Commodore 64
Released in 1982, the Commodore 64 was Commodore’s second personal home computer. The C64 is officially the world’s best-selling home computer. It commanded a leading position in the affordable home computing market for many years. C64 sales outperformed other big names such as Apple & IBM whose products could not compete in terms of price versus ability.
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About The Commodore 64
There are two versions of the Commodore 64, the original ‘breadbox’ design and the Commodore 64C, released in 1987. The Commodore 64C essentially is just a redesign with some minor changes to the hardware.
This did include the SID sound chip updates to now use the MOS 8580 chip. Unfortunately, it adversely affects the way it outputs samples, which output at a much lower volume than the chip sounds.
Other variations of the C64 do exist, such as the 64GS and ‘portable’ SX-64.
Utilising the MOS 6510 as its main processor, the C64 clocked in at @ 1mhz with a total of 64k RAM.
Of course, no system is successful just on hardware alone. The Commodore 64 benefitted from a huge amount of developer support. This was assisted by Commodore building relationships with developers and providing detailed documentation to them in advance, whereas competitors such as Atari did not. This paid off handsomely as the system was able to launch with a lot of strong software titles.
The Commodore 64 was technically succeeded by the Commodore 128 but remained in production until 1994.
A lifelong avid gamer and computing enthusiast, Matt has decades of Retro Gaming experience. Now over 40 years old, Matt now even considers himself retro, but fortunately, nobody has developed a Matt emulator (not yet at least!).