Remember a while back when one poor dreamer designed a Commodore 64 phone that didn’t exist? It placed the design of the old Commodore 64/Amiga in phone form and looked glorious. Now there actually is a Commodore phone. Depressingly, it looks like any old Android phone already on the market, but with one caveat — you can actually play Commodore 64 and Amiga games on it.
Wired managed to go hands on with the phone, and it reports that the Commodore phone’s custom Android OS comes with emulators pre-installed. It uses the VICE C64 emulator and the Uae4All2-SDL Amiga emulator to play all those old games on the phone.
Which is a complete no-brainer really. All Android phones have the potential to play emulators, but having them added to the OS itself, on a Commodore branded phone, adds a real legitimacy to things. I could honestly see myself using it.
The phone launches later this week throughout Europe, at $300US for the 16BG/2GB ram model and $365 for the 32GB/3GB ram model. No word on when (or if) it will actually make its way to Australia but, considering how popular the Commodore 64 was here, surely it’s a no-brainer?
Nostalgia is a powerful thing.
Comments
36 responses to “Commodore Is Releasing A Phone And You Can Play Commodore 64 Games On It”
I didn’t even know Commodore still existed as a company what have they been up to since the 64?
They released the 64x : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64x
Commodore died a long time ago. An American company licensed the name in 2010 (Commodore USA), tried to sell the 64x that @johnny_unitus mentioned above, then collapsed in 2012 when its founder died. Now two Italian entrepreneurs claim they have the license to the name and logo and created a company called Commodore Business Machines in the UK in March this year, and are pushing out this phone as their flagship product.
This company isn’t the Commodore we all knew. It has nothing to do with the Commodore we all knew. It’s a new company trading off the old one’s name, selling an otherwise stock standard Android phone with a C64 emulator prepackaged – something you can download for free on any Android device right now anyway.
Yeah but the Commodore branding on the phone is pretty slick. Gotta admit it!
More or less the exact same thing that happened to Atari & Activision, neither are the company that they started as and I think Activision are the 3rd or 4th company to hold the name now
Not too dissimilar to the Oppo Find7
Lazy Jones FTW!
Oh lordy! This is genuinely the first phone announcement that’s made me consider an upgrade in years. I wonder what catalogue it would offer though? I mean, is it essentially play what you can find? I’ve tried tracking down roms of old C64 games I played and theyre just non-existent mostly (or dont seem to work even when I do find them). I will pay good money for my nostalgia!
hit me up sughly! i have a complete C64 rom collection!
Say whaaaat! I would be completely surprised if you had a few I have in mind, in particular I would love to play this one cassette text adventure I once had called The Pay-Off. Do you mind emailing me about it? dbe.krams (at) gmail
just sent man! also if you have android/jailbroken iphone, you can play all these games on the go… plenty of decent mobile emulators around!
looks like a text adventure from my brief screw-around!
Thanks so much for that!! Brought back a lot of memories! I played this so damn much as a kid and couldnt get anywhere… and as an adult, still couldnt get anywhere :/ even with a walkthrough I got stuck! Ah well.
I’ll have to think up the names of all the others I played too! I remember them all by sight mostly though, not by name. We had a box of like 100 diskettes we randomly went through. It would all be abandonware by now right? Does that make them easy to track down?
it really depends man. like i said i have a complete set. shoot me an email if you want and i can help you out!
Look up some C64 video game compilations on Youtube & your memories will come flooding back.
I had one of the Atari 2600 a while back, it would have literally fit on 2 floppies. Remarkable just how much they managed to fit into a few kilobytes
hmm… musnt have been complete, just checked the size of my C64 romset and its 1.40gb
He is talking about Atari 2600 which each rom is literally just a few kilobytes each. Awesome fun!
My phone plays all the games, been playing PSP games lately
In the past (aaages ago for my Nokia 6600) I used c64.com for roms
Loading apps will take 5 minutes…..
Load”facebook”,8,1
Searching for facebook
Loading
Ready
Where do I put the tape?
Oh, never mind, got a guru meditation error…
Maybe they’ll take if a bit further.
Find BASIC code in a magazine? Use the camera to read it in, 😛
If you put the guts of an android phone into a walkman, you could build a portable Commodore.
Where do you plug in the tape drive?
I wonder how hard it is to crack open to install a reset button?
mount a 5 1/4 via OTG?
Looking at the box in the picture, it’s also a Dual SIM. That’s a plus for me.
I just hope it’s not like the Oppo where it looks like you have to choose between a second SIM or a micro SD as they seem to be in the same slot.
But I will be happy to be corrected on the Oppo if I’m wrong.
This is a non-story for a non-issue. ‘Commodore’ as both a company and a brand have been dead for years, this is just the parent company that bought them trying to cash in on Nostalgia, using other people’s hardware, other people’s Operating Systems, other people’s Apps.
Where’s the innovation? There’s no minimum effort here to make it seem original. They could’ve written their own emulator, had their own store for games, had a way to stream/cast at a TV, any number of things. They chose not to.
If a MySpace phone came out and was literally Android preinstalled with a MySpace app, would you buy it for Nostalgia?
Okay so you can buy a machine to run them but can you buy the games? Legitimacy of hardware/emulation is one thing but unless there’s a way to actually purchase the games then it’s of limited use…
Easy. You rip your own games or your mates games.
Not so. For the most part, the current interpretations of the law deem such acts illegal.
For productivity software (such as Windows, Photoshop, etc) one is allowed to make backup copies of the media.
But for games as the license only authorises a user to enjoy the content on a certain “device” one cannot make a copy of said software and play it on a compatible device.
Unless one has permission to do so or older EULAs are retroactively waved, emulation is mostly illegal unless the right holder says otherwise.
Depends on country
Well yeah but it’s technically not legal to rip other people’s and I think there’s still some legality questions over ripping your own. It really needs a marketplace for games to properly take off, at least legally
They are on an impossible mission. Let the Amiga and Commodore brands die with dignity.
Time to go burn some Shogun into my retinas and lament at how my innocent childhood dream of being a games programmer has instead turned into the nightmare of writing and selling python scripts to hack websites to a guy called Piotr who hosts .ru warez domains out of St Petersburg.
It needs to have the Commodore song as the ringtone
I love that its called the PET just like the old Commodore Computer 🙂
I want one..