Two weeks ago, a YouTuber announced that he had acquired Commodore. Today, Commodore announced its first new computer in over 30 years, the Commodore 64 Ultimate. You can pre-order it now, with pricing starting at $299.
“As of two weeks ago, I am the acting CEO of Commodore Corporation,”
Christian ‘Peri Fractic’ Simpson announced in a video on his YouTube channel. “We have completed the acquisition of Commodore. We signed a share purchase agreement with the previous owners of Commodore. It’s truly mind-blowing.”
There are three Commodore 64 Ultimate models, each with the same internals but a different case. The new Commodore is clear that this computer is
not an emulator. It’s compatible with over 10,000 original C64 games, works with original C64 cartridges, datasettes, and disk drives, and its ships with a USB drive that includes over 50 titles that include full games, licensed classics, demos, and a newly made sequel to Jupiter Lander: Ascension. The company promises the computer is “at least 99 percent compatible with all 80s/90s games, cartridges, and peripherals.”
The Commodore 64 is built on an AMD Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA, 128 MB of DDR2 RAM, and 16 MB of NOR Flash memory. It supports Full HD (1080p) video-out over HDMI (plus classic DIN-8: CVBS, S-Video, and RGB video-out), Wi-Fi, and USB with FAT, FAT32, and exFAT formatting. The keyboard is designed to look like the original–it should have gone with the more modern-looking C64C design, frankly–with the same layout but modern components. The original C64 ROMs are included, as are sockets for SID 6581/8580 chips, though an UltiSID octal core FPGA provides SID emulation.
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