The very first computer I owned, or rather my family owned, was a Commodore 64 with a 1530/C2N Datassette (tape drive) and it was the start of a beautiful relationship. Or at least it was once we landed a 1541 floppy disk drive and it didn’t take 30 minutes to load up a program. Before I bought my first PC in 1996 I went through 5 Commodore 64’s (several were given to me by friends for various reasons), a Commodore 128, and no less then four models of Commodore Amiga —of which I still own three of them. Needless to say the Commodore name holds quite a bit of nostalgia for me.
Now a Netherlands-based company seeks to bring that familiar name back from the dead after having purchased the rights to it this past March with a new line of gaming PCs:
Commodore will re-emerge with four basic systems, each with a little bit of wiggle room in terms of its configuration, at least when you order online. Prices start around the $1,700 mark for the most basic Commodore Cg, and they climb progressively to the highest-end Cxx, although Commodore is still working out the baseline costs of the pricier models. All will come with Intel quad-core processors, Nvidia 8000-series graphics cards, Corsair RAM, and Asus-made NForce motherboards. And while Commodore won’t be overclocking out of the box, it will be providing all of its systems with a proprietary Peltier-cooling heat sink, that it claims will give gamers room to ramp up their parts themselves.
Well, OK, I suppose. It’s still a Windows PC, it just has the Commodore name and logo on it. Somehow that’s less than overwhelming. I mean I could carve a Commodore logo into the case of the PC I built myself and have more or less the same product and probably cheaper to boot, though the Peltier-cooling heat sink does tend to add a little “cool” to the Commodore rigs, if you’ll pardon the pun. Still the cases look nice and they come with “skins” so you can personalize them somewhat without having to know how to casemod.
It’s hard to guess how well having the Commodore name will benefit sales here in the U.S., but it may help quite a bit in Europe where the company was held in much higher regard. Just the same I won’t be rushing out to buy one myself. Though it does make me itch to dig out the old A3000 and boot it up. Wish I could find a cheap networking card for it so I could fire up the old BBS system over telnet.
Be interesting if it has the old cartridge slots and/or attatchable cassette drive for backwards compatability, that would make it a novelty that might sell it. I used to have a C64 but the cassette drive broke, I remember there being a lot of games about some egg called dizzy