Posted on 07/14/2003 6:40:59 AM PDT by bedolido
Popular computers, games from the 1980s will be relaunched.
Tulip Computers, which owns the Commodore brand name, plans to relaunch the brand to take advantage in an upsurge of interest in the obsolete Commodore 64 (C64) computer and its 1980s-era games, the company said in a statement Friday.
Tulip estimates that there are still 6 million Commodore users, who can choose from a range of 6,000 games which were developed for the system.
Tulip is working with Ironstone Partners, which will handle all sales of Commodore 64-related products worldwide and take over the main C64 Web portal. Enthusiasts have made over 10 million game downloads, the site owners have said.
Unauthorized use of the Commodore name by other organizations will be stopped, Tulip said in the statement.
Playing Games Even if the Commodore 64 hardware is obsolete, enthusiasts have written emulators for Windows PCs, Apple Macintoshes, and now PocketPC-based PDAs to enable original Commodore games to run on those systems.
Commodore was one of the pioneers of the PC industry, entering the market in 1977 with its 8-bit PET (Personal Electronic Transactor). The C64 was launched in 1982, followed a few years later by the Amiga.
Slowly, the crucial graphics edge that these systems enjoyed was eroded by successive improvements in Microsoft's Windows OS, and Commodore went into liquidation in 1994. Tulip, based in Amersfoort, Netherlands, bought the Commodore brand name and other assets in 1997.
I occasionally still each lunch with this guy. :-) Dr. Tramiel and one of my colleagues are best of friends.
Dr. Tramiel has a PhD in Astrophysics from Stanford BTW.
Whooohooo! :-) Collector piece!
Nope. Had the KING! "Epson MX-80".:-)
You would be amazed. It was a standard S-100 bus that a great deal of cards were sold for. I remember soldering my first 64k memory board together for an S-100 machine. Floppy drives (8"), terminal, a "Jade board" Z-80 processor (replaced the 8080) and you had quite a powerful computer. You could (in some instances) out perform a PDP-8.
Fred did it.
They had a healthy trans-shipment business to Europe (e.g., the grey market). A truckload of PETs would be unloaded at our warehouse in the evening, and be re-labeled and re-loaded for Europe the next day. I think the prices and demand were much higher in Europe, and it was a lot of money for a small amount of work. We’re talking entire semis full of gear.
The owner also ran one of the larger mailorder computer businesses in the country. If you bought mailorder from Compute! or BYTE, you probably bought some of our stuff. It was legally and anonymously a separate business entity in another state, and technically in the name of a brother-in-law.
Funny thing is that the brother-in-law walked into the office one day, and announced that the mailorder business was his, “how much do you want to pay for it.” A lot of yelling ensued.
Atari and Commodore and all the Japanese companies had a tendency to overlook these shennagins, whereas Apple kept pretty tight control over its pipeline. At the time my perception was than Jack wanted to move boxes no matter what, while Steve Jobs wanted to maintain ironfisted control.
Last time I saw Jack was in an Italian restaurant in midtown Manhattan. The other guys are still lurking around the business, all multimillionaires.
Actually, they did. About 3.5 million Amiga Computers were sold, if I recall correctly.
And the screen resolution wasn't 320x200 although that was available for some games, it was 640X400 (US NTSC) and 640X480 (PAL), essentially the same as a video screen, with the refresh equal to a standard video... which made it great for TV use.
The Amiga offered 4096 colors in standard mode when the IBM PC offered only FOUR and the Macintosh just Two (B&W). In a special "hold and modify" mode, the Amiga could display almost 56,000 colors on a static screen. The "Copper" chip allowed something that isn't duplicated to this day: the ability to change screen resolutions in mid screen, for example the top of the screen could be 640x400 the middle 320X200 and return again to 640x400. You could also play games with the interlacing and gain even higher resolutions at the expense of a headache from the screen flicker.
The Amiga was built from the ground up to support hardware multi-tasking and featured pre-emptive multitasking with re-entrant libraries instead of the cooperative multitasking used later by both PC and Mac... only recently (last five years) have those platforms embraced pre-emptive multitasking and re-entrant libraries.
The Amiga was far more powerful than any other microcomputer on the market in its day and even for several years after it ceased manufacture.
IBM knew all about the NEC chip too. The company I was with then had shipped IBM some systems that used it. They could have used it in the PC, but no --they had that crazy-stupid CGA scheme.
The very best to you and yours.
Semper Fi
Tommie
Last time I saw him was about 6 months ago. Indeed they are all multimillionaires. I cartainly am not! LOL!
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