I feel like such a hacker. I feel like an old man ranting about technology
being better in the day. I wasn't even around for this. It's working. Why can't
we just have all computers be like this? Commodore 64 Ultimate. 42 years later
and we're here. Same same but new. What's new? Well, besides the snazzy
packaging being almost a faithful recreation of the original, there's a
lot more than meets the eye. All right. Wow. Okay, cool. So, they they've really
sorted this out. We get a flag, a white flag. It's not a white flag of
surrender. It's more like they're staking their claim. Welcome to your
digital co oasis. The sea is just there.
Here we are. So, there's a few versions of this out there that Pomodoro is
releasing. This is the the RGB, the Starlight version, and there's also the
Founders Edition, which is like made with 24 karat plated gold key caps. This
one's a little bit more fun. We have the manual. This thing is sick. This looks
pretty substantial. We also have some cool accessories here. HDMI stickers.
Oh, those actually look pretty sick. the very second. We'll talk about this one
in a little bit. And power. And they have a bunch of adapters, too. So, think
we'll fish around in the box and get the right one there. Oh my god, the length.
Wow. All right. So, that's the packaging. So, you're probably looking at this and thinking, "What is this?"
For those of you who don't know, this is a whole brand spanking computer. Like,
this this is this is it. This is the thing. There's a few ports here that
we're going to go over that allows it to connect to a bunch of stuff both from
the past as well as some modern stuff. Off the gate, here's the keyboard. Um,
they're using some form of a red switch. I believe it's very linear, very similar
to the original one is kind of kind of been reading online. Little bit of flex
here, but that just might be from the translucent plastic they're using, too.
We know translucent plastics have different tolerances here. Some
wonderful Commodore 64 badging here. Oh, power indicator and it uses this thing
called a bread bin design. For those of you who don't know, it's where you put bread in. A big part about Commodore's
original design was it was supposed to blend in with, you know, the home
environment. Their previous machines seemed to be a little bit smaller, more
cumb, the Vic 20, but this kind of took on its
own form. And part of that form factor was having expansions. So on the back we
have a few things, right? The original one had very similar ports. So we have
the memory expansion for cartridges and RAM expansions back in the day. This one
just does game expansions and program expansions. We've got stereo audio. We
have the video out serial. That's a 8 pin video out. So that can connect to
the old monitors back in the day that used to work with the old 82 versions of
Commodore. We also have the serial port. So any of the old accessories you can
actually use it with this new one. We also have a cassette reader port. So you
can put your cassette uh reader here, put the old cassettes from back in the
day, and it will read it through that port. But then this user port, which was
just a big configurable slot here, is now HDMI, Ethernet, and two USBAs. Bring
it to the side, you have your two game ports. So, this is unchanged from the
original. You can put in your original joysticks and controllers that would
have gamed with the original Commodore 64. You have a multi-function power
switch. So, back in the day, it was just an onoff. This allows you to do some fun
things in between, and a power connector. On the back though, something
that's really noticeable with the translucent is you actually have the
signatures of a bunch of the Commodore founders and original team in the shape
of the Commodore logo. Another addition to this though, hardware wise. So, this
is using FPGA hardware emulation. Uh, this is hardware level. So, its ability
to work with a bunch of the old accessories is really cool. Its ability
to be able to run a lot of the same programs, like almost all of them with
pure compatibility is fantastic. But another thing you might notice with the
translucent is there's those two green things. And I believe those are the
audio chips. Back in the day, the Commodore 64 was known for its audio.
That's what beat it out on every spec and kind of made it that value buy for a
lot of people. And on top of that, you can connect this thing to internet without needing a modem like back in the
day. Uh you can do it with the Ethernet port here or with Wi-Fi. So connect it
to your home router and you're good to go. You're off to the races. And once we hook this thing up to the internet,
we'll dive right into it. Just like we're going to dive into our sponsor.
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Okay, look at those colors. Wow, that's like full RGB. And for those of you who
don't like RGB, we also have the original beige version, basic beige.
This is kind of what it actually looked like back in the day. But I like this
quite a bit. You can take a look and see all the colors that are coming through
the red function keys on here with like a trans clear and a translucent
keyboard. The first Commodore 64 had mouse support, but not USB mouse
support. This is brand new for the Ultimate. And so part of that is that
you can use that in a bunch of apps like GOS, right, with the operating system
for that. But if you want to have the more authentic retro experience, you can
always just reset your system. And now you're in basic, which is their
programming language that they've used forever. Well, with the flick of a
switch, you can go into the uh the UI
menu. Actually, here. Remember that cassette that came with it? The very
second? It's a play off of the very first. It was a demo cassette that uh
came with the original Commodore 64. And this isn't an actual cassette. No, this
is a USB stick with a bunch of demos and different programs. So, we're going to
put that in right now. Okay, it's loading up and you're going to hear it.
You can hear the thing. It's beeping. No mouse support for this right now. I
tried with the mouse, didn't seem to work, but yeah, doing WD. There's other
paint apps, but I think we can use this for now. Check it out. It's like MS
Paint, but not. It's Gio Paint. I guess
I can't really type full words because WD is being used to uh to control the
mouse. And just like modern day systems, it comes with system error messages. So
that was Gio kind of gave you that productivity element part of this too. I
think that and other software that was available. But before we dive into
anything else, the manual and this is honestly probably one of my favorite
parts about this pretty much almost one to one in terms of its design. I'm
learning full stack right now. People tell me Python's the way to start,
right? Learn Ruby on Rails and I'm going to counter and say basic. And that's
exactly what I can learn here. This is really cool and I can't wait to actually
spend some time learning through this. This seems to be really fleshed out.
There's like a lot of depth of information, too. It executes on the
whole thing of this is all you need besides community to get started on the
Commodore 64 Ultimate. Let's get back to the very second for a second. Part of
what's exciting today is that we're actually one of the first to have our hands on an updated version of this USB
cassette. What's cool and new about it is that it's coming preloaded with a
bunch of discs. It runs smoother. Some of those discs that are inserted include
Geo Paint and GeoRite, which are pretty cool productivity software. And before
we do anything else, we're going to connect to the internet. So, let's go all the way down here. We're going to do
Wi-Fi today. Make sure that's all enabled. And like anything else, we can
just select our access point. We're going to go with Sean Circuit.
Then we go back and it should say link up, which means, hey, we're good. Save
the changes to flash. And we're off to the races. So, we can do a lot of fun
things. Now, we're going to run the disc. We're going to see what happens.
Oh, you hear that? Okay. So, it has a speaker that's emulating the sound of a
disc system. So, back in the day, it didn't have a speaker. It had a disc
system which would were and all that stuff. Just letting you know that it's
doing something. And if you didn't hear the sound, well, then your system maybe
needs to be reset. This is the experience. You'd wait about half an hour for a program to load, but we're
not going to wait half an hour for this to load. Back in the day, most computers were a 48 kilobyte RAM fil computer.
This one went above that 48K, went to 64. So, it had more RAM, great sound
chips, and a ton more ability, I guess, with those things combined to do some
cool things. And this new one has 128 MGB of RAM. So, the new Ultimate can do
things that the 82 version only could dream of. So, demos are really cool.
This is like community generated stuff. And that's one of the biggest things with the Commodore 64 is that even
though it came out in 82, the reason why this is happening is because of the
community. and we're going to dive into Return of the Matrix 2. These demos,
they really push the envelope. As you can see, it went from a basic screen,
now it's all of a sudden it has all this u all these different characters on the
screen. That's part of the demo. Going to hear all this music and you're seeing
the matrixy font pop up. That's sick.
That's actually so cool. And you can also take a look and see how the entire
keyboard and the power button are reacting to the sounds. I mentioned that
there's like twice the amount of SIDs. Those are virtual ones. But if you
really wanted to, you could take the original SID chips and just put that in
here. The 3D graphics and stuff like that. You're seeing the shading. And
that's the part of the power this thing has, right? Uh it's just a testament to
just how unique it was in a time where computing seemed to be pretty expensive
and you didn't seem to get that much for what you paid for. And then something
like this comes along, which is that $595 USD back then. and it had this and
it tried to really corner the market based on its graphics and sound performance. Part of that price was what
got this into the households of so many people. But then there was another price
cut that happened around 1984 post the video game market crash. This was a
perfect opportunity for Commodore to really rise up and they ended up doing
that. They became the to this date the bestselling home computer of all time.
They sold 12 million units or north of that. We're going to try some video
games. There we go. So, we're going to try Bomberland. Legally distinct from
Bomber Man. Part of it, you've noticed is, hey, we're actually using the USB mouth because this thing got an update
recently. Oh, it's detecting it as like a bad input. I see. Ah, that nostalgic
experience of the game working, but only when it wants to.
>> Did you blow on it? >> Yeah. Oh, there we go. You know what? I forgot.
I swear if that work >> that worked. Okay, this is bomber land.
The land whose residents like explosive events. You can see very different
controls, but this is one of the many games we have. Robot Jet Action sounds
the least problematic, but it could also be the most problematic. See, I loaded
up pretty quick for a, you know, right
half an hour. That was a fraction of it. But see, it's cinematic, too. I really
care about Jetpack robot. There's a star. Nintendo didn't copyright the star
yet. Family friendly. >> This seems to be a single button
joystick game. We're going to play a little thing called funk paint. We have
we Okay, we have a mouse. L
T
I'm a graphic of my passion. Now, I've heard there's some really interesting
stuff happening under the hood. So, let's pop it off and see what we can find. Going to use my handy dandy LT
source screwdriver. It seems it's just the one, two, three screws here. Wow.
Yeah, some cables here that we just need to disconnect.
Perfect. Oh, wow. Yeah. So this is where we can put the SID chips. This is the
main board here. Yeah, that's the speaker where we're hearing the emulated sounds from. You have USB for the
keyboard. You have the micro SD port here. So it seems like there's quite a
bit of expansion here. And you can see the signatures here as well. I should
know about all of them, but getting especially I know the most about because
he had worked on physical hardware projects for reviving the Commodore 64.
And that keyboard that we see here is I
believe a direct translation of hardware he was working on. down to its bones is
just how much community support this thing has. Yeah, something you want to
notice here too is besides the signatures and just the interactability
you could have with this. The labeling. I figured out if I could lock in and
unlock the SID chip here where different chipsets could go, what the FPGA board
actually contains. It seems like there's quite a bit of educational potential here if someone was just to crack this
open and take a look at it. I fall in love with it. I'm probably going to take
this home. But if you want one of your own, you can find at commodore.net. They
have a store full of merch as well as these machines available for sale
starting at 325 all the way up to 550 for the founders edition. If retro
computing is your thing, you can check out Plof's coverage of the Retro 98
right here, over here. Just check it
out. It's a really cool beige case. You know, it's retro, but it's modern.