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Is Commodore poised for a comeback?
ZDNet ^ | December 16, 2005 | Ina Fried

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.


TOPICS: Business/Economy; Culture/Society; Extended News; Miscellaneous; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: 80s; amiga; business; c64; commodore; commodore64; computers; netherlands; pet; vic20
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To: iPod Shuffle
In 1985, the Amiga was the best personal computer on the market. Period. Best graphics, sound, OS, could multi-task. It was at least 10 years ahead of its time in terms of technology. Still amazed that it never really took off.

First of all, it took a long time for the Amiga to get a useful but affordable hard drive, and even longer for it to get a useful operating system. Having one shared memory pool for all applications with no means of reclaiming memory when a program quits is incredibly bad design. Further, the Amiga's video memory bandwidth took way too long to grow beyond 3.58 megawords/second. This was adequate for 320x200 graphics, but limited the usability of 640x200 graphics.

81 posted on 12/16/2005 4:13:27 PM PST by supercat (Sony delinda est.)
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To: Eurotwit

"And the special effects for Babylon 5."

But only for the first season or two.

JMS eventually moved to a Silicon Graphics system ... but I am still impressed at the early Amiga stuff - most notably, the Vorlon ships.

(Crusade's just been released here on DVD - $50 for the entire run. Hmmm. Might have to buy myself a set, while waiting for Serenity - which is not available here until a week AFTER my birthday in February :-( )



82 posted on 12/16/2005 4:14:06 PM PST by sadimgnik
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To: Fierce Allegiance

Why do you have to flame like that for no good reason? He never said it was THE first computer porn, it was the first HE had seen.


83 posted on 12/16/2005 4:14:33 PM PST by Richard Kimball (Tenure is the enemy of excellence.)
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To: Richard Kimball; Wormwood
Why do you have to flame like that for no good reason? He never said it was THE first computer porn, it was the first HE had seen.

Good point. Sorry wormwood.

84 posted on 12/16/2005 4:17:36 PM PST by Fierce Allegiance (I miss my dad.)
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To: nickcarraway

LOAD "*",8,1


85 posted on 12/16/2005 4:20:16 PM PST by smith288 (Peace at all cost makes for tyranny free of charge...)
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To: RadioAstronomer

You are going to kill me.

I bought an original Odyssey I game system at a rummage sale, the game that you had to put plastic sheets on the TV for the graphics.

The first system ever.

I got rid of it after a while, thing is worth many hundreds now.


86 posted on 12/16/2005 4:20:49 PM PST by Central Scrutiniser (Screw Christmas, Happy Festivus!!!)
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To: nickcarraway
**** COMMODORE 64 BASIC V2 ****
 64K RAM SYSTEM 38911 BASIC BYTES FREE

READY.
_

87 posted on 12/16/2005 4:27:54 PM PST by smith288 (Peace at all cost makes for tyranny free of charge...)
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To: iPod Shuffle
I remember the first time I fired up Cinemaware's Wings on my Amiga. I couldn't believe the graphics of that opening sequence. I didn't see anything that good on a PC for a decade.
88 posted on 12/16/2005 4:30:52 PM PST by Semi Civil Servant
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To: manwiththehands
I still have my VIC 20 in a box in the basement. I took it out this summer when I moved and it still works!

We got a C64 when I was in elementary school. I rescued it from the garage a few years ago. Even though it endured a few Texas summers, it booted up with no problem. I had a lot of fun with that machine. I remember messing with BASIC, in addition to playing commercial games. I was surprised that the hundred some kb 5.25" dual-sided disk drive was still functional, too. It now sits in a box in climate controlled comfort.

89 posted on 12/16/2005 4:36:10 PM PST by Tex_GOP_Cruz
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To: beezdotcom
LOL 300 baud Im sure.

I'll never forget the day when I upgraded to the lightning speed of 1200 baud!

90 posted on 12/16/2005 4:36:15 PM PST by expatguy (http://laotze.blogspot.com/)
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To: Mike-o-Matic
That device was called an "Acoustic Coupler."

Yep, and modems ( modulator & demodulator were where I first encountered UARTs ( Universal Asynchronous Receiver-Transmitter ).

I can't remember exactly, but there was some damn chip- a 16640?- you could replace with a faster chip in hopes of goosing the transfer rate, back in the days of DTST software for DOS.

91 posted on 12/16/2005 4:40:33 PM PST by backhoe (The Silence of the Tom's ( Tired Old Media... ))
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To: discostu

Agree.....


92 posted on 12/16/2005 4:41:58 PM PST by chasio649
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To: Central Scrutiniser
M.U.L.E. and JumpMan!

Problem with the C64 emulators, ROMs, etc., is that I've forgotten how to run the OS. I remember "LOAD" with arguments, but that's about it. Both game titles are impossible to play without a configured joystick (those brain cells are LONG gone...).

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.

To think of all the studying I should have been doing...
93 posted on 12/16/2005 4:48:21 PM PST by IslandJeff
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To: Sloth

I'm full of typos today. 10MB


94 posted on 12/16/2005 4:48:35 PM PST by listenhillary ("Mainstream media" is creating it's own reality~everything sucks)
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To: RipSawyer

Bad case of the typos


95 posted on 12/16/2005 4:49:46 PM PST by listenhillary ("Mainstream media" is creating it's own reality~everything sucks)
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To: IslandJeff

I can't get the emulators to see my F keys on my keyboard!

Can't play.

Damn. Its a multimedia keyboard.


96 posted on 12/16/2005 4:57:40 PM PST by Central Scrutiniser (Screw Christmas, Happy Festivus!!!)
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To: MarkeyD
I had the pleasure of selling the first 10 TRS-80 computers in San Diego county in September 1977 from the Radio Shack store in Mission Valley. I would have purchased one as well, but I had just spent $500 buying a BSA 500cc single cylinder dirt bike.
97 posted on 12/16/2005 5:02:43 PM PST by Myrddin
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To: Central Scrutiniser
I can't get the emulators to see my F keys on my keyboard!

Did C64 recognize ASCII standards? Geez, for something that's barely 20 years old some of this stuff seems like archeology.
98 posted on 12/16/2005 5:03:28 PM PST by IslandJeff
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To: Larry Lucido
Before I could afford a decent scientific calculator, I was using a 4 function Radio Shack calculator and performing square roots by successive approximation. The "rich" kids on campus (UCSD) had HP35 or HP45 calculators. A few people had TI-30's.

My college graduation present was an HP25. I wrote my first "software" on that calculator to replace some of the genetics crossover frequency tables from the Schaum's study guide. I passed that code along to one of my professors who needed finer granularity than the published tables offered. That was about 10 million lines of code ago. Time flies.

99 posted on 12/16/2005 5:09:36 PM PST by Myrddin
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To: IslandJeff

I think its my non standard keyboard.


100 posted on 12/16/2005 5:12:36 PM PST by Central Scrutiniser (Screw Christmas, Happy Festivus!!!)
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