The C64 Mini - Reviewed
2018 ж. 25 Нау.
1 230 466 Рет қаралды
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Doesn't have HDMI monitor in the house. True 8-bit Guy !! :)
I don't have one either.
I don’t have HDMI monitor either. And I’m a 16/32 bits guy.... 😄
@@francoisbasquin6974 : You aren't a 64 bit guy?
@@louistournas120 Nope: I use an Atari STe !!! Ok, I cheat a little bit: I use the Atari STe is for my music hobby. And yes 64 bits for my day job in IT. But hey, the 8-Bits Guy uses a Mac.... :-D
Came here to say this... i find his consistency supremely commendable
The first HDMI TV was set to "Cinema" mode, that automatically zooms the picture to give you the illusion of a 16:9 aspect ratio with a 4:3 source image. If the source image is 16:9 you will see exactly what you saw, what looks like over scan. You would have needed to go through the other options and found one that worked.
But it seems to also have the same issue with his capture card as well.
I don't know of "cinema" mode for zooming or for resolution. Just color quality and brightness. But he already explained what the problem was, and it was not that. He said the unit/games were "European", which clues me in that what he was using was pretty much standard for PAL, which is what is used in Europe. NTSC is typically supported for American displays, and that wouldn't have been an issue. The fact the image was stretched for the working monitor was a dead giveaway for PAL, due to PAL having a higher resolution than NTSC.
"I have another visitor, stay awhile, stay forever....." Man that brings back memories.
Another visitor! Stay a while... *STAY FOREVER!*
I always gathered all the puzzle pieces and then had no idea what to do with them.
I pretty sure that's what David (the 8-bit guy) is always thinking about his YT channel...
I never knew whay the first line was...so now I know LOL. It sounded like a foreign language from my computer.
That and mule hot me in the feels
"If Commodore 64s could have babies, this is what they'd look like" Rule 34 artists: "Hold my beer"
I didn't truly believe rule 34 until I saw that 9/11 image where the plane fucks the towers
Arrell Magister f*cked up tbh
@@arrellmagister1849 yeah cause 80% of it is my little pony, dont ask im just assuming
@@arrellmagister1849 **eagle flies into wind turbine**
Oh god
The coloring is actually closer to the original first run C-64s . The grayish beige one was a later model.
Exactly. Especially on the Breadbin versions that came with white keys and of course the ones that came in a case that looked more like a Amiga 500.
The easiest way to find the current copyright owner? Infringe on the copyright of the game. :)
And for a UK company/person, the easiest way to bankruptcy and even jail. UK has some serious copyright theft laws.
SeanHodgins certainly someone will pop their head up begging for cash
hmmm. For really old games from companies that do not exist anymore?
lol, I was thinking the same thing. But, then the copyright holder will probably sue for some ridiculous amount of money claiming "lost revenue" and pretty much shut down your business.
I know that for ZX Spectrum games, Odin/Thor (same guy behind both names) guards their copyright jealously.
2:55 the brown colour was the original colour, I had one. 6 months later my friend got one and it was grey, we both assumed this was a newer model. It might be a Europe/US thing, the brown ones just in Europe and the grey ones just in US.
Yeah, I remember C64 was brown...
Can't believe you had never heard of Monty Mole, that was a classic. Some of the notable omissions from the list were any Jeff Minter games (Attack of the Mutant Camels, etc), Manic Miner, International Karate, WOTEF or Spy vs Spy. Even Elite despite originally being a BBC micro game. As for Paradroid, I still think that was the greatest C64 game ever.
Missing Dig Dug, Monopoly, Ghost Busters, River Raid, Rambo, V, Moon Petrol.
I'm stunned at how many classic C64 games you weren't familiar with. I guess they didn't travel out of Europe. It makes me wonder what US games we've missed here in Europe. We got a lot via US Gold of course.
That's actually a fascinating, and sometimes depressing, subject in-and-of itself. There's practically a treasure trove of games, systems, and peripherals that were either kept out of a certain region for one issue or another, kept inside one region, or were drastically changed from one region to the next. The Contra/Probotector debacle is a good example of the latter.
6581punk EU did not miss any games i think as the warez scene was so unbelieveable big.
Another thing is loading from tape was more a Europe thing too. I got a disc drive around 1986 but few of my friends had one. Couldn't get a 1541 as they were impossible to find.
6581punk in the u.s. we used tapes to bootleg from other tapes.
Cole I imagine it was less common though? I had very few original disks but loads of original tapes.
18:32 Even with "Game Mode" enabled, there can still be several frames of latency in the TV itself, depending on the model. Manufacturers are finally starting to add lower latency options to certain newer TVs, and obviously OLED TVs often have much lower latency. (but not always, of course. Some newer TVs can be just as terrible with latency than the older ones, if not worse. lol)
Input lag's a real bitch, it'd be nice to see some TVs made specifically with gaming in mind. That being said you could probably find a gaming monitor with negligible input lag that'd be perfect for retro gaming like this.
Yeah, hdmi TV's are usually terrible for input lag. He should buy a nice 1ms monitor and a composite to DVI converter to replace that crate of a TV he has.
"so I wrote a program in assembly..." This is one committed reviewer. Bravo!
6502 assembly is quite simple actually. I was able to code and decipher 6502 machine code for my Atari 800.
in 2018 it takes 256MB to do what 1982 could do with 64KB, but with a lot more latency
Assembly vs C (in a good case scenario) or python (worst case) you know who will win
It's due to emulation. Surprised people are surprised to be honest. It's not really reflective of anything beyond peoples desire to believe the good ol days were better, for better or worse.
yeah its almost like it needs to be more advanced and use chips that have actually been in production some time in the last 30 years
@@AvatarOfBhaal Emulation is doing in software things that should be done in hardware, hence the lag. Hardware clone would be a much nicer solution, or an FPGA, but also harder to develop and more expensive. 256 MB is probably the least RAM you can get these days, and even if you could get less it would hardly be cheaper, so why bother with less if you can have more, it never hurts.
Good point, it's a computer running a public domain / open source emulator: VICE.... waste of resources but economical way to build a toy computer
12:24 ".. and here is another one of the mini space shooter games" DUDE. That is Armalythe. It's one of the BEST space shooters i have ever played on the commodore. You, however, should play it on the real c64 with a friend. So much fun.
Again... European PAL release...
+M D What?
8-bit guy wouldn't have known this game as it was a European PAL game, not an American NTSC game. Also it was released very late, well past the C64's prime in the USA.
Ok. I thought PAL and NTSC were terms of the NES era. The game itself was released in english, so I thought it was an american game.
Need to retrobright this one too.
No. Considering the games and colour, this was based on the european model which was an odd brown.
2nd edition breadbox machine. Grey Fkeys and brown chassis.
It wasn't. C64's become brown over time, but their original colour is gray.
Original colour - 1st generation. the 2nd generation had a darker exterior, not brown but not grey.
HellWyck I always referred to the second gen as coffee coloured. Kind of looks like coffee after you put cream in it
Your videos and channel makes me feel so happy. Thank you for being on KZhead 8 Bit Guy!
i got over the fake keyboard but "joystick latency" is too much
Well said joysick .joke
Unforgivable
I am going to buy one of these Commodore 64 and we'll see. However, I don't have HDMI.
I think the latency is reduced in the NTSC version. Correct me if I'm wrong.
@@sleekflash16 it is, But it's Miniscule. He made a Re-Review of the American C64 mini and it states there.
An AMIGA 500 Mini would be nice to have :)
as long as it doesnt have a mini external vga bit that snaps off really easy right? haha
Same for a Mini Atari ST I wouldn't mind a miniaturized handheld version of the the Vectrex myself
@Scott Breon That would be cool, especialy if you had one of those monitors that can be turned 90 degrees for that portrait format the games come in.
Oh boy, let's hope that will be the next thing. An FPGA AMiga 500 Mini would be amazing! But it really has to have a good Competition Pro joystick as well. Not a cheap copy.
Yes!!!
The included software will definitely be more familiar to those of us living across the pond in the UK and Europe. To be honest, I would put that down as a positive for those from the US thinking of buying the c64 mini, there’s some great games amongst the ones you are not familiar with.
Indeed, Europe/UK was way more into gaming on the C64 than the USA. Surprised there wasn't M.U.L.E. and Monsters in Mayhem : /
I'm surprised he wasn't familiar with Chip's Challenge. THough admittedly I've only played the DOS version, so maybe it's just the C64 version he didn't know?
I think the different colour scheme may be due to that as well--I'm sure I remember my friend's C64 being that sort of brownish colour rather than the grey his full-sized one is!
It's like the whole "videogame crash of '83" and "the NES saved gaming" stuff - the US had a very different gaming experience during the 80s, and seem tragically unaware of what happened in the rest of the world. Maybe the US version will have a different game list, but I'd be quite happy with this lot. (And on a pedantic note, he spelled "Nodes of Yesod" wrong, and mispronounced "Apshai"...)
d2factotum That is DEFINITELY the colour of the UK version of the C64
You should definitely consider a video series on assembly programming, its nearly impossible to find any good video tutorials on it even today and most are in Hindi as well. I remember my struggles spending over 8 hours trying to output text, where the book we used didn't even mentioned it until chapters later but already assigned it as a problem from the first chapter. Not to mention even setting up the environment for it. It was the worst academic experience of my life.
I'm getting into the C64 for the first time with this, we were a IBM-PC family when we were growing up, and I only got to play on friends C64s (and Amigas). Thanks for the review, the technical side of it was tremendous, and very useful. Can't wait to get my one setup and running shortly!
I would wager everybody will notice a 130ms input delay on fast arcade-style games.
Not just fast arcade style game but all games. This thig sucks.
That would be life or death in Galaga. I tried playing F-Zero on a Rasp-Pi and the lag was about 230ms, that was atrocious as all hell.
That is an exceptionally good selection of games. I thought I saw Creatures in that lot, probably one of the best coded games made on any platform ever.
Until Sam's Journey last December.
Wow, I'd never heard of Sam's Journey before. A C64 game selling over 1000 copies in 2018? At 20 - 45 EUR a copy? That's amazing. (And the game looks stunning.)
really good review, it's nice to see the board tear down along w some inside info on the chipsets and such
Thanks so much for this thorough review! *SUPER* helpful!
Did you really just refer to Armalyte as another “ space shooter game” ? It was probably the best achievement in gaming ever released on the C64. Some really nice games on this release.
jack blaziner Why? I have little experience with the channel so I am curious as to this claim.
Love your videos across all your channels thanks for the content... very keen to watch this video particularly as I've had one on pre-order for months and it's being delivered this Thursday. Love for them to make a fully functional Amiga 500
They've hinted on Facebook that they are looking into it.
Nebulus aka Tower Toppler aka Castelian (on NES) was awesome! Quite challenging, but definitely recommend to try on any platform. Also I was blow away by your lag-analysis! Great work.
I personally think it's good that the modern Retro consoles have HDMI as their image output. For a long time, I haven't used anything except HDMI for Image output. It's convenient, because it's the most-used image output in this generation. Just like A/V and VGA used to be the convenient standards one generation before.
Some of those games you hadn't heard of are pretty famous ones at least in UK
Also in many other European countries! :)
The fake keyboard ruins it for me
Exactly. It was a real shock for me. Not the fact that the device has no keyboard is the problem, but that there is physically a keyboard which is not more than a toy. I have 2 pre orders running at local stores, but since I saw the review yesterday I'm still thinking about a cancelation. There are so many emulators and out there, a raspberry pi does a great great job. Why should we use another emulator which at least has no positive aspects besides the case? The review was great, but the missing keyboard and missing AAA titles (like Giana Sisters or Turrican) makes it hard to keep the pleasant anticipation alive. Even if this was "only" the european model, I can't imagine the later delivered games for the US will be much better. Here in Germany for instance Giana Sisters was a huge hit and the copyright holders are still alive and active today, the same for Turrican. On my wish list was Giana Sisters, The Last Ninja 2, Raid on Bungeling Bay and Turrican. But for now, all of these titles are missing :-(.
If you don't get it because it doesn't have a keyboard, they may not have the money or incentive to build one that does have a functional keyboard. If you have the money to spend on any nonsense, spend some on some C64 nonsense!
bitset well, no if this product doesn't bring anything he'll want then he shouldn't buy it period.
diamened me too
@torque this video shows it brought as much if not more than the c64 DTV and NES classic and many of the other "mini consoles". It is not a c64 replacement and was not intended to be.
I love your channel and it’s addictive to watch. I’ve been binge watching. Also appreciate the fact you don’t have obtrusive mid video adverts. As an electrician the cables being slightly wonky on your wall behind you on the left side really triggers me! Ahahahahahah! Please pull them slightly straighter 😂
Your videos are always interesting and fun to watch. Keep it up. :)
This is a neat device. I might actually buy one of these myself. Especially if they update the firmware and add some better features. The biggest reason I don't play my C64 is the trouble of getting it out and hooking it up.
+TheGeekPub _Exactly_ why HDMI and USB make this the perfect _retro_ machine. Great point.
You expect people to drag their desktop PCs to the TV?
Lorfarius Desktop PCs are usually connected to monitors.
They went bankcrupt In the 1990s so no. It's just made by the people who own the commodore trademark
Same here Mike, I find myself doing most of my Commodore adventures on VICE rather than on real hardware - it's just so much easier to quickly start an emulator. Looking forward to the larger size version too - imagine a real keyboard :-)
Fun fact: The A20 in this thing, in both GPU and CPU architecture, is the same as the R16 (also by Allwinner) in the NES and SNES Classic Mini systems! The big difference being that this one's a dual-core and those are both quad-core. Edit: Upon checking Uridium on that hardware, I think the latency is software-specific. Did the C64 emulator guys draft up their own emulator or license something like Vice? If the former, it might be something that needs to be fixed on their end.
2:04 well, when a daddy c64 and a mommy c64 reaaaaly love each other....
Excellent. There are some nice looking C64 new games in the last few years. I haven't played them properly since the mid 90s, but really probably time to start getting into Commodore gaming again. Probably because it just makes me happier.
If only the keyboard was real..even if it used shitty laptop key switches this would be 1000 time better.
Next Donations: Hey Guys! I got an HDTV as a donation
Been binge watching for 2days while sick in bed. LOVE the channel (and the new awesome intro! ) Living in NYC, but greetings from a Texas native! Like the content. Keep it up plz!
I stick to my original the old breadbox version that still works including the tape recorder. still love to bring back memories pressing play on tape, load error, adjusting tone head then on to it again until it works :P
0.13s delay is over 7 frames at 60 fps.. that is massive
anuj68 I wonder if he meant 13 milliseconds. That would only be one frame of lag, which isn't actually all that bad. The lag could also be caused by the TV. Some TVs have really bad lag.
You wouldn't notice 13 miliseconds on a joystick like that. I'm really sensitive to latency and find ~30ms very annoying, but 11ms unnoticeable. Sounds like he really did mean 130ms which is really bad.
I think 1 frame of latency wouldn't be noticable. I bet for 7 frames. The problem could also be with the HDMI to TV display - televisions are not meant for low latency operation - using a PC monitor display could help with that.
1 frame is only 16.6ms at 60fps so that's not too bad. 7 frames would be really, really bad though. I had a TV with a (tested) input latency of 51ms and it was unbearable. My newer one has 34ms of latency and it's still noticeable, but not quite as annoying.
The color is not off. I had one in the 80s with this color.
It seems more on colour for the ones sold in the UK (that I had as a kid)
Which would be appropriate since it appears it's a European-market model.
looks off to me, I have an european c64 right now sitting next to me and it's not that brown, maybe older models were that way? most of the c64 breadbins I see around are grayish, not fully brown
Mine was this brown and it was Euro
a lot of this review was frustrating, specially the TVs at the start.
Thanks Dave for the review. Concerning the comment near the end about finding a working C64 on eBay. I found a nice unit at a decent price but non working. It had the board revision I wanted so I nabbed it. I had to troubleshoot and repair it but I was in the electronics development industry at Westinghouse, Kodak and a leading university for 35 years so I had the skills to do so. I also bought the SD card external drive to load all the d64 files available on line.
Thanks for the great video. I bought one because of this. These things are hard to come by in South Africa but managed to get my hands on it. Very happy so far.
Those save slots are handy for people like Billy Mitchell.
Okurka No, the tapes were switched! Honest.
No, not Billy!
Sorry, don’t you mean Silly Bitchell?
Monty On the Run has a legendary soundtrack, it's worth playing for the music alone.
I agree. Although, they also included Wanted Monty Mole, I would have preferred if they went with Auf Wedersehen Monty instead of Wanted Monty Mole, due to the fact that that game was a disappointment to me (when compared to the original Spectrum version)
Thing on a Spring has even better music. Both soundtracks are of course composed by the legendary Rob Hubbard.
Definetly worth the subscription. Really good content. Reminds me of my own C64 back in the days. Which I still have.
I remember back in the days I had a brown one while my younger brother got a slightly newer, much lighter breadbin one. Both were brand new bought EU models. I even remember my original box which was very similar with the box the mini comes in. If I could choose, I’d go for the browner one.
You've never heard of Nodes of Yesod? Or Skool Daze?! Or Who Dares Wins?!! Or Boulder Dash?!!! These are all classics! I think Retro Games are a UK company and these are games that were popular in Britain and Europe, which is perhaps why you haven't heard of them. They're great games, give them a go.
psammiad i came here to say exactly that. I recognise most of the games in that list and probably because during my C64 era i lived in both the USA and UK...
I live in Finland and I recognised really many of these games. Netherworld was one of my favourite games when I was a child.
Skool Daze is an absolute classic, I played it, and the sequel Bak2Skool on the ZX Spectrum.
psammiad Or Chip's Challenge? One of the greatest games ever made!
It's the European version. Just like the C64DTV, the games bundle may adjust between the US and EU/UK version. I wasn't that excited about this product, but I'm even less impressed by David's knowledge and the style of this review. To spend the first 5 minutes bemoaning the lack of composite and failure to make use of an odd aspect ratio on an old LCD TV is a strange decision
Very cool. You clearly received a device that is in the late beta-testing stage -- close to being ready for commercial production, but just not quite there yet. I think the future firmware updates will make it an excellent device -- hopefully they'll be able to figure out how to remove some of that latency you showed. That would be a *big* distraction to me... I'm very sensitive to latency like that. But overall, I'm impressed with this project -- I definitely hope it succeeds, and I will definitely have to consider buying one.
Yeah, any latency over ~30ms is just unplayable to me. And differnce between 10 and 15ms is really huge.
But a frame is like 16ms...
My guess is that the latency is more from the tv being an old LCD more than the device.
Them thinking of loading ROMs is nicer than a lot of vendors. Great video as always.
I used my C64 monitor for NES & Sega when i traveled , such great picture !
It's got one of my favourite games on it from the Commodore 64 (Hunter's Moon) - which is why my user name is Hunter's Moon
seems like a cool little unit! I never had any experience with the original so I don't know a lot about the games, but it would be fun to check out anyway.
18:40 - The interesting thing is that I used the sound of him clicking the space button and then importing it into VLC to determine the audio delay of my Bluetooth headphones! But it helped, so thank you!
“If Commodore 64s could have babies..” Science, make it happen.
They'll both need a tall glass of retrobrite to get them in the mood. Lol
From the Soil DID I STUTTER
Here are the review scores for each game from seminal C64 magazine ZZAP!64. In summary; 39 scoring 90% or over and 22 scoring 80% to 89%! AlleyKat [Zzap!64 - 89%], Anarchy [Zzap!64 - 83%], Armalyte [Zzap!64 - 97% (Gold Medal)], Avenger [Zzap!64 - 86%], Battle Valley [Zzap!64 - 91% (Sizzler)], Boulder Dash [Zzap!64 - 96% (I & II Reviewed)], Bounder [Zzap!64 - 97% (Gold Medal)], California Games [Zzap!64 - 97% (Gold Medal)], Chip’s Challenge [Zzap!64 - 86%], Confuzion [Zzap!64 - 89% (Sizzler)], Cosmic Causeway: Trailblazer II [Zzap!64 - 93% (Sizzler)], Creatures [Zzap!64 - 96% (Gold Medal)], Cyberdyne Warrior [Zzap!64 - 90% (Sizzler)], Cybernoid II: The Revenge [Zzap!64 - 91% (Sizzler)], Cybernoid: The Fighting Machine [Zzap!64 - 93% (Sizzler)], Deflektor [Zzap!64 - 81%], Everyone’s A Wally [Zzap!64 - 82% (Sizzler)], Firelord [Zzap!64 - 68%], Gribbly’s Day Out [Zzap!64 - 90% (Sizzler)], Hawkeye [Zzap!64 - 96% (Gold Medal)], Heartland [Zzap!64 - 85%], Herobotix [Zzap!64 - 87%], Highway Encounter [Zzap!64 - 79%], Hunter's Moon [Zzap!64 - 92% (Sizzler)], Hysteria [Zzap!64 - 83%], Impossible Mission [Zzap!64 - 95% (Past Blaster)], Impossible Mission II [Zzap!64 - 96% (Gold Medal)], IO [Zzap!64 - 80%], Jumpman [pre Zzap!64 - 9/10 Lemon64], Mega Apocalypse [Zzap!64 - 90% (Sizzler)], Mission A.D [Zzap!64 - 80%], Monty Mole (I) [pre Zzap!64 - Crash 92% (A Crash Smash)], Monty on the Run (III) [Zzap!64 - 90% (Sizzler)], Nebulus [Zzap!64 - 97% (Gold Medal)], Netherworld [Zzap!64 - 87%], Nobby the Aardvark [Zzap!64 - 96% (Gold Medal)], Nodes Of Yesod [Zzap!64 - 95% (Sizzler)], Paradroid [Zzap!64 - 97% (Gold Medal)], Pitstop II [Zzap!64 - 89% (Sizzler)], Rana Rama [Zzap!64 - 87%], Robin Of The Wood [Zzap!64 - 92% (Sizzler)], Rubicon [Zzap!64 - 88%], Skate Crazy [Zzap!64 - 86%], Skool Daze [Zzap!64 - 78%], Snare [Zzap!64 - 88%], Speedball [Zzap!64 - 90% (Sizzler)], Speedball II: Brutal Deluxe [Zzap!64 - 90% (Sizzler)], Spindizzy [Zzap!64 - 98% (Gold Medal)], Star Paws [Zzap!64 - 90% (Sizzler)], Steel [Zzap!64 - 82%], Street Sports Baseball [Zzap!64 - 82%], Summer Games II [Zzap!64 - 97% (Gold Medal)], Super Cycle [Zzap!64 - 95% (Sizzler)], Temple of Apshai Trilogy [Zzap!64 - 90% (Sizzler)], The Arc Of Yesod [Zzap!64 - 91% (Sizzler)], Thing Bounces Back [Zzap!64 - 86%], Thing on a Spring [Zzap!64 - 93% (Sizzler)], Trailblazer [Zzap!64 - 93% (Sizzler)], Uchi Mata [Zzap!64 - 89%], Uridium [Zzap!64 - 94% (Sizzler)], Who Dares Wins II [Zzap!64 - 90% (Sizzler)], Winter Games [Zzap!64 - 94% (Sizzler)], World Games [Zzap!64 - 98% (Gold Medal)], Zynaps [Zzap!64 - 90% (Sizzler)].
The guys that have worked on the machine have actually made a good selection of titles, only not many of them are famous like some others, in particular if someone isn't/wasn't really inside the C64 world.. even the David looks like doesn't know some pretty famous games like Hawkeye. There are obviously still a lot of great games that are missing (like Bruce Lee or the The Last Ninja trilogy) but some of the games are probably too expensive to get the license and others are so old that is impossible to find the actual owner (like said by David in the video). Also, we have to remember that the C64 have probably the largest line up of videogames (and by far -apart PC's-).
You missed the Mic drop...
I love the footage of the thing being fabricated! It might be cool if you could do a factory tour.
Just found your channel a few days ago and dining on some great nostalgia. Although I cannot believe you haven't seen Armalyte or Hawkeye. Although I lived in NZ so we didn't see all the games you were familiar with, but most of them lol.
needs better games like Beachhead, Raid Over, etc
Should be a bit bigget with a real keyboard and cartridge port for our old games.
Bought my C64 mini today. Like 4:38 I inserted my HDMI into my TV and it works perfectly. When I moved to my computer room and plugged it into my ASUS 24in monitor - nothing. Having seen this kind of problem before when using cheap HDMI cables, I inserted a more expensive HDMI cable into the monitor and now it works fine. So if you try a more expensive HDMI cable, that should fix your problem. Pity they include a cheapy in the box - would have been better to not include one and take off a few bucks. I don't know why some cheap HDMI cables are so problematic (they all look the same). Maybe there is a ground pin or something missing in the cheap cables that causes these incompatibility issues with some monitors. Also I am using a wireless keyboard which means I can stash the C64 mini behind the monitor and out of the way - which is nice.
I've been wondering if my monitor was broken but since I've been using the HDMI that came with my NES Classic, I'm second guessing this now.
I'm really impressed with the bundled games. Spindizzy, Boulderdash, California Games, Summer Games 2, Paradroid, Uridium. Can't wait.. :) The colour of the new one is the same as mine as well. Brownish rather than grey. Seems we had very different C64 experiences 30 years ago.
SO many amazing games missed though! Bubble bobble, rainbow islands, last ninja series, dizzy games (the adventure ones), IK+, i know theres a lot more but i cant think of them at the moment!
1987 I got a second hand C64 with a lot of games, nostalgia. Some of the games i loved: Indoorsport Bowling Boulder dash Giana Sisters Bubble Bobble Space Harrier Rampage International karate Yie ar Kung Fu Lazy Jones Panic Rygar Super Mario Bross
Great video. I will keep my eye out for the larger version with working keyboard. thanks.
3:00 - Mine is more the color of the mini. Could be a variance in the plastics that were used earlier/later in the run (bromine content?). I looked all over the unit and it doesn't seem discolored, I think that was the color it came in.
That's "Nodes of *Yesod" my friend. One of the best games released at the time 👍🕹️
It's been an amazing journey and several decades later find myself sentimental over my first personal computer, the C64! In fact I did work on a lot of my graduate work in electronic music back in 83/84 on the C64!
thanks for showing me how to load your game that I bought on your website onto my C64 mini! can't wait to try it out!
Say it like "Temple of Ap-shy". Strong Bad taught me the pronunciation.
my hit points are, like, inexcusable in this dungeon, man.
Strong bad for the win! I did laugh at "ass pie" though.
I'm amazed at the lengths you had to go through to get an HDMI monitor.
Matt Snyder lol me too, I have a monitor from way back (like 2008-9) and it has two hdmi. How long has it been since he bought a monitor? lol
Great video. Brought back great memories. Looking back now I wonder how in the world we had patience to wait for games to load but it was fun learning computers on this great and under rated system back in the day. My mom n dad couldn't afford an apple 2 e but this and the Vic 20 was very affordable and began my love of computer gaming...favorite c64 game....telengard, bards tail 1,2,3 and i liked MASTER of magic, MASTER of lamps, wasteland, all the text adventures, realms of impossibility, but my favorite games of all time was the dungeons and dragons gold box series with pool of radiance as the all time best c64 game of my memory. Many more come to mind. Great video.
Boulder Dash 😍😍😍😍😍 game of my childhood 😁
Elite was the most badass game of all time.
i like to sing raiders of the lost ark while playing boulder dash.
dig dug clone
@@Deathtank75 i played Dig Dug alooot :) I got some flashback now.
So how DOES it compare to the one released in 2004?
I was wondering that as well...
Without a keyboard, they might as well have put all the hardware into the base of that giant joystick. 👎🏻
Ojisan642 It's just for aesthetic purposes. It would be more efficient to put it into the joystick, but it wouldn't have the same effect for people.
that would put to much wear and tear on the hdmi cable/port, bad idea
"Without a cartridge slot, they might as well have put all of the hardware into the controller on the nes/snes mini!"
Ojisan642 Pretty much
Nuziburt correct!
I'd be interested in hearing more about the sound aspect of these emulators. How is the sound compared with the SID devices?
Nodes of Yesod is a great ZX Spectrum classic!
How can 8-bit guy not know of all those classics? Americans must have missed out on half of all C64 games released.
We absolutely did. Americans were mostly console gamers in the '80s, so most European-made Commodore and Atari computer games never got exported.
I used to own an Atari ST, STe, Falcon030 and I'm in the States. I got all of my stuff from Europe via Post.... read about most of it through STart magazine. Even had one of my programs published in there too. STOSFix. :) I still remember figuring out how to get to work on the Falcon030. I had my old ST w/ 1.04 and STe w/ 1.62 TOS and then the Falcon030 and comparing the results. Many good games in that magazine too.
We did, and that was mostly because we were almost exclusively using disk drives and UK/European users relied almost exclusively on cassettes. Being designed for cassettes UK games didn't have to worry about size limitation of disks (170kb) and porting a game to require interacting with multiple disks may not have been cost effective.
Thank you, the disk drives were something I didn't realize were so common in the US. In the U.K I've never even seen one. That's a really good point.
> Americans must have missed out on half of all C64 games released. It a shame but it is true: A lot of C64 games were PAL-only. The "underworld" of cracking groups often did a lot of "NTSC fixing" to make games accessible for NTSC users, so NTSC users might have played those games, but often there was no official way. So many Americans did indeed miss out on a lot of titles. On the other hand, the American games industry did make very few NTSC-only games. Almost everything ran on PAL.
This is a very cool device, but i hope they will do a mini Amiga 500!
Isn't that an Amiga 600 then ? :)
Hey buddy, huge fan of your channel, I even bought one of your T-shirts (the SID chip) last year, but due to differences between UK and US sizes it's a bit of a tent! I still love it though. I convinced my husband to buy me a C64 mini for my birthday last year, and it's really cute. To be honest, all I've done with it so far is try to play Paradroid on it, something that comes naturally to him but I find really hard! He couldn't understand why they went to the effort of making a C64-looking keyboard that didn't work... but I connected a USB keyboard to a USB hub to type in BASIC commands and he seemed to get it then. We've also got real C64s for when we need to load software from tape. I'm one of the remaining retro warriors. I'm an IT specialist at a UK University, and I'm on the Legacy Systems virtual team. That's not as interesting as it sounds. I learned coding on the ZX Spectrum and ZX81, and later the Acorn BBC BASIC and RISC-OS, but my heart belongs to Atari. I still use Atari ST computers running CuBase as my preferred sequencing platform, and I even had a netbook dedicated to running an ST emulator, with a USB MIDI interface, to connect with my synthesizers. It works really well! I even upgraded my Atari Falcon030 to solid state storage, along with his Amiga 1200. My husband created all the graphics on an Amiga game called Electrek, which has some attention recently. I'm rambling, it's late and I've had beer. I love your channel and look forward to each of your new posts,. Peace out.
"Creatures" and "Creatures 2" were some of the best games to be released on the C64. The programmers' (Rowlands brothers?) pinnacle work was the release of "Mayhem in Monsterland", a "Sonic the Hedgehog"-style game, which I believe to be the last great game for the C64. Mind you, I don't think these games were sold in North America. In Canada, we got them through "other" channels.
It looks cool but they definitely need to allow you to put more than one game on it! Curious to see how it turns out when it releases in the US
MetalJesusRocks you are going to need to do a video on the best retro emulator cases soon if this trend keeps up.
MetalJesusRocks Holy crawackomoli it's metaljesusrocks! Can you do a review of a vuvuzela? Or maybe the top 5 vuvuzelas?
Agree. And they need to have a lot of spare flash memory so that people can put all their favorites onto it. (I can do this with my SNES Mini.) There are some essential games that aren't on there like The Last Ninja trilogy and Bruce Lee.
MetalJesusRocks oh hi metal Jesus, I like viewing your videos.
Idiot you can. Pay attention !
Hey David, any chance of an update on how this thing has progressed? Have they improved usability/features? Any difference in the lag?
Excellent review. Completely adore your terrific 80's style music and attention to detail including physically opening the unit up. (who didn't love opening up there consoles back in the day. Hmmm, let's see, the Philips Video PAC, Atari 2600, Vectrex and an Apple IIe were all opened up back in the day.) For the price point this is is pretty cost effective for what you get and surely it's not that hard just to plug in a USB keyboard. Perhaps the company could makea special hub and keyboard package that could clip onto the top of the unit and provide an actual C64 replica keyboard. That would certainly sell a lot more hardcore fans. Shame about the lags but to be honest it doesn't look nearly as painful as waiting for those confounded cassettes to load back in the day. Fingers crossed they decide to do an Amiga 500 version and let the retro gamin heaven begin. :)
Excellent review. It is so tempting to buy one of these, if only to play Jumpman. My now 25 year old son grew up with a C64. Actually we started with the C16. We must have played Jumpman for 1,000 hours back then.
I hope it sells well enough they'll make a full size one. This mini console is cute, but I'm not interested. I want a full size replica with a functional keyboard!
Coming in the fall, supposedly. I got my mini recently as a free add on for the delays to the production of the full sized one that I preordered awhile ago. That one looks very nice!
You haven't heard of Chip's challenge? Damn, it was a classic on Windows 3.1 computers
I love the Chip's Challenge game.
I didn't even realize it was on any platforms other than Windows. That game came out so long after I moved on to MS-DOS based systems. Great game.
Yep. As mentioned, the tan colored C-64s came earlier. The gray-ish ones were later. As I recall there was a minor chipset or ROM change or something between the two. The Vic-20s also had two colors. The original ones, which were hard to come by at all, were a beige shade, the later ones were more of an eggshell. If you look at an older cartridge, the beige label matches the plastic perfectly, but on the newer cartridges, the label was still beige, but the plastic was more eggshell colored. ;) OMG! I about flipped out when you plugged the power in before the video cord. All of those old C/X/VGA video cables carried power on the video cable, and I zapped more than one video card / motherboard over the years plugging the video cable in while the power was on. I find myself wondering if you've tried to take some old C-64 parts and build an emulator box with a built in USB keyboard out of this thing. Ah-ha!! A bin file in the root of the USB drive. That sir ( theC64 mini), is an android device with a C-64 emulator on it. I'll bet on it. I bet you could hack it somehow and install you're own better faster emulator. :D You made me roll my eyes. 'I SUSPECT that there are screws under the little rubber feet. Yep, there they are.' Shocking. ^^ Linux core? I'm going to double down on the android thing. ;) Wait, time out, it could be one of those 'Damn Small Linux' machines or whatever they called, and the bin file could be an emulated Linux machine on CD-ROM. Seems a little silly.. but it would explain the delays.
Nice work! Personally, I would like to see such a machine with functional keyboard that emulates everything from Pet to C128.. but I'm probably not the target market.
Oh man California Games was awesome back in the day. I played that one a lot. If you're gonna check one out that's my recommendation.
1:10 - Skool Daze was one of my favorite games. It's super funny and it was a unique game concept at the time. I remember the game was made entirely in machine code by just one man and his wife in their garage (literally!). They made a sequel too (Skool Daze 2, I believe was the title), at least for the ZX Spectrum. It had an additional school, the girls-only school, next to the boys-only school that you had to break in regularly to steal certain items from the girls while avoiding getting caught. Meanwhile, you had to show up in the right classroom at the right time for your lessons or get punished. You had the freedom to be a bully to anyone if you wished to do so, and you could irritate the teachers behind their back as much as you liked (if you managed to get away with it). Really great fun! By the way, Thing on a Spring had the best music of all C64 games ever, i.m.h.o. The soundtrack was (of course) composed by the legendary Rob Hubbard. He later orchestrated most of his famous C64 music for symphonic orchestra. Amazing quality by an exceptional composer & tech wizard!
Skool daze sounds like a really complicated and fun game for the C64 at the time!
I used to have a C64 and Amiga. There's a guy on Github who is writing a desktop emulator and I believe it even works on MacOS. Keep you posted if I find out more. Great content by the way!
Great review.. I've got one of these myself and am very impressed with it.
Cool video! :) However... How one could not know Creatures (1 and/or 2)?! It's one of the best C64 games in context of graphics, complexity and the pleasure of playing. :) I've made it to bring Clyde and his rescued fellows home on more than one occasion. :) On the other hand, I never had "Thing On A Spring" in my collection of games. From what I see it's a nice game and it's fun to play. Time to catch up with it. ;D
I agree Creatures was one of the best c64 games for graphics but he was right in saying it's as hard as nails and think back in the day I never got past the second torture area 😣
This is an American reviewing a UK exported version of this device. Americans grew up with different sets of games on the same C64.
@noblelies you're talking rubbish, i'm British, still got my c64.. i only knew 3 or 6 games on theses mini. clearly not all Brits grew up with the same games!!!
MephProduction Nowhere in his post did he claim that. He just said that there was a discrepancy between common games in the US and Europe. I'm a Brit and I've played most of these games, and heard of all of them bar a couple.
so glad to see you load MULE up! pity about the latency.
Amazing video I learned more than I expected. THANKS
Do a review of Mail Order Monsters---one of my all-time favorite C64 games!!!!
Most games are popular in EU and the colour is more common in EU than NA
How do you not have an HDMI compatible monitor/tv in 2018?
he doesnt have *small* hdmi compatible monitor/tv
MINI HDMI to be more precisely
Guess we were waiting for him to carry in a 40'' TV just for a short video. But I must admit, most of my monitors don't have HDMI, only the newer ones does. Also the plug is a nightmare, always have to be careful when turning the monitor or trying to plug something in or out. It is way to lose. Good old DVI get's screwed in and DisplayPort atleast has some hooks to secure the connection.
1flynlow Like he showed in the video, he tried but it did not like the European 50Hz signal this review unit was sending.
AkcesoriumPC he ment a small HDMI compatible a TV, not a mini HDMI compatible TV.
And that 50htz machine you have there is the right colour for here in Australia along with 50rtz 🙏🏽
can't believe this is still around , you gotta be about my age or a couple of years older, and congrats for writing a game, back in the days it was insane to use lm sticks, peeks/pokes and sprites and all that assembler , arg !, you're awesome, old school programmin rocks