Press B 285: Commodore 64 Ultimate

Chances are, you either grew up with a Commodore 64 or you knew someone who did. From Space Taxi to Ultima, it was the other side of 80s gaming across North America and Europe. Now the C64 is back. Last year, a YouTuber and hardcore retro computer superfan bought the Commodore brand and, building on a popular FPGA project, relaunched the C64 for a modern audience of longtime fans and curious newcomers alike. Sinistar picked one up, and he is here to walk you through exactly why he loves it.

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00:00 --> 00:27 The Commodore 64 where 64 kilobytes was generous today on. Don't long load. Oh, you gave, you gave me the, the host credit. That's cool.
00:27 --> 00:38 Yeah. But you're going to do most of the talking. Welcome everybody to another episode of Press me to cancel your favorite retro podcast. And we mean it. This week. I'm your host this week, Sick Jake, and I'm joined by Sinistar Sinister. How you doing this week?
00:39 --> 00:45 I'm doing well here in the United States. I have a three day weekend. I'm stoked.
00:45 --> 01:28 Awesome. I am jealous for sure. This week we are talking about a very cool device, something I know Sinister has been really excited to talk about and I'm very interested in, and that is the Commodore 64 ultimate, which is, we'll explain in a few minutes. But I mean I feel like growing up, either you had a C64 in North America and Europe or you knew somebody who did. I certainly had a cousin and a friend who had one and I've played a little bit of using one back in the past, but I've never thought about having to use one in the modern day. But that's now reality with this special project, Commodore 64 Ultimate. So let's honestly just get right into it. Sinister, I want you to explain what the C64 ultimate project actually is and maybe you know, how much you know about how it came to be because it's a very interesting story.
01:28 --> 01:38 Yeah, obviously I may get, I may get some facts a little, a little wrong. I'm gonna precurse and say, hey, if I get it wrong, do your own research.
01:41 --> 01:43 Yeah, okay, do your research on YouTube.
01:44 --> 02:51 Yeah, yeah. Well actually, funny enough, there is some truth to that. So we'll, we'll start there. So there's a, a channel called retro recipes on YouTube. The primary host is Perifractic and his wife joins him as well. Can't remember. Anyway, his name is not Perifractic, it's actually Christian something. And I don't remember his whole name, but he basically, he's, he's a Commodore Stan. You know, he wants, he loves Commodore 64. He's, he's even built like a Lego Commodore 64 case, you know, put in, put in a software emulator, the whole thing. But he wanted to basically try to do some Commodore 64 branded work. And he basically reached out to the current copyright owners, current trademark owners and said, hey, you know, what's it going to take for me to, you know, can I pay you royalty? Can I pay you a fee, etc. And basically this company said, what if we just sell you Commodore because what.
02:51 --> 03:12 Are they using it for? Really up to this point, I know there was like a C64 mini, which is one of those tiny little devices, heavily on the emulation side. Not very accurate, more of a novelty thing. You have one. But I mean, since other than that, Commodore hasn't done anything in decades, so how wild is that to be pitched the company?
03:12 --> 05:43 Yeah. And it's funny because he was like, okay, this is going to be stupid expensive. Now, for a layperson, we're not talking a small amount of change, but for a corporation, I think this was. I. This is where I may get some facts wrong. I think it was single digits, millions of dollars for the entire Commodore trademark. Now we can discuss later Amiga, because Amiga was sold off separately. So that is actually not part of this purchase. But everything Commodore trademark, that was not the amiga. So the 64, the VIC 20, the. The chip production MOS, which we'll talk about also, as far as like my childhood goes in a bit, they basically said, what if we sell you this? And he went and found some investors, plus his own money, obviously, and he purchased Commodore. And it's interesting because when he started this process, he then kicked off, it was, it was like a Kickstarter, but instead of being like, yeah, yeah, it was crowdfunding, instead of being like, hey, we'll see if this succeeds. You, you could go and pre purchase one, you could pre order one. And basically that actually part of that was the funding to purchase the, the Commodore name. And so he decided as. As part of this, kind of the first thing he was going to do was try to make a modern recreation of the Commodore 64. And obviously since he has some trademarks and stuff, he probably could have looked at something like reproducing the 6510 chip that was in it, or 65, you know, et cetera. But he, he basically went to some other creators in the retro community and he said, hey, you've been working on projects that are awesome. Why don't we get together and. And let's combine this thing. And so he looked primarily for the technical piece, he went and talked to an online creator called Gideon, who has created what's called the Ultimate 2 or Ultimate II plus, which is kind of like, it's essentially kind of an FPGA take of the Commodore 64. And we've talked about FPGAs before. FPGA is as close to replication as you can get of the Original hardware. Obviously there's, you know, it's up to how well it's programmed but it's not software emulation, it's hardware emulation.
05:44 --> 06:04 So the hardware emulation on these, on the course for the. Mr. A lot of them are very, very mature, especially for the older computers. And I know Gideon's been doing this for quite some, quite some time and well renowned for is the hardware boards he's producing. And as close as you're going to get, as cycle accular as you're going to, you want to throw that term around as you're going to get for a C64.
06:04 --> 06:04 Yeah.
06:04 --> 06:42 Especially for the age of the computer versus now. So yeah, incredibly accurate. Some of the videos with him, the interviews are very fun. He's definitely an interesting character in interviews. I like how he signs his names on the circuit boards. Like it's, it's pretty interesting but it's very smart of, of, of this gentleman from YouTube who bought Commodore to go to somebody who has done the work already and just whatever the deal was, whether it's licensing or cut of the deal, go to somebody's well respected in the community, somebody that fans are going to know, hey, I wanted one anyway and I know the parts are going to be good. So all we need is a great case and a great keyboard to match with it. And it's an awesome deal, right? An awesome project.
06:43 --> 07:36 Yeah. And, and so, and by the way, signing the motherboard is actually like that is Commodore did that way back in the day. And so this kind of. Well, I think they, I think they actually pressed it into the case underneath in the inside of the case. But yeah, they had all the signatures from the original creators and developers. And then so on top of talking to Gideon and getting all the technical pieces, so the fpga, all the enhancements to. And we'll talk about the enhancements as we go through. Yeah, but he basically was like I need a case and I need a keyboard and there were people in the industry that had already done those pieces as well. So, so he basically brought the three things together and said, hey, we're going to brand this, this is going to be branded Commodore. This is a Commodore 64.
07:38 --> 08:07 And then he, it's not a one guy operation either. Like he's got a dozen people on his executive team. Like this is a full on proper, actually incorporated company that's doing this. This is not like I've seen people buy things off Kickstarter where it's one or two people trying to do the best they can grassroots this. No, this has evolved into an actual proper company now managing Commodore. Like it's pretty interesting to see how we YouTube to now. I think he's the CEO. I think he's CEO of Commodore at the moment is his current title. It's pretty interesting.
08:08 --> 09:04 Yeah. Okay, so we can talk some technical specs. As we said, it's as close to accurate as close to cycle accurate. And it really, I, I looked into this a little bit because I wanted to make sure that I was, you know, because my assumption is hey, we're cycle accurate. No, it's like, it's like four or five nines accurate. There is not a Commodore core even on the Mr. That is a hundred percent accurate. But it's, it's close, it's close enough. The amount of things that aren't going to run is, are probably things that you're never going to run across. Right. And so, or maybe, maybe you drop a frame here or there or something. Right. I mean, right. We're, we're essentially close enough. But so it runs on an FPGA as we talked about. Oh, I wanted to bring this up because people may ask both you and I, Jake, but you already have misters. Why do you care?
09:06 --> 09:36 Yeah, I actually was going to ask that because look, I never owned one as a kid but I'm very interested in this kind of device. I especially love it one in such a well built device and it's just cool like the idea of an all in one computer within the keyboard. I've always, I've always been interested in one. There's a lot of C64 games I remember playing at friends places in my cousin's place. So yeah, I've thought about it. But then I also have behind me a Mr. And I've been playing C64 games all week on the Mr. Yeah. So outside the keyboard, what am I actually missing?
09:36 --> 09:49 That's primarily the reason is the keyboard is drastic. And for those that are listening to the podcast, I'm showing the keyboard if you come to the YouTube channel. But like you'll notice the quote key is actually shift two.
09:51 --> 09:52 Yeah, that messed me up earlier.
09:52 --> 09:57 Yeah. And it has, it has separate keys for asterisk and at.
09:57 --> 09:57 Yeah.
09:58 --> 10:29 And so I mean honestly, when I would do the C64 emulation on the Mr. I would have a cheat sheet. In fact, funny enough, there's my cheat sheet. Yeah, right. And so there's my cheat sheet for when I was using the Mr. Core and I don't know, there's all There's a piece of me that's like, hey, the keyboard's a part of it. And, and you know, I mean it was the primary input. There was, there was a mouse later in this life, in this life cycle.
10:29 --> 10:30 Right.
10:30 --> 10:32 The other things are. Go ahead.
10:33 --> 10:45 I. I will say, like, yeah, like that's what I ran into issue earlier today. So somebody made a fan game of Mary Brothers. They ported the original Mario brothers to the C64. And like I gotta try that before the episode. But it's not a cartridge.
10:45 --> 10:45 Right.
10:45 --> 10:53 There's different formats of loading programs into this, which we explain. But it's not the usual CART format that I was used to on the Mr. Which is much easier to just load games up.
10:53 --> 10:54 Yeah.
10:54 --> 11:20 It was only a floppy version A D64 file. So to do that you actually have to type in the commands to load the goddamn thing. And I. And that's. And I'm like looking up like I haven't done this in years. So I'm like, okay, load quote, quotes not is in the number two quote again. And then where's. Where's the asterisk drive number? And then, and then what, what do I push after? I think it's shift enter or something you have to do. I couldn't load the damn game.
11:20 --> 11:20 Yeah.
11:20 --> 11:31 Is it just enter? It wasn't working for me. So. So yeah, I mean I could plug in a keyboard to my Mr. Absolutely. But it still did not have that layout. I was trying to do it on my on screen layout and it was just driving.
11:32 --> 11:32 Yeah.
11:32 --> 12:04 So they're. So when it comes to the FPGA cores and the Mr. That are computer related, as fun as they are to play with, they are really. They really. It's not the same that the keyboard. It just really isn't. And that's like for the ZX spectrum is another one where it's like the all in one with the keyboard built into the device. Very specific and needs that device. And when you don't have that tactile thing in front of you, you don't get the full experience of that core. So I am jealous of the keyboard, especially if it's well made. Like is it buckling springs on that or was it membrane? I don't.
12:05 --> 12:07 Is mechanical, my friend.
12:07 --> 12:09 Yes. I love that.
12:09 --> 12:44 Yeah, yeah. It's. It's a mechanical keyboard. It feels great. We'll talk. Well, we'll talk right now. They. They did a few iterations. They did the beige, you know, the old red box beige. They did the clear. Which is the version I got. It's called the Starlight. And then there's a Founder's Edition that they're still. They actually found a production issue and they. Luckily they were able to. They had to unbox a whole bunch that they'd prep, but they caught it before the Founders Edition went out. And so in particular with. With keyboard buckling.
12:46 --> 13:04 And so can you explain that? Because I saw some. I mean, they came out and did a statement saying that Flex was part of the spec but buckling was not, and that they believe it affected less than 1% of the consumers, but they're willing to work with those who are affected. But I know that is it. The PCB under the keyboard is now transparent, right? For that model.
13:05 --> 13:57 So, I mean, the PCB itself is not. So that's the. But the keyboard tray is, as you can see, you can see through. And so basically the problem is they had to use a thinner material to keep it transparent. And so mine actually did flex when it arrived. Now I say flex because mine actually felt just fine. But apparently there were some production issues where things were not being screwed in properly. And that's where the buckle was happening and it would depress way into the. Into the case. And so they have found the issues, it sounds like, and they are correcting them. From what I understand, they're being really good about either helping people get it taken care of or fixing it. You know, I actually.
13:57 --> 14:24 Which is good because. Because with them, like, the reputation is everything. Like, it's a. It's a very small market that they're catering to. So reputation is everything. So I'm glad they're doing that. I. I do gotta ask though. Like, when I looked at it, the first thing I thought was if I were to buy one, I would have to go with the ugly one because that's what it was originally. Give me the ugly ass beige. Like, give me the. Give me the gross brown one. Why did you get. Why did you get the clear one?
14:25 --> 14:33 So I'm going to be honest with you. This was a total case of FOMO for me, because you know how I feel about rgb.
14:33 --> 14:34 You usually don't like it.
14:35 --> 14:36 Yeah, I usually don't like it.
14:36 --> 14:39 We make fun of Chard all the time about his freaking RGB lit setup.
14:40 --> 15:08 But here's the problem is I do like RGB for certain things. And this has. You can tie the RGB into the sound processor. It's called the sid. You can tie it into it. So it's almost like, what are they. Yeah, Visualizer. And, and the other part of me was like, hey, if I don't get it, I'm gonna, I'm gonna think to myself later on there's a feature that I don't have. Right.
15:08 --> 15:09 Okay.
15:10 --> 15:15 And so I totally would have gotten the beige except for fomo.
15:15 --> 15:57 So the other thing too is, is unlike, you know, like, because I, I'm one of those guys where I see that there's been a bit of a fad to go back to retro style beige PC cases. I saw a few companies making those but with modern, you know, specs and everything like that. And I thought I would pick one of those up. But also part of that is that the computer case is usually not in front and center View, whereas the C64, because the keyboard is right in front of you, having it light up underneath your fingers is pretty cool. I mean to be full disclos disclosure, I have a black widow Razer keyboard in front of me. I do like the RGB lights to a degree. But that thing, that thing you got, that thing lights up a room like that would keep me awake at night. I'd have to make sure I turn it off. But it is very cool looking. Yeah, yeah.
15:57 --> 16:35 Which of course you can, you can turn off all the rgb, et cetera. No, I just, I mean, but, but here's the thing. For me it was totally about the feature that I would miss out on because they did have the Founders edition which is the next tier up and it added 24 karat gold plated keyboard. And I thought once again, yeah, I didn't, I didn't suffer the FOMO over the gold plated keyboard. Right. Because that's, that to me is not a feature that I'd be missing out on. In fact, I'd be worried that that plating would rub off and I'd be like, there goes my gold.
16:36 --> 16:48 There goes your gold. Yeah. A waste of money I think for me when I saw that one because I very was very close to picking one up. But I'm like, no, I've got to get a switch too. Is what might came down to. Or I need the money for something else.
16:48 --> 16:49 Yeah.
16:49 --> 17:38 But the Founder's Edition, I don't, I'm not a fan of the, the amber to color plastic case. Sure the keyboard is really rad and the gold stuff is really neat, but I didn't like that. If they had kept the clear one but modified the buttons or added a gold plaque to it then that would be pretty cool. It's all frivolous anyway. Like the, the whole device, even the basic beige one is very rad and it is very authentic and accurate to the original, which I appreciate. I jokingly told my co workers today that they don't make plastic like they used to as an old man. Angry shake fist at the cloud and they laughed at me. But they really don't make plastic like they used to, whether it's, you know, environmental reasons or they're trying to save money. But a lot of toys and things that use plastic these days are much thinner and are much prone to breaking compared to stuff that was made in the 80s. The Commodore is a sturdy built thing. Like it's a hefty device. It's not, it's not light.
17:39 --> 18:16 Well, and that's, that's the thing is this feels, this feels as heavy as they used to. So I don't know if they've put weights in it or if it's just, you know, I don't know. Anyway, real quick, I did want to point out, even though mine had some flex and I wasn't concerned because it wasn't buckling, but mine had some flex, there is a person that went and created a 3D model for a brace that you can put underneath. I printed it out in translucent and I did apply it and now my keyboard has like zero flex whatsoever.
18:17 --> 18:17 So.
18:18 --> 18:49 Yeah. So, okay, so while we're finishing up talking about why I would buy this, even though I have a Mr. All of the ports on the back, I may not, I may not ever get a C64 cartridge in my hands, but if I do, it would be cool as hell to plug it in. Right. I may not ever get a monitor, an S video monitor, but it would be cool as hell to get an old CRTS video monitor and plug it in. Right. I mean, all of.
18:49 --> 18:55 Yeah, it has hdmi, but does it do analog and HDMI at the same time?
18:55 --> 18:56 Yes. Yes, it does.
18:56 --> 19:03 Okay. Yeah. Because the mister does that. That's one of my favorite features. Yeah, that's cool. Yeah. The fact that it has the original controller ports.
19:04 --> 19:04 Yeah.
19:04 --> 19:25 If you had it, if you had a control kicking around somewhere or you want to grab one off ebay or you can buy the recreation. They do that. It uses the original ports is really interesting. I didn't even realize the C64 had carts until, until I got a Mr. Because growing up, my friends and cousin only had the discs. Right. So it's, it's neat that there's a cartridge slot that you could use today. That's pretty cool.
19:25 --> 19:26 Yep.
19:26 --> 19:32 And I Had heard that. I was watching another video that sids, you called them the sound interface things.
19:33 --> 19:34 Yeah.
19:34 --> 19:41 They're slots inside the machine. You could actually put your own into that board, from what I understand, if you wanted to.
19:41 --> 19:54 So it has two slots. So you can actually go up to eight channels on this thing if you want. So by default it comes out of the box with what's called Ultisid, which is an FPGA emulated SID.
19:55 --> 19:55 Right.
19:56 --> 20:48 But it has those two slots. And here's the cool thing. There were two produced SID chips for the C64 over the lifetime and you can, you can actually mix and match. And what's really cool about that is they each kind of had a little bit of a different tone. And so you can actually like turn one off, turn the other off, have them both on, you know, so you can have that full experience. I have. I'm not going to go chase an authentic SID chip. They have become absolutely stupidly priced. But yeah, apparently there is a product called an ARMSID that is more accurate than the Ulti SID that's on this. And there's a. The producer just, just created some new stock and I can't buy it in the us.
20:50 --> 20:51 Oh, tariffs.
20:51 --> 20:57 Yep. Yeah, they will not sell to the U.S. yeah.
20:57 --> 21:41 Hopefully that changes in a couple years. It's just the idea that the device is that accurate, like that's how authentic the device was built, that you could do it if you wanted to. And that's definitely a reason to pick one up. It's like when folks tell me, why would I even want a mister? I have an NES and I can plug in cart. Nes? Yes. If you want that tactile feeling of shoving carts into a slot, then yes. These are the kind of devices you would get. If you don't mind the all digital files, then a mister is fantastic. Right. There's also versatility of cores in a mister, whereas the C64 ultimate is just a C64. I don't think we're going to see cores of the thing and I really wouldn't want any. Right. Like, I liked how the device is one purpose and it does it exactly like you want it to.
21:41 --> 22:05 I could see them doing a Vic 20 core for it and the reason why is because it used the same keyboard and the same tape interface and that sort of stuff. So I could see. Because the Vic 20 came before the C64. Right, right. I could see them doing that, but I also can see them saying, no, we're not going to do unnatural on this thing.
22:05 --> 22:13 Right. You know, so I know that. Okay. There's a Vic 20 and then there's a C16 and C64. And there's a 128.
22:13 --> 22:14 128. Yep.
22:15 --> 22:17 Does that thing also do 128?
22:18 --> 22:37 No, this one only does 64. Okay, so where the, where the Mr. Core, you can, you can switch it into 128 mode. Right. So what that technically is, is the Mr. Core is actually technically the 128 core. Because the 128, the original 128, had a 64 mode that you could put it in.
22:38 --> 22:39 Okay.
22:39 --> 23:23 Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So far we've talked about really kind of the original, like how it kind of stays to the 64. We can start expanding out into the features that they've added to it that kind of make it substantially more usable in the modern age. So we talked about hdmi. That's huge. And the HDMI looks fantastic. And if you turn on the scan lines for the HDMI mode, it looks. They are the best scan lines I've seen. I don't do scan lines on my Mr. Because I hate them. I do scan lines on this because it looks great.
23:24 --> 23:44 So to be. To go in the weeds on that one. So I normally don't like scan lines, but I like them on the Mr. Because it has the. The shadow mask. Mm. And there's a lot of filters to it that does look really authentic. Only if you can play at a really high res. So I'm doing 1440p, I think I have right now.
23:44 --> 23:44 Okay.
23:44 --> 23:53 And that one looks great. So. And that's because the Mr. Has a really great scalar. So the C64 must have a scalar in it. Do you know what the maximum res is for the precision?
23:54 --> 23:54 1080.
23:55 --> 23:56 1080. Okay.
23:56 --> 23:56 Yeah.
23:56 --> 24:33 And the scan lens look really good. Okay. And the fact that you can do that and analog is also really rad because this is a computer that. For folks who never grew up with one. I don't know anybody who had this on their desk. This is something you hooked up to your tv. You sat in front of a big. You usually had a big ass tv probably booked in wood, encased in wood on the floor, and you're sitting on the thing in front of it with the C64 doing your thing. And that's how I always played it growing up. So it's meant to be a TV based computer, which is why it was so great, because is more affordable. Right. It was something you just interacted with your TV. So that's, that's neat.
24:34 --> 25:20 Yeah. So the original C64 had the, the eight pin din for S video and RGB, but it also had that composite out, which is probably what you were seeing was people were connecting their TV to that composite out. This dropped the composite out. So it doesn't have a composite, but it does have that s video slash, RGB slash. The 8 pin din. It has the 8 pin din port. So the other cool thing, this is actually just totally like something I saw. I don't have an orig. Well, I want to see if I can hook it up to my, my crt. But getting it to an VGA connector, it's basically I go buy another retro tank and do that whole thing again. Because VGA is a totally different signal.
25:20 --> 25:21 Right, right.
25:21 --> 26:14 And so, but if you have the rgb. So I've seen people hook it up to the, you know, the Commodore monitor, you can have the HDMI side handle the menu for the additional features and it actually shifts the display over and pops the menu up on one of the panes on just the HDMI side. So. Yeah, and so go ahead and talk about that because this is the piece that Gideon has kind of built on top, which is based on his product called the ultimate or ultimate two or two Plus. And basically what it does is it gives you a file browser so that you can load different ROMs, whether they're carts, whether they're tape ROMs, whether they're floppy ROMs.
26:16 --> 26:32 So the issues I had with the Mr. Core where I had to type in, load *, quote, *, quote, all that crap. So Gideon has added something additional to the OS or whatever when it runs that you can just interface. So why can't they add that to the freaking Mr. Core? That would be a.
26:32 --> 26:35 Lot easier. Yeah, talk to sorc, man. Talk.
26:35 --> 26:46 To sorc. Yeah, I know. Because that's a huge quality of life feature. Even if you're not using this thing for much gaming, if it's just for other things, a file browser.
26:46 --> 26:46 Is.
26:46 --> 26:53 Huge. Yeah. And that's because that was the barrier to entry with this thing, was learning the language of how to use the thing. So.
26:53 --> 27:39 That'S interesting. Yeah. So you have the file browser, they've added a thing. This is totally new to the C64 ultimate, called CommoServe, which is an Internet based ability to browse for software. Now obviously they are doing everything legal and above board. So if they were able to either acquire it as part of the Commodore trademark or if it's something that's open or if it's something that's freeware, et cetera, et cetera, you can browse their CommoServe. It'll either run it directly off of Commoserve product. Well, I guess it loads it into Flash or you can copy it down to your internal memory, whether that's an SD card or USB flash card or.
27:39 --> 27:49 Flash device. The software you've been running and testing with is that. Have you mostly been doing it the legal way or have you been doing it the. You've got a library of C64 games.
27:49 --> 27:50 Just, just.
27:50 --> 28:06 Yes. Okay. So if you wanted to play things like. Because a lot of, a lot of C64 games have hit the age where they are abandoned where. And you can, it's not like it's. I don't know, I mean maybe abandoned where it's not a legal way of getting the software. But. Yeah, but I see it quite a bit.
28:06 --> 28:28 Out there. The, the, the, the product came with. It's a cassette tape. I, I have it put away right now, but it's a cassette tape that looks like the original cassette tape that came with the original C64, but it's got a little flip out USB drive which I think is clever as hell. But it's got like. I did some, I logged on to some BBS's last.
28:28 --> 28:28 Night.
28:29 --> 28:33 Because. Which. That was a whole ass thing back in the 80s and.
28:33 --> 28:34 Early.
28:34 --> 28:35 90S. Yeah.
28:35 --> 28:53 And right. Because before we had Internet folks, I mean before there's news groups, before there was Internet, there was bbss. Right. Ways to communicate online. The, the thought of going back to a BBS in 2026, I mean. Yeah, the thought of going to The BBS in 2026 is pretty wild. But like as you mentioned, it's a feature they put on.
28:53 --> 28:53 The.
28:53 --> 29:16 Box. Yeah. They kind of brought the stance of like people are tired of social media trying to unplug a little bit. So going back to retro. Retro is kind of a style for a lot of folks. Right. And, and this is as old school Internet as you get. I saw one video, Jeff Gerstman was showing off a BBS that was pulling news from cnn. So he was getting CNN headlines on a PBS.
29:16 --> 29:16 In.
29:16 --> 29:17 2026. Yes. That's.
29:17 --> 30:48 Pretty wild. Yeah. So that's a feature that's added is it has modem emulation. So for those that are not old enough to remember modems, modulators, demodulators, it basically took a phone line, you would dial, you'd hear that crazy hiss that made it into all sorts of media. It would connect and then it would, it would, you know, using analog sound, it would send digital data. And so this emulates a modem. This emulates kind of the most popular modem that came with that you could buy for the C64. But what it does is it translates it into an Internet service, which is great. It even uses like the old haze commands, ATD to dial. But then you put in the URL name, right? And it connects, or not URL, but the domain name. You put in the domain name and a port. And I had a hell of a lot of fun last night. And what's cool is I looked these, I found a list and the list included what the hosts were running these on. And some of them were on emulated C64, some of them were on actual C64 hardware. And so it was slow as hell. While I was doing it, I created a user on one of these BBs and it was like, please wait, waiting, waiting, waiting, like, and I'm over here just picturing it's running a floppy drive. It's spinning a floppy drive.
30:50 --> 31:08 That is. How wild is that though, right? Like, just how, like the fact that people are still running those. I didn't think that was. Something was happening. Like when I, like, I don't, I don't go back that far back, but I know we talked about earlier where for me personally, I, My nostalgia was irc. I was big irc, met my wife on irc. I'm that kind.
31:08 --> 31:08 Of.
31:08 --> 31:56 Nerd. Nice. So like these days, when I look at, like a lot of people have gotten away from web forums, if they're even around anymore, a lot of people are doing the communities online on Discord, which Discord won't be around forever. It'll go down some point. And like, where do people go if they want to avoid all the corporate corporatization of social media? Do they go back to IRC? Do they go back to BBS's? Maybe a little faster ones, but. Yeah, but like the idea that that communication, that form of communication still exists and is still used even now, decades later, I love that so much. I love that so much. And it's very rad that that's still a thing. Yeah, I'm glad people are still running this on their C64s, wherever, whatever bunker they may be living in, running a bbs, and they freaking.
31:56 --> 32:38 Love it. Yep, yep, exactly. It can load. So just like the Mr. So let's talk ROMs. So obviously you can plug in Hardware. And there's videos of plenty on the Internet of people plugging in 1581 hard or floppy drives, you know, 1541, sorry, 1541s, you know, plugging in tapes, the old tape, you know, player, etc. But this can use basically any of the formats I haven't tried. If, if it can do it while the format is still zipped. I haven't tested that. That is one thing that the Mr. Can do for most of the cores is you can just put up a zipped version of the ROM and it'll, it'll.
32:38 --> 32:40 Run it. Did we have it.
32:40 --> 32:43 Back then? Well, no. So this would be.
32:43 --> 32:44 Like.
32:44 --> 33:35 Modern. Yeah. Well, if, and if, if you go. This would be handled by the piece that Gideon's done as part of loading the ROM. But it'll do cartridges or CRTs, it'll do tapes, taps, D64s, which is the, the main one that you see for floppy images. G64s, which is actually my preferred because, you know, back in the day we had copy protection on floppy disks. Right. And part of that floppy protection, or that part of that copy protection was like they'd put bad sectors so that you couldn't copy it on the floppy disk. And then it would look for those bad sectors to make sure they exist. Well, G64 is essentially a D64, but it has the additional metadata that bad sectors. And so it's, it's a more accurate version of the.
33:35 --> 33:58 Original disc. So back then it still would have been a disk. Okay, that's it. Because I know I. Because that thing is retro computing. Retro piracy is a. Is a fun thing to look up when I go. When I'm playing through the games these days, the library of games that I've somewhat legally acquired, a lot of the games are cracked. So you get the, you get the, the cracking groups. Logos and stuff. Yeah, these.
33:58 --> 33:59 Discs and. And a lot.
33:59 --> 33:59 Of times.
34:00 --> 34:12 Pretty fancy. And a lot of times trainers. Yeah. Which we can talk about real quick because I. So I had an Apple ii, so I guess I kind of wanted to talk about this. We're kind of all over the place. I'm sorry, Jake.
34:13 --> 34:13 That'S us.
34:13 --> 36:30 And tangents. No, no. I grew up with an Apple ii, which was kind of the primary competitor between the Commodore 64 and the Apple II were the primary competitors, obviously. IBM was, it was business machines initially. International business machine business machines. And it was kind of getting a foothold at this period, you know, with things like the PC Junior and stuff like that. But as you said, most People you knew, you knew somebody that had a Commodore 64 if you didn't already have one or if you didn't have one. But I was an Apple II kid. They actually run the same processor, the Commodore 64 and the Apple. In fact, the Apple's chip was produced by mos, which is Commodore's hardware, their chip making division. And so I also had to find copies of software. And so, you know, back then it was BBSS with things like what was called X modem to do transfer or Z modem to do transfer. And yeah, you'd get a cracked version, it'd have the cracking, you know, groups logo and maybe even a little demo at the beginning with some lights and sounds. In fact, a lot of the demo scene, that's just demo scene altogether came out of those cracking groups. They're like cool, we're cracking software. Why don't we do these big production demos that just show off things. And then of course trainers, we mentioned a minute ago, trainers, but trainers were kind of cool. It's like built into the crack for the software was an action replay or a game Genie or whatever you want to call it. And so it would have things like, hey, do you want infinite lives? Do you want infinite health? Do you want. And you could turn on and off those things and then play the game. And by the way, tosec, which is the, the online software, whatever, I don't remember. They're the ones that go and like catalog all of the ROMs. They catalog even the cracked ROMs with trainers and stuff like that. So you.
36:30 --> 36:48 Can go. It's legit because it's, it's a legit re release of a game in a lot of ways. And it's, it's. It was common enough that a lot of folks are familiar with the cracked version than the official version. Right. In the slight changes that might have resulted from that. Because some of those crack versions have sometimes they're missing sound. Right. Some is the graphic a little.
36:48 --> 36:48 Bit.
36:48 --> 37:03 Different. Yeah. And some of just the cheats are added to it. Right. So but, but it's neat. It's like, it's like catalog, cataloging boot bootlegs, I guess. Yeah. It's a part of gaming history whether. Whether it was legal or not back then. So I like that they do catalog it. Yeah, that's.
37:03 --> 37:44 Pretty cool. Yeah. So D64s, G64s. There were a handful. There was a later floppy drive released, the 1581 that had larger capacity. There were only a handful of games released on it because It, Right. It's kind of that whole thing of like, hey, Most people have 16 gigs of RAM, so let's, you know, develop everything for 16 gigs versus a few people have 32. This was. Most people only have that. The, the 1541 drive, not the 1581 drive. But if you see a ROM that says D81, that's for the 1581 drive, it'll be a larger ROM. I think they were 800k.
37:44 --> 37:55 Or something. So if you wanted to use One of those ROMs on the C64 ultimate, does it work or do you need to actually plug in the separate floppy drive and do the old.
37:55 --> 37:59 Fashioned way? No, you go to the file browser, you find and.
37:59 --> 38:00 It supports. Emulates it.
38:00 --> 38:35 Yeah, yeah. And so instead of saying run disk, which is the feature that does all of the fanciness for you, you can say mount disk. And you can even mount them read only because obviously there was some software that wanted read only disks and stuff like that. So it is, it is, as we talked about, cycle accurate. The floppy drive is cycle accurate too. So if you load a rom, go grab a coffee and hold on to your butts for a little while. Now, there are some ways around it and I'll talk about those if.
38:35 --> 38:54 You'D like. Yeah, because like, I wonder if I was running that issue with the Mr. Because the carts load very, very speedily. Because they're carts, right? Yeah, but I noticed getting a lot of black screens when I was messing with the disks. Now I wonder if it was not I was having issues. It was more that I was impatient and that they're.
38:54 --> 40:42 Not loading. It could be. So it could be, it could be you were impatient. There's also games check if you're running NTSC or PAL mode because there are some games and not load if you're in the wrong mode. So double check that. But so the Mr. Actually, if you look at the, at the, the C64 core, I believe they have already defaulted to what's called Dolphin dos. So there was the original Commodore DOS that loaded. You know, it's that blue screen that gives you the memory output and gives you a cursor. That's the one that just basically loads everything sequentially and really slow off of a drive. There was a cartridge that was produced by Epics, the same people that made California Games and all of those. Well, but there was a cart called Fast Load that they produced that you could, you can mount that on your Mr. Or you can mount that on your C64 ultimate and in a Lot of cases. It'll speed things up, but it's also kind of a hack. But there was a company that produced what's called Jiffy Dos and it actually was a like, it required you to replace the ROM in your floppy drive because it adjusted the speed of the floppy drive as well. So you can go buy legally, you can go buy Jiffy DOS for either the Mr. Or for the Commodore 64 Ultimate. And it gives you a ROM for the DOS portion and for the drive portion. And so you can load those in. And it'll load. I mean it's still, you know, you'll, you'll, it'll be loaded by the time you're walking back with.
40:42 --> 41:54 Your coffee. It's a different time. Yeah, it's a different time. It's like one of my kids nowadays. Like we were watching a movie earlier today and it was on. It was one of the ones was on Plex, but it was one of the ones that was Plex Run. So there's ads. So every like 20 minutes there's a three minute commercial break. And look at my daughter's face. She's like, again, commercials. Again. I'm like, kiddo, you don't know how lucky you are not to have commercials every five freaking minutes. Oh yeah, this instant online. And I'm guilty of it too. Like when I'm playing games on the Mr. Or people who are playing games on Never Drive. You just flipping through games every five seconds. Like, it's great, it's fun. It's not what it was back then. Like, even the old nes, you had tapes. Right. Once, one at a time. It was a different time. So it's need to be forced to go through that process of loading the games up, especially if you're looking at the ones that are on tape. Tape is wild tech that, that worked back then where the idea was all the data was on tape and the computer has to listen to the audio on the tape and you have to rewind it and all that. That's crazy tech that, that was a thing. But it's, that's what they did. And it.
41:54 --> 42:55 Was awesome. Yeah. Or. And the moment, it's like, hey, I have to write data, so press the record button on your tape on your tape device. Yeah, yeah. So I mean, the thing, it's. It. I love the thing. I've had it, what, a couple weeks now. I've. If you're, if you're a new listener or you missed our Sisyphean challenge episode last week. I'm doing a game My Sisyphean game is going to be played on this. Now, to be fair, it plays old school slow as well. And that's another thing that this device has, is you can turn on overclocking. There is an overclocking mode. Yep. And you can take it. So that chip ran at 1 MHz back the original chip, 1 MHz. You can take this thing all the way up to 64 megahertz, I think. Good luck if you do that. Yeah, good luck if the timing is, is, is not based on like.
42:55 --> 43:14 Something or. Yeah, I was going to ask like if you're playing like the great Giana Sisters on that thing, which is, which is a very platformer game I have a lot of nostalgia for. If you were overclocking the 64 hertz, does that mess with the game's timing? Is the timer not going to just crazy or does it actually take that.
43:14 --> 43:28 Into account? And that is actually. So it's up to the game. Right. It's like going and playing an old DOS game. Right. Is it tied to clock cycles or is it talked to the system timer or whatever? Right. And so if it's tied to.
43:28 --> 43:28 Clock.
43:28 --> 43:31 Cycles. Yeah. Good luck. Don't, don't, don't do it at.
43:31 --> 43:32 64X.
43:32 --> 44:26 Right. Okay. But if it's tied to like an internal time like clock timer, it will speed up things like loading the game. It'll speed up, you know, like, especially if you get like pixel slowdown like we've all seen on NES and etc. Where like you get a lot of sprites on the screen and chunk. Kachunka chunk. Right. It'll speed stuff like that up. But yeah, some I've. I watched a person go through some, some, some games and some of them performed better. Some of them it was like it's now unplayable. So. But yeah. So overclocking. Yeah. So that's my Sisfian game. Anyway. I love the thing. I'm having a hell of a time playing with it. Like, it's kind of like, what do I want to try? Last night I'm like, do I want to play my Sisyphean game? No, I'll dial some.
44:26 --> 44:36 BBS's. Right. So yeah, before you know it, you'll be playing Street Fighter 6 next in Half Life 2 and just going to.
44:36 --> 44:36 Those.
44:36 --> 44:43 Tangents. Exactly. So I know you love the device. That. And it sounds really awesome. Is there anything you, you don't like or you feel like could have.
44:43 --> 44:53 Done better? That's a.
44:53 --> 45:15 Good question. Because, like, they definitely made improvements to the device. They brought some modern conveniences. The file browser is genius. And definitely the turbo mode is awesome. And just, like, there's a lot of great stuff there. But, like, I'd heard that. I know that you can stream it online. I think, like, you can connect to it over the network to stream. I heard that was a little bit janky for.
45:15 --> 45:44 Some folks. It's. It's janky, but it's cool. Yeah. Now that I've figured out how it works. So when you. When you bring up the primary menu on the device, there's a sub menu that if you don't go down and read, you know, like, press this for the other menu, you don't realize it's there. And you'll go. You'll go set up the streaming, but it won't work. Well, it's because you set it up, but you didn't turn it on. And that turning on is in that submenu. Right.
45:44 --> 45:44 Got.
45:44 --> 45:59 It. Okay. And so, yeah, so there's that. The things that I probably would complain about is the USB ports. You can't use controllers in the.
45:59 --> 46:00 USB ports.
46:01 --> 46:17 Oh, interesting. The only controllers that work are the actual controller ports. Now, that said, it has keyboard controller emulation, so you can actually use. Just like you do where yours is leverless, you can basically turn the keyboard into a leverless controller.
46:17 --> 46:26 For this. Okay, interesting. Yeah. I wonder if that's something that somebody could come around and develop a software for to enable a regular controller support for.
46:26 --> 46:26 The.
46:26 --> 46:56 Usb. Right. Because that would be an awesome thing. I mean, yes, it'd be really cool to use a C64 joystick, but as somebody who's messed around with the Atari CX40 off and on, it will last a little while still. I much rather Pad. Yeah. Or I much rather my levelless controllers. Right. Like, it just. Yeah. Especially because the C64, I mean, most of the games I tried. I know there's multiple fire buttons supported for some games, but it was almost always one button. And more often than not, up on the joystick was your jump. Right. The.
46:56 --> 46:57 Amiga.
46:57 --> 47:08 Thing. Right. And I mean, that's. That's for the time, but I would rather have a pad. Yeah, but I mean, that's still. I didn't realize it had USB ports. It makes sense because it has that tape, not tape thing with.
47:08 --> 47:18 The software. My other complaint is the Micro SD card slot. You have to open this thing up and take the keyboard off.
47:18 --> 47:21 It's internal. Oh. To get.
47:21 --> 47:42 To it. Yeah. Now, that said, this Thing one of. So once again, Gideon, it has an FTP server, it has a web server, it has a telnet server. So you can manage all of your files on that SD card from the network. But plugging in that thing, you have to open it up and.
47:42 --> 48:03 Get on. Crack it open. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's interesting they didn't add that to the back. I mean it's fine like once you've like you said, once you got it installed, you never can open it again. And that's, that's totally fine. But like that's like with my mister as well. I have mine embedded in an arcade cabinet behind me. I never go back there. I don't need to. I just, I just filezilla into it and do what I need to do. So. Interesting. I actually have web interface. Actually I use for mine most of the.
48:03 --> 48:27 Time now. Yeah. And the web interface is cool. You can, you can even do things like you can, you can send it code. So the web interface will have a little like box that you can, you can go create a whole bunch of basic code and paste it and it'll send it over. So you know the old days where like the magazines had you know, 400 line type.
48:27 --> 48:32 In. Yeah. To make games. Yeah. You'd have to type it out my hand to run it.
48:32 --> 48:52 Yeah, yeah. You could go copy pasta this and try it out. Right. And so via the web interface. So that's pretty cool. Yeah. The, the. All of the features that are built on top are really well done. I've been surprised. So trying to think if there's anything else. Yeah.
48:52 --> 48:55 Go ahead. Has he said how many of these he sold?
48:55 --> 49:04 You know, no, but I. From what I. Maybe he has. It's. The 10 is coming.
49:04 --> 49:04 To.
49:04 --> 49:05 Mind.
49:06 --> 49:06 Okay.
49:06 --> 49:09 So. Yeah. Or maybe that was like.
49:09 --> 49:18 What their first batch was September. Yeah. It says here in September 2025 C64 Ultimate Eclipses. 10 units sold. Milestone. So that when that was six.
49:18 --> 49:33 Months ago. Yeah. A lot of people bulk at the price and I get it because the base model starts at 349 now. Yeah. 349. 350. Yeah.
49:33 --> 49:33 U.S.
49:33 --> 49:47 Dollars. Right. But at the same time, if you Go source Gideon's Ultimate 2 Plus if you go source the case, if you go source the keyboard, you actually are probably going to be more expensive than this thing.
49:47 --> 50:16 Put together. So the way I compare it to is, is the Mr. Not to go keep going back to the Mr. But if you go back to a billion Mr. The classic Mr. Nowadays is almost 500 bucks. Yeah, I know we have clones now. Finally, after multiple years, we have clones that are under 200, but they're hard to get. But even, even putting aside the. Mr. When you just look at the components, yes, there's FPG board, but also the very well made housing plus mechanical keyboards.
50:16 --> 50:16 These.
50:16 --> 50:51 Days. Yeah. Are like 100 bucks, if not higher for, for a high quality one with if you're doing the springs and everything. So it's under 400 bucks, I think is more than good enough value for that. You just need to look at like what analog charges for their boutique devices. And that's what this is. This is a boutique device for a very niche market and they're catering to a very certain level of consumer. Like you have to have ties to this device from your childhood, I think to appreciate it. And if you do 350, whatever it is, it's totally fine. I think more.
50:51 --> 51:17 Than fair. Or you have to be a nerd like me who had the Apple, but always, always looked at the back of. Of game because this is something you and I have talked about. You didn't realize kind of the breadth of. Of the games that were available. Like my favorite, my favorite game, Bard's Tale. The display images on the back of the box were the Commodore 64 version. And I always drooled over them, right. Like it was.
51:17 --> 51:40 Like. Yeah. So I wasn't. What thing was shocked me because I was looking this up last night was I was looking what was the competitor to this device back in the day besides Nintendo, right. What was the PC or the computer equivalent to it. And like you said, it was the Apple and they both had same processor. The only real difference was the color support and the sound. Right. The Apple too had bleeps and bleeps from.
51:40 --> 51:41 The speaker. It had a beeper. It had.
51:41 --> 51:53 A beeper. Yeah. And that was it. Whereas C64 has outstanding music that is iconic in a lot of ways. I have something to talk for that later. Yeah, but also the colors. The Apple is what, like six colors.
51:53 --> 52:15 Or four? Something like that? Well, and honestly, most of us that owned apples had the monochrome. I had a monochrome green. My aunt had a monochrome amber. Amber. And after a while, Brother of Sin and I went to Radio Shack and bought an RF modulator and plugged it into the television and we're like, holy shit, the Apple.
52:15 --> 53:08 Has color. Like, yeah, yeah, but it's neat. That has color. But it's much more limited compared to the C64. The C64 games are gorgeous. And when you compare it to. For me, it's the Atari. I was playing a lot of the games I used to play in the Atari. Like Hero, which is an excellent Atari game. So much better looking on the C64. Donkey Kong looks pretty great. It's a very respectable Donkey Kong port on the C64. Not that every game is great on there, but a lot look good. One of my favorites, like Gianna Sisters, outstanding platforming game for the time. Or my favorite, I think has gotta be probably Space Taxi. Space Taxi is one of my favorite games. For those who don't know, it's Think Crazy Taxi. But it's a 2D lunar lander clone basically. But it has digitized voice, right. Like taxis there on a pad. There's multiple pads on the stage. Yeah, hey, Taxi. And you go over to it and it's not the same voice. I mean they modulate the voice so it.
53:08 --> 53:09 Sounds different. It's.
53:09 --> 53:09 Like.
53:09 --> 53:23 Either. Please. It's either like a deep voice, dude. Or like a high pitched whatever. And well, and I love that it's like Pad 2. Like you can actually hear that it's saying Pad 2. Right. And so it's.
53:23 --> 53:51 Really cool. But in terms of. While we're on the topic of sound, one of the cool things that I. I found out, I guess is last year there's a. There's a Disney movie called Elemental. It didn't do very well, but there's a stadium sequence in the movie and there's like a song playing the stadium. And I'm like, that song is catchy as hell. I love this track. I had to look it up and it was a. It's a remix of Zombie Nation by Kerncraft 400 which is like. I mean I.
53:51 --> 53:51 I'm not. That's.
53:51 --> 54:12 A great. Like you got you in chart of the music buffs. You actually. You chart and wool for all music buffs. I am not. Yeah, I know a good track when I hear it. So I looked it up. This track is 20 years old. It's a great track. I'm like, this is. This is great. It's based. It sounds like, you know, the old computers. And I looked up on it and the riff of Zombie nations was actually pulled from a C64 game called. Was it.
54:12 --> 54:14 Lazy Jones? Something.
54:14 --> 55:05 Like that. Yeah, yeah. And like. And you play Lazy Jones and sure enough that I'm not going to say here, but the core beep is there. So they lifted it from this game. Yeah. And I found out that. Not a lawsuit. But when their song became popular, they Reached a deal with the creator of the game. Because this is. This is a song that is played stadiums nationwide. Like it is super popular in stadiums. It's just wild. But that's. The music was that iconic for that generation. Right. Like as much as like C64, the Amiga. Yeah, just something about those computers had outstanding music and that was very influential for a lot of folks overseas as well in Europe. So it's guaranteed if you're playing a Genesis game. Odds are the people who worked on the Genesis game, if they're in the Europe. In Europe region, they probably cut their teeth on making games and music for the C64 and the Amiga. Yeah, it's a really.
55:05 --> 56:04 Rad thing. No, the sid. So the SID chip. I meant to talk about this a little bit when we talked about the SID chip. So the SID chip was very. I don't want to say it was future tech when it came out, but it was, it was. There was nothing like the SID chip when it came out. Yeah, multivoice, you know, had. It had different. I'm blanking on the terms. But anyway, multivoice processor. And the reason that the SID chips are so sought after, it's not that we. It's not. It's that we can't emulate them as accurately as we should. And the reason why is because that chip wasn't just transistors. It actually had analog oscillators and it had actual analog features in that chip that you can sort of emulate. You can only sort.
56:04 --> 56:41 Of emulate. It's. I saw someone else talking about this as well. Yeah. And you said as well earlier that very analog design in terms of the chips and they all sounded just a little bit different. And there's an analog warmth to these kind of things that you can't replicate digitally. You get close. Right. I see this with. When I do the podcast editing, there's certain compressors and filters that I use and they are all based on analog devices you would use in the 80s and the 70s. Right. And like they were based on analog analog circuits. And while they've digitally recreated them, they sound very close and I do.
56:41 --> 56:41 Like.
56:41 --> 56:47 Them. Yeah. They're not the same as the originals. Right. And even the originals, unit to unit, would sound a little bit.
56:47 --> 56:47 Slightly.
56:47 --> 56:54 Different. Right. It's kind of cool. I kind of want an analog compressor. I cannot afford the grand that they cost and I.
56:54 --> 56:54 Don'T have.
56:54 --> 57:10 Yeah, yeah. But that kind of stuff is very cool to me. Right. It's. It's like. It's like there's something about, you know, even the old tube TVs, CRT TVs. There's something about having a CRT TV in front of you and playing games on that versus trying to play it on the crisp, clean HDMI output's not.
57:10 --> 57:10 The.
57:10 --> 57:10 Same.
57:10 --> 57:43 Yeah. Yes. I mean this is an analog vga, right? I mean this is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so the, and, and from what I understand, I would love to get one of the ARM sids. So it's, it's an ARM processor that they figured out how to emulate some of those analog pieces. And I would love to get one. I can't buy one, but I'd love to get one, but dear God, I'm not. At least in the current market, I'm not going to go source a SID chip because a. You can't trust from ebay that it's not going to.
57:43 --> 57:44 Be broken. It's.
57:44 --> 57:50 Still working. They start at like 150 bucks a piece, right? I mean, well, 30.
57:50 --> 57:58 Year old. 30 year. They're probably gonna be 30 years old, right? Like these things aren't made anymore. So that is pricey for sure for such a small part of the.
57:58 --> 58:48 Package. Right? Yeah. Well, and then of course there's also like do I want the, you know, the 15, whatever or do I want the 8 85, whatever. Like, because they, as you said, they all have different sound, even, even like produced chip to chip. But then the different models had different sounds as well. So yeah, I've seen people that are like, I have both. And I switched to this one for this game and I switched to this one for this game because I can hear this tone here, but I can't, you know, it's like. Yeah, so that's, that's the one piece. I may, you know, if we can figure out, you know, tariffs or whatever, or if I can figure out a local distributor, I may get an arm SID or two for it. Which is obviously a lot less than buying an actual SID chip because they're not made.
58:48 --> 59:01 Anymore. Right? That's right. Yeah. That's pretty cool. Any, any other games you've played that on the C64 that you just want to call out? I know you're playing Wasteland this year as your Sisyphean game, which is an awesome one. That's another one I have to check.
59:01 --> 59:26 Out too. Well, so I had my son, my youngest, who still lives at home come in and we basically spun up a bunch of games. We spun up Lode Runner. You remember Lode Runner? Yeah, we spun Up Lode Runner. Load Runner still holds up. We spun up gorf, which is, is like a Space Invaders kind of copy duplicate thing. We spun up BC's quest.
59:26 --> 59:30 For tires. I love BC's quest for tires. Yeah, that.
59:30 --> 59:35 One'S great. I, of course have spun up Bard's Tale.
59:36 --> 59:47 Of course. Yeah, I watched some footage of that last night. It looks really good. Yeah, for, for the C64, like, it definitely looks great. Is that an Ultima are on there as well. Right? And they.
59:47 --> 01:00:52 Look fantastic. Yeah, well, and up through there was even a port of Ultima 6, which was like a VGA title on DOS. There is a port of Ultima 6. It's official. It's an official port now. It's, it's very stripped down. But, but all the way up through Ultima V, it was like those were originally developed on the Apple. Right. And so they are because, because Lord British was an Apple, Stan. And so. But what's funny is when they ported them to the C64. The C64, as you mentioned, has better graphics. As, as, as much as I hate to say that my childhood computer didn't have as good of graphics as the C64. And then. Oh, you mentioned the Apple had the, the internal piezo speaker buzzer, the beeps and the boops. But later on I did get what was called a mocking board. So it was an add on card that added a sound chip. But the problem is, is because it was an add on card, there were, I don't know, less than 20 titles that supported it. Funny enough, you.
01:00:52 --> 01:00:56 Mentioned Ultima. Like you said, if it's out of the box, then that's when they're going to support the base model that.
01:00:56 --> 01:01:50 Everybody has. You know, funny enough, you mentioned Ultima, Ultima 3 and 4 on the apple. I think both supported the mocking board. Okay, but, but once again, even the mocking board was playing catch up to the SID chips. And so yeah, so let's see, we played Gorf, we played Load Runner, we played BC's Quest for Tires. Oh, a, a sequel that was produced as part of the C64 ultimate called Jupiter Fracture, which is a sequel to Jupiter Lander. That is a hell of a game. That is. It's very much like Space Taxi. It's a lander game, but instead of picking up people and moving them, you're just trying to complete, you know, these maps that are, they look like, they look like it would be a Meat Boy style map. Right. Super Meat Boy. But it's.
01:01:51 --> 01:03:31 It'S hard. Yeah. I was playing this. I was playing this yesterday. It's control is very good and. And it's definitely nailed the lander physics. But there's. It's lander, but they've added gameplay mechanics to it. Like there's like force fields where you have to. You have to gas power your way through them. And I got to the one stage where you have to. You have to go down through it, but you can't go too much because you have to flip back around to yourself before you've got flying to the ground. It's really fun. It's really well done and it looks really graphically really cool. And that. That came out fairly recently considering then, like, that's the awesome thing about a scene like this. The C64 has fans that still develop software and games just for fun. Like I mentioned earlier, somebody had made a Super Mario Brothers One port for the C64. I think it was in 2020, 2010, thereabouts. Runs really well from what I've seen. It's really cool. So, yeah, it's neat to see games on this thing. This was while it was a computer. You can do all computer things to it. It was also very much a gamer's computer. Right. There were so many games for this device. When I scroll through the list of games, there's just tons there. And some are great, some are not, but there's a lot of gems even. There's a port of Outrun, which is the arcade racing game. Not as graphically nice as the NES version, but damn if it doesn't play really well. Like, it's very smooth. The controls are very spot on. Like there's some games that control and feel really well done. And then, you know, there's games that run like crap just like any game. Yeah, we did California games. This is my. When I think of California games, especially the hacky sack, but the surfing. Yeah, I think there was BMX in.
01:03:31 --> 01:03:31 This one. There.
01:03:31 --> 01:05:09 Was bmx. All those. All those. I remember because I played on the C64 version of that game because Epics had a bunch of them on the C64. And that sounds and plays excellent, just like I remember. And what was the other one? Oh, there's a. There's a pretty prolific game creator named Jeff Minter from the uk. I follow him on Blue Sky. He's a really awesome guy to follow. He just posts about sheep and English curry houses. It's awesome. He's very down to earth, but he's also made some of the Most bizarre and fun games on. On computers. He did a lot of Apple NC64 stuff. Have you ever heard the game Attack of the Mutant Camels? That was him. But there's one he. He used to make games when he was basically in high school and college. He didn't have access to play the arcades originals, but he look at screenshots and magazines and he would make his own version of them. So he made a version of Centipede called Grid Runner. And it's. It is fun to play. It's hard. All his games are bullshit hard, but they're really fun and unique. So it's the Millipede or Centipede style where the worm comes down the screen and there's mushrooms that block the paths. But as well, there are two turrets that are on the sides and the bottom of the screen that are shooting at you every so often. So you have to move your ship, avoiding the laser turrets while shooting the millipede and ducking the mushrooms. It's fun to play and there's been several iterations of that. So I like. I like playing his stuff on the 64 and the Mr. Because I'm like, yes, I have a compilation that Digital Eclipse did a while ago, but I like playing the original on like a core that makes the hardware. So that's kind of. But yes, some of the stuff's.
01:05:09 --> 01:05:28 Really cool. Yeah, you brought up. So it made me. It made me realize we've. We've played Boulder Dash, that Sinstress loves Boulder Dash. It's funny because I spun up Boulder Dash and I was like. I was just getting crushed by the rocks left and right, left and right. And Sinstress walks in and she's like. I'm.
01:05:28 --> 01:05:35 Just like. His core memory unlocked the skills come in. Yeah, yeah. Did you get the controller from them when you.
01:05:35 --> 01:05:42 Bought yours? No, I actually bought a. Hold on. I bought a.
01:05:43 --> 01:05:46 Hyperkin Trooper. Oh, right. Okay. So.
01:05:47 --> 01:05:48 CX40.
01:05:48 --> 01:05:49 Okay. Yeah.
01:05:49 --> 01:06:01 That's cool. Yeah. So awesome. I was gonna say there was another game I thought of while you were speaking that I definitely wanted to mention, so. Oh, I tried the Centipede that was on there. That was a.
01:06:01 --> 01:06:10 Good Centipede. Oh, Castle wolfenstein was on C64. I watched some footage there. I have to check that.
01:06:10 --> 01:06:12 One out. I remember I.
01:06:12 --> 01:06:22 Played Ghostbusters. That's an interesting version of it because you went. You have to enter your name into that one. And that's how it's saved. I think it was. That was how they.
01:06:22 --> 01:06:27 Did it. Well, and it had that digitized Ghostbusters voice, huh?
01:06:28 --> 01:06:37 Yeah. Yeah. See, the only version of that game I played as a kid was the Atari version, and it was not good. I did not. I did not try the C64 version. That's.
01:06:37 --> 01:06:40 Pretty interesting. Stunt. Stunt racer. I don't know if you ever played.
01:06:40 --> 01:06:42 Stunt racer. I think I tried.
01:06:42 --> 01:07:13 That one. It's. It's kind of this. It's. If you, if you ever. If. If you go look it up, it's this. It's this vehicle where you're staring out the front of the dashboard and it's got like six, you know, fire stacks from the tur. From the engine. Right. That are coming off. But that's one of those that I watched the person turbo boost to 2 or 3x and. And it actually played a lot better. So. Okay. Because this is back in the day when it was five frames per second. Right. And we thought that.
01:07:13 --> 01:07:14 Was great. That's how we.
01:07:14 --> 01:07:14 Liked.
01:07:14 --> 01:07:18 It. Yeah. Now you have RGB lights to make it go so much faster because that's how RGB.
01:07:18 --> 01:07:19 Lighting works.
01:07:19 --> 01:07:22 That's right. That's why Chard invested in all.
01:07:22 --> 01:07:22 His.
01:07:22 --> 01:07:59 Lights. Yeah. Well, C64 ultimate is a very cool project and far, far more polished than I imagined it would be. Far more, I think, done. Done justice. Like, I did not think it would ever happen this way. To take a brand that was sitting in a closet somewhere, rusting away, and to take it as a YouTuber to get the funds, get a proper team. And when I say proper team, like, I think his marketing exec is from Disney. Like, he. It's a proper company. And then delivering a device that is so true to the nostalgia that people have for it is pretty awesome. So pretty.
01:07:59 --> 01:08:40 Cool device. I would love to see them. And I don't know that they will ever get this because Cloanto, who does the Amiga emulator that you can get, owns the. Owns the property for Amiga. I don't know that they will ever give it up, but I would love to see them do a partnership and produce a version of an Amiga that's very much like this. I would love to see that. I think, honestly, from the fact that he basically took this from. Hey, we're talking about purchasing in. In either May or June or early, like, you know, mid-2025 to. A lot of people got these under their tree.
01:08:41 --> 01:08:41 By.
01:08:41 --> 01:08:44 Christmas. Yeah. Like the fact you never see with.
01:08:44 --> 01:08:45 These things.
01:08:45 --> 01:09:14 Yeah, yeah. Like how many kicks. I have backed a handful, more than a handful, probably tens of Kickstarters. And I always expect that hey, a year is, is fast with a Kickstarter. Right. And there was a Kickstarter project that I backed, that System Shock 2, which we, we talked about on the, like that took, I think that was five years. I mean, so yeah, you.
01:09:14 --> 01:09:52 Know, I, I think there's board game Kickstarters I, I've done and, and like I expect delays whenever I, I back a board game Kickstarter, I expect a delay of at least six months, if not longer. Just that's just the way it is. Right. Like they always underestimate how long these things take to make and for him to do like an actual like computing hardware device is pretty awesome. If you go to the website, he's, I saw the factory tour like overseas because they're built in a Chinese factory. So he's over there with his team going through the process of, you know, how they're assembled and everything like that and walking through the whole step, step by step. And that's really cool to see. So it's, it's very interesting to get that behind the scenes look at the development of.
01:09:52 --> 01:10:38 This device. Yeah. And, and the, and the quality. I know. So I, I'm on a number of Facebook groups that are about this product and there are a lot of people that are complaining that they haven't gotten theirs. Obviously they're going as fast as they can. Right. And there are people that are complaining about either the Flex or the buckle. But I mean aside from that, like the, the quality, you know, it's a, it's regular Phillips screws to open it and there's no label to pull off. There's no void your warranty to open this thing up. But these screws don't go into plastic. They go into actual metal nuts that are in the case. You know, I mean, so they're doing their best. And yes, there's going to be some.
01:10:38 --> 01:11:23 Outliers. So. And I think it's one of those things where like they've been pretty responsive to any issues with, with the quality control of the device. So I mean it's one of the things where you look back six months from now and see where, where they stand. But so far seems like a really great launch. I mean for the most part outside of that Flex issue, every review I've seen has been pretty glowing that this is how you do, this is how you do justice to your nostalgia purchases for hardware. So I guess as neat as it as analog is with their kind of modern takes on, on retro, I kind of like when you have a company that's like Commodore now that sells the original ugly ass beige color. That's, that's what I want to see. That's my personal. The RGB one is cool too. I want to see the original. So I'm print. It's.
01:11:23 --> 01:11:23 Pretty.
01:11:23 --> 01:11:26 Rad. Yeah. Well, anything else? It seems like a really.
01:11:26 --> 01:11:33 Great device. One last thing. This is a manual, my friend. This is a manual that came.
01:11:33 --> 01:11:34 With it. What's.
01:11:34 --> 01:11:55 In there? Well, it teaches you basic. It teaches you Commodore based. Like this is the original. It teaches you about Petsci characters. It teaches you about. I mean like this is, this is a. It has the modern pieces. It talks about the modem emulation. Oh, printer emulation. You can print to JPEGs, which is cool.
01:11:55 --> 01:11:56 As hell.
01:11:56 --> 01:12:03 Oh, nice. Yeah, you can print. Yeah. So you can go to like old print shop and do like one of those really janky, you.
01:12:03 --> 01:12:06 Know, whatever. Print it to jpg, the birthday cards with the.
01:12:07 --> 01:12:36 Yeah, yeah. So it goes, it goes over all of that, but it also includes the basic, you know, teaching you basic. It teaches you PETSCII characters, it teaches you graphics. Like this is, it's cool because this, this is also retro. When computers came with manuals that went over how it worked, went over and taught you how to build things with it, you know, so it's, that's pretty, it's just really.
01:12:36 --> 01:12:39 Well done. So yeah, that's.
01:12:39 --> 01:12:39 Awesome.
01:12:39 --> 01:13:57 Device. Yeah. Well, I mean I think that's a week, week of episode of Press me to cancel. Thanks everybody for listening as we recently launched a Patreon for our podcast. So for those who want to support us, you don't have to totally voluntary, but anything you do donate toward our show goes to paying for the cost of running a podcast and we do appreciate it. For as low as a dollar you gain access to some behind the scenes videos where we talk about things. Last week you could hear me rant about the Switch 2 and Metroid Prime 4. That was a good time. And that's as low as a dollar a month. We're various tiers, unlocked rewards, behind the scenes chats on our discord and that kind of thing. And if you sponsor at our Circus Charlie tier, we shout your name out. So we have two people who are supporting higher than that tier and that's enthusiast Jeff and Von Beardley. Thank you again guys for your support. We thank all our Patreons but you too, thank you for the extra money that you donate each month. We do appreciate it. In terms of our podcast, we go live every, every Friday at 9pm Eastern over here on YouTube and over on Twitch. Press B to cancel. And then of course, our audio episodes can be found on any of your favorite podcasting apps on the following Monday. Sinister. Actually, I have stuff to shout out for once. For once, I have stuff to shut out. But I want to hear you. What are you doing over.
01:13:57 --> 01:14:31 On Twitch? On Twitch I. On Saturdays, I'm over on Soul Archaic's channel doing some DJ stuff as DJ Spinistar. And a fair number of Mondays, I'm over on my DJ Spin a Star channel, also on Twitch, and I am recording my playthrough of Wasteland. So we'll see where that lands. I don't know where that's going to land. It may be on my channels or it may be over on press B. Probably on press B. But yeah, I'm working on that.
01:14:31 --> 01:16:38 As well. Awesome. And then for me. So I. I told myself 2026 was a year. I start making videos and I have been. I made a bunch, actually, and they're scheduled to drop over the next couple weeks. The first things first, I finally. I finally did my Sisyphean Game. Or, sorry, my. My Wheel of pain game from 2024. I know it's late, but I did record a playthrough of Buck Bumble, which is a game that's awful. There's a point toward the end of that playthrough where I'm like, you know, I. Maybe I could act, baby. I could beat Buck Bumble. Maybe I want to beat Buck Bumble. Because I got close, I thought, because the scoreboard only went to stage eight and I was stage seven. I'm like, maybe I could do this. Only to find out afterwards when I looked it up, there's 17 stages in Buck Bumble. That game is awful. That's the game from. Anyway, it's the game for the Star Fox people. They could have done better. But I did record it and that comes out next week. But I also, because I was feeling frisky, I also did my Sisyphean Game. My the mini Wheel of Pain that Wolf and I spun. He got Rascal and I got Mario Lost level. So I played that Trash Fire for an hour. Although I do think I kind of secretly like lost levels. But you can see that playthrough here on the Pressby Channel. What else? Oh, and I also did just. Just to try it. I don't know if folks want it or not, but I do play enough games, especially indie titles throughout the year. I feel like some of them don't get enough attention or sometimes I want to talk about them. And they're games that maybe we wouldn't do an episode on for the podcast. So there's one game called Absalom that came out last year that I kind of slept on. It's a fantastic beat em up. It does have roguelike elements which are fine, but the beat em up mechanics, Chef's Kiss, like really a fantastic beat em up game. So you can see a video of me playing through and talking through a little bit of that over as well on the channel. So if you're interested in any of those games, please check them out. I'm looking for feedback on these videos. Do you want these? Do you not want to see them? I don't want to overload, folks, but I am planning to do a few of these videos over the next few weeks to test the waters because I'm trying to, I'm trying to learn how to do the video stuff with.
01:16:38 --> 01:16:39 DaVinci resolve.
01:16:39 --> 01:16:57 So nice. This is kind of my practice and I like playing these games. So. So check that out. Oh, and of course, check out our website, presbytercancel.com and presby.org, we're still paying for it, so please use it. Otherwise, I think that's everything. That's an episode, everybody. Have a great week. Thanks for joining us and see you.
01:16:57 --> 01:16:59 Next week. Yes.