Commodore 64

Oh yeah, back to the 80's with the Commodore 64!

Got hold of an original Commodore 64 on QXL the other day. My older brother had a Commodore, but he sold it in the late 1988/89 something.. Now, however, it is nostalgia time! :)

The Commodore 64 was announced in 1982 (good year by the way), and had the following stunning specifications:

The Commodore 64 has a classical 1980's "bread bin" design. As you can see on the picture below, it is brown, round and quite thick. The keyboard also gives off the old school "clack clack" sound. The C64 is one of the, if not the most sold computer systems in the world. Everybody has either had one or at least knows someone that had one. It's an incredible simple machine, the whole thing is integrated with the keyboard and you use a plain television as a monitor.

All games and software comes on plain data cassettes (datasettes), it's actually a quite ingenious solution. It basically uses the same principle as analogue modems. A modem converts digital data to and from analogue sounds, that can be transferred over a plain telephone line. Or in the datasette case, recorded on a plain audio cassette.

When starting a game or application from a datasette, the C64 plays the analogue data from the tape and converts it to digital data before loading the entire programme into memory. The C64 also supports 5¼ inch floppy disks through the Commodore 1541 Drive, but only the datasette drive was included with my C64. The fancy loading screens makes me wonder what they were thinking back in the 1980's!.

I also got some "useful" software along with all the games. Such as the Mini Office suite and a cartridge with the Simons BASIC. When booted with this cartridge the C64 can boast an extra 114 BASIC commands! BASIC applications can be programmed directly into the BASIC shell.

Got a whole bunch of original game cassettes along with the machine, their covers where quite mashed up. But the games seems work nicely. The graphics of these games is stone age stuff, but the gameplay is brilliant.

Below are some screenshots from some of the included games. Most of these are found at the C64 section on the Video Game Museum website.

Would also be nice to get hold of some of the following games for the Commodore 64. Most of these games I know from the Amiga 500 or from the PC, but still it would be nice to try the C64 version.