping with 3d printers, and you can even do very low volume production with 3d printers. I think the costs have come down quite a bit but there are still going to be some hefty costs to get all of the custom parts manufactured.
It also looks like they have some custom metal bits that get manufactured as well. Again, up-front costs are probably higher than most folks expect.
Once you get all of this stuff set up, you can crank out units fairly cheaply. But it takes a lot to recoup your up-front costs.
Looking at pictures of how they are built, and given that this is a niche product that probably isn’t going to be selling millions, I think they’ve done fairly well on the pricing. Given the development costs and expected sales, and how the thing looks to be put together, I seriously doubt that they could sell it for less.
FPGAs aren’t that expensive. I’m guessing they paid somewhere between $30 and $50 per unit for theirs.
There’s a step in between those options. You can also 3D print a master, and use that to make a reusable mold, for far cheaper than what it used to cost to make a mold. Precisely how much cheaper depends on your geometry, to determine how many pieces your mold needs to be and whether you need a flexible mold material, but a computer case shouldn’t be a very difficult shape.
Interesting. I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone to have a game in cartridge form on the C64. If that cartridge slot was used for anything, it was for an Epyx Fast Load cartridge or perhaps some other utility, but I never used mine.
I used mine for many games.
The VIC-20 was a different story for me, as the onboard RAM vs cartridge ROM difference was significant, and you couldn’t get anything but the most basic of games in enough space to fit in an unexpanded VIC-20 on tape or disk.