Just before Christmas Commodore USA teased us with information regarding an Intel Atom based Commodore 64. Driven by Ubuntu, in the classic shape of the C64 home computer, which was set up to boot into the game playing C64 emulation.
Today!! They went on sale and expecting to ship between May or June. Base price, barebones a cost of $250.00. The Barebones model is nothing more than the case, keyboard and a card-reader. The cheapest functional unit is $600.00 Basic Unit, and the $700.00 unit adds Wi-Fi and a DVD. If you want the Ultimate unit with 1TB Hard Drive, a Blu-Ray and 4GB RAM be prepared to cough up $900.00.
If your thinking that is expensive for what was once the ENTRY level system in the Personal Computer Market. You’d be right, it’s very near the cost of a MacBook Air at the TOP END of it’s pricing.
The machines internal hardware will be based around a dual-core Intel Atom D525 1.8GHz processor and an Integrated Nvidia graphics chip set. The unit will running Windows 7 but will offer an INTEGRATED C64 emulator to allow you to play the commodore 64 classic games.
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| All New Commodore 64 |
The original 8-bit Commodore computer was relased in 1982 with 64kilobytes of memory and FAST became the best-selling computer EVER. (ed. note, I owned a Vic20, C64, Amiga 1000, 2500 and 3000, personally would love to get my hands on any one of these units just for TESTING to see if it reminds me at all of the fun I had with these systems.)
The company is promising New models of the Amiga and VIC series computers coming soon as well.
Additional Note: At the time of this posting CommodoreUSA’s website was throwing alot of server errors so they traffic to the site could be slowing them up a bit or maybe a rewrite of their publishing materials or shopping cart is underway.
Sources: commodoreusa.net, wired.com, BBC news