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This weekend I got my MEGA65 in the mail. Okay, it was there before last weekend, but I wasnt at home, so I got my hands on it yesterday.
20 years ago, the home computer era was coming to an end. But the Commodore Company had plans to release a succsessor to their popular home computer Commodore 64: The Commodore 65 (yes - a very creative name 😁).
The C65 was supposed to be backward compatible to the C64, because there already were lots of games and software for the C64, but Commodore wanted to make it faster and improve graphics and sound. They even developed a new version of BASIC with lots of improvements.
But there where already succsessors of the C64 - even from the own house: The C128 and the Commodore Amiga. End it was the end of the home computer era... So the C65 was never released to the public. The existing prototypes are rare collectors items today.
Some retro nerds rebuild this computer on FPGA basis, renovated the firmware and extended the hardware. The result is a modern retro home computer - the MEGA65 now sitting on my desk.
First impressions:
The home computers comes in a nice 80s style designed box. There are even two photos of excited kids using a MEGA65 on the backside.
The box contains the MEGA65, a printed manual (in the design of the original C64 manual) and an international power adapter.
The computer makes a very good impression: the case feels valuable, the keyboard has an enjoyable haptic. It has ports for floppy, micro-SD, HDMI and VGA and even a network port. You can connect two original C64 Joysticks.
On the first boot, the machine starts a demo disk with some basic games, demos and tools. Its nothing spectacular but enough for a quick demostration. There is also a GEOS (graphic environment) and an enhanced BASIC editor on the internal SD-Card.
My first impression is very positive. Its a pleasure to handle the device, it defenitely makes fun to use the keyboard for typing. On the software side many things are still under developement and i guess it wont be many exclusive releases. But I think it can make homecomputing fun again.
Best fact is that it has a C64 mode, so I can use it for all my Commodore64 games!
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you can find this blog post in german in my www blog: