Commodore 64 is back.... sort of.

[Narei Mooncatt]

Seems the licensing rights for the Commodore (and thus Amiga as well) have been bought and a company is now making an all in one type computer with today's technology that is encased in a traditional C-64 case. They can run a new Commodore OS that would even allow you to play old 8 bit C-64 games (from a CD or emulation), or let you install Windows or Linux.

News article here

http://www.commodoreusa.net/CUSA_C64.aspx

Cool. 

[Landrav]

Very cool.  I'm not old enough to have used a lot of computer technology from that era, but it's really cool to see all this making a comeback :3  Are you planning on getting one?

[Dusty]

Yeah, someone that I'm subscribed to on YouTube brought this up today. I think it is a slightly pointless idea because real C64s are pretty damn cheap and the only characteristics that the PC that site is advertising shares with the C64 are purely cosmetic. Apparently they send you the PC with Linux on a CD and then they'll send you the C64 emulator later when they've actually finished writing it because they haven't done so yet. Just more people trying to get rich quick by tugging on people's heart-strings, I guess.

[Foxpup]

I thought Amiga was owned by Amiga Inc, not Commodore USA. They're the only company to ever acquire the Amiga brand without going bankrupt immediately afterwards (except Gateway, but they didn't actually do anything with it, so they don't count). I smell an ugly legal battle brewing...

Also, it's sad and pathetic that they can't even sell real replicas...

[Narei Mooncatt]

From one of the "About" sections of their website on the Amiga licensing rights:

The AMIGA project began as a quest to create the ultimate Video Game console, by a talented group of engineers who had played a large part in shaping the hardware of the video game console era of the early eighties. Jay Miner, the then CEO of Amiga Incorporated and a notable Atari engineer, is considered the father of the AMIGA. Originally funded in part by Atari, when Amiga Incorporated was purchased by Commodore in the early eighties, the concept was modified to include a keyboard and disk drive in order for it to be used as a fully fledged computer that would be open to third party development. The AMIGA represented Commodore's move to 16-bit technology and was the natural progression from its 8-bit range of computers which featured the Commodore 64...

So looks like you were right to a point, Foxpup, but buying the Commodore rights included Amiga rights by default. Until I read the news article, I thought they were two seperate companies myself. I'm half tempted to get one of these when the C64 OS is released so I can finally play some of the games I had a heck of a time programing. Ah the days of going out and not just buying a disc, but also buying a BOOK of nothing but programming code for you to transpose into the C64 to create the game before you could play it. Only to find out after multiple corrections and even starting from scratch that something must be wrong in the book because the game would never play like it should.

[Foxpup]

No, no, no. Amiga hasn't been a part of Commodore since 1994, when they went broke and sold everything to Escom, who themselves went broke and sold the Amiga Technologies brand to Phase 5 (I think) in 1997, and they turned into a cool PowerPC-based system and went broke doing so, then Gateway took over and didn't go broke but didn't make much profit either until they sold it to Amino for an ungodly sum of money in 1999, then it ended up in the hands of Eyetech, but they went broke too, then in 2007 Amiga Inc. got into a legal dispute with Hyperion for reasons I don't remember, and then it was now, and all of history stopped. I read it on Sabrina Online, so it must be true!

Anyhow, I've done a little reading up on this new Commodore USA deal, and it seems they're having trouble getting the rights to AmigaOS and are going to make it a Linux-based system. But since you can run real Linux on a real Amiga (and do it a lot cheaper), I'm not really that impressed.