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Back to the future for Christmas 2025

As a grumpy old man, I miss the computers we all loved back in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Times were much simpler then -- there was no malware, there was no internet, there was nothing but an 8-bit processor and a janky keyboard with BASIC and some assembly code (if you were up to it).

Despite the limitations of 1MHz processors and tiny, tiny amounts of RAM, we did some really cool things with those old "home computers" and we had an awful lot of fun doing so.

While kids today log into an online service, spend a few minutes downloading Cyberpunk, Fortnite or whatever -- then throw gigahertz of CPU and gigabytes of RAM at creating photorealistic graphics, the early days of computing saw us struggling to type in long BASIC programs from magazines. Don't get me started on those multiple pages of DATA statements which consisted of nothing but numbers and commas.

A single typo meant the whole thing would crash when you typed in RUN.

Now if you have a nostalgic yearning for those early days of computing then the ideal gift to yourself has just gone on the market.

Imagine if the machine of yester-year could be recreated using state of the art technology.

Well that's just happened.

If you were a fan of the Commodore 64 you can now buy it again -- in the form of the reborn C64 Ultimate.

Using modern FPGA technology to acurately recreate the original's logic circuits and building it all into a deadly-accurate reproduction of the original case and keyboard, the "Ultimate" may well be the best thing an aging geek could get this Christmas.

To be honest, I was never a fan of the C64. It had a crappy display format and the only Commodore product I ever yearned for was the PET.

Even the Amiga just never spun my wheels, despite its (for the era) awesome graphics and sound capabilities.

I have to concede however, that the C64 was an incredibly popular home computer that was considered by many to be the gaming machine of the day.

Unlike many other machines of the era, the C64 had dedicated sound and video chips that gave it very impressive colour graphics and multi-voice music capability. Dual joystick ports and the ability to connect disk drives without the need for an expensive "expansion interface" were also points in its favour.

This machine came from an era when many of the most popular games of the day were written by individuals, in their grandmother's basement. The hardware was so simple and the gameplay so elementary that almost anyone with some spare time and a good idea could break into the big-time. Compare that to today where top-tier games require an investment of tens of millions of dollars or more and teams of developers, graphic artists etc.

Looking at the reviews, this reborn C64 seems to have been very well implemented, mainly because it appears to have drawn heavily on the C64 retro community's efforts and hard work.

Although I'm not a C64 fanboy, I sure as hell wouldn't mind one of these machines and I'm sure that it would result in a huge amount of time being wasted round here with peeking, poking and hacking up fun bits of code.

Although there are C64 emulators around, none of them compare to this machine which, because it has cycle-accurate hardware emulation through its FPGA, is also hardware compatible with all the old peripherals. Despite this total backwards compatibility, the C64 Ultimate comes with an impressive array of additional capabilities such as internet connectivity, support for USB peripherals, SD cards and more.

Ah well, it is perhaps as well that I can't afford one. I already have far too much to do and too little time to spend doing it so a distraction like this would not help at all.

Carpe Diem folks!

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