History of video games/Platforms/Commodore 64
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A recreation of a typical Commodore 64 gaming scene in the 1980's.
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History
[edit | edit source]The Commodore 64 was introduced in 1982 for $595, a price considered low given it's specs and enabled by Commodore's in house manufacturing.[1][2] The manufacturing price of each commodore 64 was about $135[3] giving Commodore about a $460 margin before shipping, advertising, and other costs are considered.
In time, the price of the Commodore 64 would drop to $200 and the manufacturing costs of the Commodore 64 would drop to $25.[4]
The Commodore 64 was discontinued in 1994, with 17 million Commodore 64 computers sold.[1][2]
Technology
[edit | edit source]Compute
[edit | edit source]The Commodore 64 is powered by the 8-bit MOS Technology 6510 CPU, clocked at 1.023 megahertz in NTSC regions or 0.985 megahertz in PAL regions.[5]
The Commodore 64 has 64 kilobytes of RAM.[4]
Hardware
[edit | edit source]The Commodore 64 can generate three channels of audio via a SID 6581 chip.[4]
Media
[edit | edit source]The only type of media that the Commodore 64 accepts without needing external peripherals are ROM cartridges. Cartridges were mostly used for video games and programming languages, but later also saw (and continue to see) usage for hardware enhancement.
The system was compatible with the Commodore Datasette tape drive, on which many users relied to load software, both retail, pirate or simply custom-written.
Much of the software was also distributed on 5¼-inches floppy disks to be read by Commodore 1541 or compatible drives, connected to the system through its "Commodore" bus. Similarly to previous Commodore disk drives, the 1541s worked like computers on their own, running Commodore DOS to load and save data, as well as interacting with the C64.
Notable Games
[edit | edit source]1987
[edit | edit source]- Bad Street Brawler / Street Hassle - A beat up up released on multiple platforms. An early example of a game which allowed players to pet dogs.[6]
Gallery
[edit | edit source]Commodore 64
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The Commodore 64 computer is built into the keyboard. -
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Audio output
[edit | edit source]- This is an example of the Audio capabilities of the SID 6581 chip.
- This is an example of Automatic Mouth speech synthesis output from a Commodore 64.
References
[edit | edit source]
- ↑ a b "Impact of the Commodore 64 : a 25th anniversary celebration, lecture by Adam Chowaniec et al. Computer History Museum". www.computerhistory.org. Retrieved 27 November 2020.
- ↑ a b "Commodore 64 - The Most Popular Retro Computer of All Time". Adafruit Learning System. Retrieved 27 November 2020.
- ↑ "Commodore 64 - History of the Commodore 64 Computer". history-computer.com. Retrieved 27 November 2020.
- ↑ a b c "Commodore 64 computer". oldcomputers.net. Retrieved 27 November 2020.
- ↑ "OLD-COMPUTERS.COM : The Museum". www.old-computers.com. Retrieved 27 November 2020.
- ↑ "Commodore 64 - Angry Video Game Nerd (AVGN)". Retrieved 3 October 2021.