Memory's a weird thing, isn't it? Your brain records every moment in your life, and locks it away forever. And then, suddenly, a sound, a smell, a piece of beige plastic can just send you tumbling back in time to a different time. Sat on the floor of my office, unboxing the C64 Mini, I wasn't 33 any more, but eight, and sat at the blue formica table in the corner of my bedroom. In front of me, a hand-me-down Commodore from my neighbor, an engineer who taught himself BASIC in his semi-retirement. He chain-smoked cigars and was never without a tin of stout in his hand, smells that permeated the skin of this computer, never to be washed away.
It's these pangs of nostalgia that British company Retro Games Ltd. is looking to take advantage of to sell a "mini" version of the Commodore 64. For the uninitiated, the microcomputer was the computer of the '80s, and the first machine that many folks ever got their hands on. Even in Britain, which had been the crucible of the Sinclair vs. Acorn battle, Commodore holds a special place in millions of hearts.
My own Commodore 64 was hooked up to a 10-inch, black-and-white portable TV with a bent aerial. White-out was painted on to mark the tuning locations for BBC 1, BBC 2 and ITV, and I vividly remember playing (Pac-Man knockoff) Radar Ratrace, purely because I had the cartridge, which loaded faster than games on cassette. I used that battered, beige machine for so long on that TV that, when I finished unboxing and turned the C64 Mini on, I was actually surprised to see it output video in color.
via Engadget RSS Feedhttps://www.engadget.com/2018/04/06/c64-mini-review/