Posted on 12/16/2005 2:15:21 PM PST by nickcarraway
It may be time for a Commodore comeback.
No, Lionel Ritchie isn't signing up with his old band. We're talking about Commodore, the venerable computer brand.
A Dutch consumer media company is hoping it can tap the power of the VIC 20, the PET and the Commodore 64 to launch a new wave of products, including a home media center device and a portable GPS unit and media player.
Yeahronimo Media Ventures, which has offices in Los Angeles and Baarn, the Netherlands, acquired the rights to the Commodore name late last year in a deal worth just over $32.7 million. Earlier this year, it took on Commodore as its own corporate moniker. The rebranded company already has some products available on its Web site, but hopes to make a bigger splash at the Computer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January.
"We are excited to be launching our initial offerings at this year's CES," Commodore CEO Ben van Wijhe said in a statement. He said that the three new products will both advance the well-known brand as well as "uphold the world-class quality of yesteryear's Commodore products."
The company has said it plans to launch three products at the show. The Commodore MediaBox is an all-in-one home entertainment box with an Internet connection, digital TV tuner and hard drive for playing music downloads, games or on-demand video. The Commodore Navigator is a Windows CE-based portable device with a 20GB hard drive for music and video storage as well as built-in GPS and a 3.6-inch touch screen.
"Never before has a brand come out of hibernation and truly reinvented itself to position competitively in an ever-evolving digital media marketplace," van Wijhe said.
This is far from the first attempted comeback in tech, however. The Amiga, Commodore's onetime PC brand, has had its own decades-long history as fans tried to preserve both the computer's operating system and brand despite the lack of strong corporate backing.
Gateway had hopes of reinvigorating the Amiga PC when it bought the name and technology in 1997, but eventually scrapped its plans and sold the brand in 1999. Efforts to keep the computer's OS alive, however, have continued into the current decade.
Another '80s game name, Atari, bounced among several owners before making a comeback earlier this decade. Gamemaker Infogrames acquired Atari's name and game titles in 2001 and began using Atari as its own corporate name in May 2003. Meanwhile, Atari's classic games have also found new life in low-end TV consoles and cell phones.
Napster is perhaps one of the best-known recent transformations, with an authorized music subscription service taking on the brand built as the first of many rebel peer-to-peer file sharing systems.
"Now if someone imaginative would port such great, parsimonious game designs to something like PC or Xbox, they'd have a built-in nostalgia market. Sigh"
A chipped Xbox, running a dashboard like EVO, can easily run MAME, or Multi-Arcade Machine Emulator.
I play jumpman on mine, and bank panic, and supermario, every now and then - cause they are more fun than a lot of xbox games :-)
I spent hours and hours on Nukewar. If you tried to go nuclear, half the time (since your country was a democracy) you'd be refused (i.e. the electorate said no) and your turn was wasted. Invariably your computer opponent would launch a full strike the next turn.
And if you started a nuclear war in the 1950's, 2/3 of your shots would miss their targets.
Ahhh, what a game!
Cheers!
Is it possibile that the games are becoming too complex to be FUN? I think the classic games endure because the rules are simple yet winning is neither too easy nor too hard.
In nuclear war, I don't believe hitting your target directly is all that necessary. Close is good enough... sorta like horseshoes and hand grenades.
Wow, now we can all go back to basic.
Well you beat me, I only go back to the VAX 11/780.
I still remember playing Star Trek and getting stripped of my command for detonating nearby stars with photon torpedoes...
on purpose!
Cheers!
Not in that game, each country was an 8 x 8 grid.
A nuke hitting any square on the grid would eliminate it.
A hit next door would not affect it.
Cheers!
Fast forward a few years to 1988, graduate school. We got our first IBM-compatible computer. I sold the C-64 and all the stuff for $500 to a Korean student at the seminary. (I was asking $300 - and he insisted it was not enough! Go figure!)
Anyway, our first IBM-compatible was - you guessed it - another Commodore - PC20, if I remember correctly. Had a 20 meg hard drive, 2 floppies, and - are you ready for this? - a 4-color monitor! I paid more in 1988 for that setup than I did in '03 for the Dell I'm using now! too funny!
All that to say...ya gotta love that Commodore!
The VIC-20 and its derivatives (probably the PET, but I'm not certain) had two character sets. One character set was ASCII from codes 32 to 91, and 93. Code 92 was a UKpound sign (instead of backslash); 94 was an up-arrow (instead of caret); 95 was back-arrow (instead of underline). Codes 96-127 and 160-191 were assorted graphics characters. Codes 0-31 and 128-159 were control codes, and other codes not mentioned mirrored the functions of codes mentioned. Typing an unshifted letter would generate code 65 to 90, an uppercase letter; typing a shifted letter would generate code 97 to 116, a graphics character.
In the second character set, codes 65 to 90 were replaced by lowercase letters, and codes 97 to 116 were replaced by uppercase letters.
Mmmmm...nice software!
Yup, I think it was.
That's a blast from the past. When I was a grad student we had a lab full of 'trash-80's' at Penn. I taught the best business calc students in the world in those days: for the last three years as a TA I had the class of Wharton undergrads who self-selected to take an extra half-course to learn BASIC programming along with their business calc.
That's pretty good. I worked at Radio Shack in college and sold my share of them too. I already owned my Ohio Scientific by then though.
Here is my favorite computer
http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/eserver/iseries/
That was my first. Spent the next 48 hours straight programing and the next 2 years on only 4 hours a night sleep, 8 hours at work and the rest writing programs that little sucker. Was that great or what??
I still have and use one of them TI solar powered calculators. Found it at school in 1990, so could be older than 1990. Still love it, btw.
Does that one read punch cards?
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