Yep, a little disappointing it's an emulation. A new era of Commodore OS' would have been welcome, particularly for the audio community.

My first music computer was a Commodore Amiga1000, then 2000, running OctaMed sometime in the late 80s. I knew absolutely zero about computers but was instructed how to boot up kickstart, load the desktop program and run OctaMed. A mate printed me a copy of the 10,000 page (that's how big it is in my memory) manual for OctaMed and off I went into a massive upward learning curve. I didn't use the audio side much, (wasn't much of a fan of the 8 bit audio) as I had hardware that sounded much better. I ended up mainly using it as a 16 channel hardware sequencer and recorded to tape.

When I migrated to PC, around 95, even though I could now do 16bit 48kHz audio, I was sorely disappointed with the MIDI performance. I could never get a solid sync, the jitter was terrible and used to cause massive headaches. I now experienced the world of blue screens and dodgy software, something that NEVER happened with the Amiga as they were absolutely rock solid. Even to this day MIDI is still pretty terrible (better than it was) out of the box with both Mac and Windows machines unless you have audio sync.

Honorary mention to the Atari ST, that was another system with rock solid MIDI timing. Never owned one personally but worked on them plenty with the original Cubase.

 

@Haze I once borrowed an Atari 1040 ST from my friend in the 90s, and it was a solid piece of equipment, it had probably the most beautiful monochrome monitor I've ever seen, crystal clear image in high resolution, perfect for working with Cubase

 

Wow, you must have had the only stable Amiga in the world. Every Amiga owner I know including myself knows "the world of red Guru Meditation Errors" too good.

 

debian linux xfce with some theme, in a commodore box. waste of money

 

Here we are….old school.
I still own the old c-64 and i still use it for fun, with midi cartridge and sequencer prophet..

 

I don't understand the excitement about an OS with almost no compatibility with most of the programs I'd want to use. This is just nostalgia hype.

 

I don't know.. Quite pricey for the specs.
I guess the novelty of having the breadbin on your desktop wears off rapidly.
I would have preferred a c64 II case, one that makes it possible to type for more than a few minutes. (for those who never had the breadbin: put your keyboard on some books and write an email. you gonna get the idea how having one of these is).

 

Meh... I still have the original in the attic. I'd just have to replace some capacitors to get it running again.

 

Doesn't even come with a thick and sticky layer of nicotine. Totally inauthentic. 0/10.

 

I always really liked the story why that cryptic message came about: they had a digital meditation mat and the message was for the Amiga devs to go chill out and meditate when the Amigas would inevitably crash. But yes, they were very common crashes, and not knowing the story then they were frustrating as fuck.

It's interesting to see our generation of Amigists and Atarists (are those real words?) pretty roughly split between what we've used since then. Most Amiga musicians I know (counting myself among us) used Trackers and sample manipulation and ST was just natural inside a MIDI studio. And now the Atari folk mainly still use Logic and Cubase whereas Amiga people use Ableton or Bitwig. Not a scientific study though, just my viewpoint.

 

Isn't VICE a better emulation of C-64? It's been around for decades and aside from C-64 it also emulates all other Commodore computers: CBM-II, C-128, VIC-20, +4 and PET. It's loads of fun!

 

if you replace the flux capacitor, I beleive you can actually create female humans. I saw a documentary by John Hughes about it. I think it was called "weird Science"..

 

Dang, brings back a lot of memories, I also had a C64 when I was a little kid and an Amiga 500 later until I was forced to buy a PC for college.

I also bought a cartridge, but not for MIDI. "The Final Cartridge II", to make game pirate copies.
Differences... and not in my favor...

 

Last edited: Oct 14, 2024

they were pretty stable. but yeah you could invoke the Guru, usually running a weird demo disk or some odd bit of software. I think os 1.3 was more prone to such errors, by 3.1 or so it was rare. I still miss being able to pull down a screen and see the other programs running behind it, and many of the demo scene music disks were really good I've got a couple cd collections of compiliations someone sold. I ought to push them through an emulator and make a streaming mod music channel for the old home stereo. Got a couple fm transmitter I could broadcast them thru out the house and yard for even more fun.. Radio Amiga is on the Air!!

 

The c64 was my first true love

Making music, drinking beer and going to demo parties were those two where combined




(x2001 demo party)

 

Yep, come to think of it I remember the Guru Meditation, but think that was more when running graphics intensive programs. I honestly never had a single issue whilst running Octamed.

 

Cubase didnt exist for the Commodore 64, that was Pro16.. Still have two of these collecting dust in the garage. Time to bust out some California Games or Ultima V maybe.

@SineWave - I'd bet their Linux build in there is just running VICE as it is hah. Pretty sure Nintendo just uses SNES9x/BSNES/Nestopia/etc on the Switch.

 

wtf ...this LED shitism is unblvbl(also with other product sorts) ...a retro machine
equiped with such shit and colors , how dumb is that....and on top spectral colors

---
BTW i think "Die dunkle Dimenision" the dark dimension was the first
roleplay computer game ever ....a good one at least .

 

Last edited: Oct 16, 2024

the dude in the background sniffing his armpit seems like a perfect summary

 

Well that was exciting for about 2 seconds. I think I'm going to go out and buy an original C64 though, that would be freaking awesome.

I do admit a new version of a C64 that ran the original software and was decently priced but had modern monitor support, I would definitely pony up for that.