2025/08/06
what odd timing
They’re here.
A couple of months after Poltergeist, the Commodore 64 hit the market in 1982. And in 1983, its price was $299. Well, the Commodore 64 is back, the Commodore 64 Ultimate, and it’s selling today at $299.
retro reboot?
This is not a knockoff, not a copy like we’ve been getting all these years. This is the original brand of Commodore coming back. The original licenses, the original products, and this is all being headed by the new CEO of Commodore, Chris Simpson. I know him as PeriFrantic or RetroRecipes and I watch his YouTube channel quite a bit a few years ago when I heard him talk about his KITT Knightrider application where we’d have devices that would interact with him like KITT did off the TV show. I thought that was really cool. He is an Internet of Things guy. He likes marrying retro tech with current tech, making it work, making it exciting, making it fun. And he is in charge of Commodore. So, I’m really curious where he’s going to take the brand. He’s likely going to take it into an area where he’s the most familiar in, the Internet of Things. But maybe he’s just doing it because he wants everyone to relive the retro of the 80s.
c64 space cowboys
He’s brought back the heart and soul people from the original Commodore from the 80s. These are guys in their 70s, and I keep on thinking of “Space Cowboys” with Clint Eastwood and where the younger team was giving the older guys some ensures. If you haven’t seen Space Cowboys, it’s about a satellite with old technology. No one today in the current year knows how to fix that technology, and the satellite needs to be fixed. So they brought in experts during the time when that technology was built.
So Space Cowboys, Clint Eastwood. It’s a funny movie but that’s what I keep on thinking when I see with this team that Chris Simpson has surrounded himself with. And people are investing. Chris has a lot of credibility because he brought back the original heart, the original soul, and the way they’re trying to get investment. They’re trying to do everything up on the up and up. So, there are some slowdowns in how to do the investment, but Chris has been talking about the licensing. They’re having the licensing to be a flat fee of 6.4% of revenue, which is very low relative to what it used to be. But you’ll find that a lot of guys that are in the Commodore community that will be doing, using the Commodores, developing on it, advocating it, they’re not doing this for the money. They’re doing it for the love of the technology, the challenge of the technology. The Commodore community is very unique in terms of how they are very supportive of each other and they love to take on the challenges of making the Commodore 64, an old computer of 40 years ago, to do really good tricks. Things that if the Commodore had those tools back then 40 years ago, the Commodore would have been the most popular computer from the 80s to the early 2000s. I’m quite confident of that after seeing a lot of the development tools. It’s just insane how well dedicated this community is. It’s not like in other development communities where, well, “I’m not going to write any code unless I can make money off of it”. They don’t have any of that in this community.
challenges, and it’s not the tech
But there are challenges for Commodore coming back, the brands coming back. There’s major IP fragmentation. They have their IP, Commodore IP scattered all over in archives over the internet. There’s also previous commitments. There’s something called the Amiga OS that is being licensed on other different computers. So there’s that going on. They have to pull that in. I’m really not sure how they’re going to deal with all that IP management. It’s just insane. That’s like a big project on its own. And then there’s also the low-cost alternatives like the Commodore 64. If people don’t have that retro feeling, but they want the challenges, they might decide to go to something like the Raspberry Pi. If you played around with the Raspberry Pi, it gives a lot of the same challenges. It has a simple architecture. You can get access to the hardware very easily. You can make it do a lot of interesting tricks. I’m not sure where Commodore is going to go with this.
should dead brands stay dead?
I love Commodore. I developed on the Commodore 64 in my youth. It really was what guided me into engineering school. Though I don’t do computer engineering now, I still use that engineering mindset, still using things that I learned when programming on a Commodore 64. Same ideas, different way of explaining them. But when I think about the Commodore 64, I think about “Pet Sematary”, you know, where you’re bringing something back from the dead and it just does not come out right. Like we’ve seen that with resurrected brands like TV shows that were rebooted, superhero shows that were rebooted, fashions, things like that. Things don’t come back in their entirety. For instance, an old toy from the 80s comes back. Like those old Transformers, you touch it, doesn’t feel the same. Doesn’t look the same. It just looks off. It’s like getting that uncanny valley effect with nostalgia. It just does not resonate well. I’m wondering about with the Commodore 64, is that going to resonate well? Is it going to be accepted or is there going to be a rejection that this does not satisfy the nostalgia? Will people say “this is not what I remember it to be”?
what’s really coming back?
Even though the Commodore is coming back, the brand is coming back, it makes me wonder what really is coming back. Is it just the hardware? Because I hope it’s not just the hardware. I hope it’s not just the software and the development community. I hope it’s more than that. I hope the ideas in the 80s on how you approached technology, how you designed it, and how you implemented solutions comes back. And if Commodore can work its way into the mainstream and challenge these current status quo that we have with how we doing things today, I think that would do a lot more good than bad. There are some things we’re doing today that I’m really beginning to question, especially after seeing the power of artificial intelligence and a lot of the development tools that we have available today. Kind of makes me question that status quo of how we do things today with our technology.
it was done 40 years ago
Back then in the 80s, we had dedicated chips and we’re still doing it today. Back then, we had dedicated for processing, dedicated for sound, dedicated for graphics, and today we’re doing the exact same thing. And people forget just how old that idea is and how entrenched that is into the tech community of doing things that way for optimization. That was coming from computers from the 80s like the Commodore, the Atari, IBM, it’s all these computers were doing that sort of thing. But even the idea of being able to connect to almost everything and being expandable and not having limits on how much you expand. Limits were your imagination.
That was being done in the 80s with a lot of devices, especially the Commodore 64. And you don’t see that much today. There’s standards like making sure there’s USB ports. Make sure there’s the B or the C type ports. Make sure that you have Wi-Fi and things like that, but you’re still constrained to a box. Not nearly as expandable as those computers were in the 80s. We really need to get back to seeing things like that. Making things more expandable, makes things more modular, less expensive, and it also opens up opportunities for innovation and especially for getting major boosts in speed relative to the dollars you’re paying.
outdated design practices
And in the 80s, relative to now, you had access to your hardware. You could go right to the hardware. You could change the memory, the registers, and the hardware. Today, there are so many layers you got to go through, so much security you got to go through. There are reasons for that. Primarily to facilitate development, to manage the code, to make sure you don’t break something when you change code. There were reasons, but today we have artificial intelligence. I could take my code, make it a large language model, have the AI monitor to make sure when I’m modifying and making patches that I don’t break the solution. So why do I need all these different layers where every time there’s a layer I get a hit in performance? Why do I have that today? So, it kind of makes me wonder about a lot of the paradigms we’re doing today for development. If we just took a step back and looked back 40 years ago, there were things that we did, but those reasons may no longer be valid today. Like encapsulation at the level that we’re doing, abstraction at the level that we’re doing, having these multiple layers. Does it make sense today based on the tools we have, the development tools and the artificial intelligence that we have?
scaling hardware with easy tricks
This is also what I liked especially with the Commodore 64 is that if you didn’t like your operating system for the computer, you could turn it off and replace it with your own and you could swap between operating systems. That was just with putting a value in memory and that was it. That was a pretty nice trick. I liked that. I liked the idea where you would have programs stored on ROM, read only memory rather than loading the program off of a disk, I liked that idea. That was cool. I remember with Microsoft’s basic interpreter that was coded on a chip in the Commodore 64. I was rather surprised to see Microsoft when I looked back. Thinking – wait, did I remember that right? And today we have that sort of ROM idea too, especially with the flash ROMs. Flash ROMs that we have for our smart devices, for our phones, for our TV sets, laptops. So, we’re using ideas from the 80s that had certain assumptions. And maybe we should start considering – maybe we should be looking back at those assumptions, see what we can change.
And what I did like about Commodore because you had total access to the hardware, you could make it do tricks. Like there were no limits with what you could do. When people today, engineers today look at requirements and constraints, those are things that you can’t really work around. But when computers in the 80s like the Commodore 64 with a restriction, you’re only allowed eight objects on the screen that can float around and do things.
Well, you’re allowed eight objects, but you could trick the eye into thinking there’s 64 objects on the screen because you had total control over the hardware and where things were painted on that screen. When something’s painting, you could say, well, after it’s been painted, after it’s shown on part of the screen, the line that’s painting everything on the screen hasn’t reached to a certain point yet. So you can move the object to just after that point and then the object magically appears in two places at once with no flicker. Not like in the Atari 2600, there was no flicker. So there were a lot of tricks like that. As long as you knew how those objects moved on the screen, there were a lot of tricks you could do with the Commodore 64. And we lose that with the new technology because of all the levels of abstraction, encapsulation, all those layers. And we are stuck in a trap of we need more and more higher processing solutions like chips and accelerators to get basic things to work because of all those layers we have today.
design practices must change
We have layers because every time we change something, it could break something. But with large language models today, we can make our solutions in a large language model and have the AI make sure that we don’t make a mistake when we make changes through our prompts. We have the tools today. We could change the way our technology is built, how we program it. We could make things simpler. We could have simpler chips, simpler AI chips that require less power, less energy, be more green, less expensive. If we focus on more simple solutions, simpler solutions tend to be less expensive, they tend to scale more, and they tend to be easier to access and easier to adopt.
they’re here
What’s really coming back from Commodore? What’s coming back? Is it just the hardware, just the retro, just it for the community, or are these ideas from the 80s are coming back to challenge the status quo of how we do things today, 40 years later? And I sure hope it’s the latter. There are so many things today that I’m beginning to question because we have so many tools, so much good talent that everything because of artificial intelligence, because of automation, because of the inexpensive memory and processing power. Looking at the Commodore 64, a computer from 40 years ago, a lot of the things we’re currently doing today just seem so outdated.
references
@RetroRecipes – https://youtube.com/@RetroRecipes
Commodore is Back From the Dead – http://news.itsfoss.com/commodore-lives-again
Commodore Revival Community – http://tedium.co/2025/07/12/commodore-revival-community
New Commodore 64 Ultimate: The Best-Selling Home Computer Ever is Back- http://youtube.com/watch?v=S2fGP59mJ5M
We’re Bringing Back COMMODORE – http://youtube.com/watch?v=S2fGP59mJ5M
BIO
