Commodore 64 set to re-launch, same exterior with modern innards

The Commodore 64 was, for quite some time, a big hit. However, the company made some mistakes, and eventually fell by the wayside in the face of competition from the IBM PC and Apple. Now, it's about to return.

It was already known that the Commodore 64 (C64) would return in the "late spring," but it's now known that the C64 will return at the end of April. Barry Altman is president and CEO of Commodore USA, and he purchased the Commodore trademark in September of 2010 with the intention of reviving the company and brand.

Although there are plenty of laptops and all-in-one PCs around, desktop PCs still predominate, and those consist of a box for the motherboard, video cards, etc., while the keyboard and display are separate.  Altman hopes the C64 can make inroads with a retro-look and state of the art technology.

The C64 will look the same as it did before. It will have the keyboard, RAM, CPU, GPU, and other components internal to the same taupe brown/beige color colored rectangular box as before. Other colors will follow, but the internals of the device are significantly upgraded.

The C64 will sport a mini-ITX PC motherboard featuring a dual-core 525 Atom CPU and an NVIDIA Ion2 graphics chipset. That not the most powerful combination, but it's way better than the original C64, which was introduced in 1982.

The original C64 sold for $595 had a Commodore KERNAL Operating system, with Commodore BASIC 2.0, and a MOS Technology 6510 CPU which ran at 1.023 MHz (NTSC version) or 0.985 MHz (PAL version). Compare that to today's CPUs which run at GHz speeds.

The RAM was 64KB (that's kilobytes, as opposed to the gigabytes of today with a 20KB ROM. Graphics were a VIC-II with 320 x 200 pixel resolution (something exceeded by today's smartphones), 16 colors (not 16 million), sprites, and raster interrupt.

It was primitive, but it was also well-loved. During the C64's lifetime (the company went out of business in 1994), sales totaled somewhere between 12.5 and 17 million units (there are no exact figures), which makes it the best-selling single personal computer model of all time.

The new version will not come with Windows pre-installed, but an end user can be add it. The system will come with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on CD, ready to install, and Commodore OS 1.0, along with emulation functionality and a classic game package, will be mailed to purchasers when available.

Pricing ranges all the way from $250 (for a pretty much empty chassis) to $895. Storage ranges as high as a 1TB hard drive, with RAM starting at 2GB (4GB is an option). The C64 can have either a slot-load DVD, tray-load DVD, or Blu-ray.

You can watch a cross-promotional video about the Blu-ray release of TRON: Legacy and the C64, below.