Any retro gaming aficionado will know about the Commodore 64. If you had one back in the day, then you'll no doubt know the pain of having to load it up, go outside and play football, and then come back in again with the hope that it hadn't crashed. It's been 30 years since Commodore directly released a new piece of hardware, and now the Commodore 64 Ultimate is available for pre-order.
This isn't a software emulator. The Commodore 64 Ultimate uses an AMD Artix 7 FPGA and, according to the new Commodore management team, will work with over 10,000 games. As reported in Tom's Hardware, prices for the console start at $299 and won't be shipping until October at the earliest.
With a slogan of 'Do you remember your first love? Do you remember your first 8-bit computer?' starting off a trip down memory lane back through the life of the Commodore 64, the new console looks to channel all the nostalgia of the original machine with some new touches to drag it kicking and screaming into 2025. According to the official product pre-order page, it boasts 'a game-reactive colour-changing LED case, Wi-Fi game transfer, & a USB "cassette" bursting with classic & new games'. It also has the signatures of the original C64 creators etched into the motherboard.
It's no secret that Christian ‘Peri Fractic’ Simpson has put in an offer for Commodore and claimed that he is the acting CEO of the company, citing big changes and new products that will revolutionise the retro space. There's a 'seven-figure deal' on the table, but the sale hasn't been finalised yet. It could be that this new hardware release is there to move things forward a little bit and boost some extra funds, but let's hope any orders will actually arrive and not fall into the ether like my Analogue 3D purchase... I don't think I'm ever getting that at this point!
