Mini version of Commodore 64 will be released at the end of March
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XP-200
Anybody looking to enjoy a fully licenced C64 emulator should go try C64 forever, the best way to play any C64 game these days, and it wil also play all other Commodore games from the Pet,Vic-20, C16,Plus/4, and 128.
And while you are at it grab Amiga forver as well, two of the best ways to play these old games today without the hardware, now if only they would hurry up with Atari St and Speccy forever. 😉
Vtech
Good news for gamers, as long as no one can put this into mining
scatman839
No mate I think we're safe, no one is going to be using a Commodore 64 for mining
TonyTurbo
to many absolute classics missing from that list.
Fox2232
Will add that gem, I liked so much:
[youtube=Mp78yel2p9A]
Guy may not know half of mechanics driving certain events in game. But still OK to look at.
flimbo
So what's the difference between this - and me running winvice on my pc rigged up to my big flatscreen via hdmi cable? Apart from the fact I can play ANY c64 game on my emulator? Oh £64.99 that's what. I think I'm better off my way....
scatman839
honestly fauk all mate, who even profits from this now? Certainly not the creators or the original makers of the games.
I'm about 5-10 yr too young for c64/atari, and what I played was bad games. Nostalgia at it's finest.
RealNC
I had a C64, but it was in the late 1980's (forgot when exactly,) where it was considered outdated already, and thus you could get a used one very cheaply.
The majority of the games on the C64 don't hold up today. Except for the music, that SID chip was really good. But back then, these games were a lot of fun and I have fond memories from that time.
And it's that kind of nostalgia these "Mini " devices are exploiting. But this doesn't work on me. I see these "Mini whatever" systems as complete fakes. A cheap emulator setup with a bunch of ROMs. In other words: junk.
(I love emulation otherwise, mind you. But not this. A Raspberry Pi will do the job a million times better at about the same price.)
H83
The difference is that a good retro console is much better than playing the same games on a PC. I speak with experience because i´ve bought the NES and SNES mini and playing on them is an absolute joy, much better than using emulators on a PC. Just the controllers alone are worth the money they ask.
Of course i´m talking about quality items made by Nintendo and this mini Commodore doesn´t seem to have the same quality standards...
RealNC
I doubt it. On a PC you can find very accurate emulators that are too demanding for the CPU that's in an (S)NES mini. You can also use g-sync and get input latency that's just as low as the original hardware (or even lower.)
H83
Yea you can get all that and even more but retro gaming is about the gameplay and that "familiar" feeling not about better or enhanced graphics and the controllers really help on that aspect. Of course this is my opinion and i understand others thinking the opposite way.
Monchis
But lots of these new retro consoles don´t even have analog output lol. I´d rather use my pc with a high accuracy emulator on my spanking new jvc crt:
https://i.imgur.com/akimgN6.jpg
0blivious
For this to be authentic, you should have to type in some code to run anything.
Fox2232
Not necessarily, it can start with some kind of loader. (Like having cartridge in and active.)
It is emulator, and it will not be authentic. As other emulators, it can produce same logical results to same assembly code, but hardware quirks "can't" be emulated.
RealNC
You can emulate hardware quirks using cycle-exact emulation, but it's quite demanding. Higan for example (previously known as BSNES), does this, and is able to reproduce graphics effects in games that depend on corner-case quirks, but requires something like a 3GHz quad core CPU or something like that to run at full speed. None of these "mini" emulator boxes come even remotely close to be able to provide such low levels of emulation. They only provide a cheap ARM CPU.
Another solution would be an actual hardware logic implementation on an FPGA, but again, these "minis" obviously wouldn't ever do that. They need to be dirt-cheap to produce and turn in a big profit.
These "minis" do not seem even remotely authentic to me. If you don't put on a cartridge, or put a cassette or floppy in, there's no authenticity to be had for me. Switching this on and being presented with a ROM selector menu just kills it for me. Nothing can replace the feeling of putting that floppy in the drive and hearing it work as it loads the game. It's a big part of the authentic experience.
For example, an emulator "mini whatever" cannot replace this experience:
[youtube=F1GNx-qlEj8]
Fox2232
By HW Quirks, I meant no logic expressions. But electrical synthesizations.
At the end of each line to human was analog information. (Sound/Video/...)
Few unique physical transistors can do and react to signal in ways digital emulation can't do 100% in real time.
Hardly matters how many iterations CPU can do, or how wide-bit-depth is. It is digital.
Digital can get pretty close. never 100% analog.
RealNC
I have no idea what this means.
The C64 was a digital computer. So was the NES and anything else made in the 80's. Analog computers were made in the 70's and some pong-clone consoles were analog, but that's about it.
Fox2232
Have you heard about modem? That little box which took digital information and "modulated" it into analog sound transferable via standard telephone line?
Guess how those bits from PC of the old got into connected TV. Does PAL rings the bell?
How does zeros and ones from SID get to be played? Modulation via electricity handling transistors. Not that much different from modem. Except those transistors on c64, those capacitors, ... All made very unique blend.
In all those years, there was no emulator which would sound like physical c64.
RealNC
You need modeling for that. It can be done. It's been done for the MT-32 emulator, for example (munt.) It models the analog stages of the module extremely accurately. You won't be able to notice a difference. Although you can turn that off if you want, to get higher quality sound 😉
But I agree with you that the original hardware is always the best, because... it's the real hardware. But emulation and analog modeling can give you extremely good accuracy, to the point of transparency. But not many emulators do that. It's hard to do.
