Hello and welcome back to The 8-Bit Guy.
Now, after receiving probably no less than 500 emails asking me if I'm familiar with
the C64 mini product, well, guess what?
I now have one of the very first production models in my hand.
And, I'm going to open it here in a minute and we're going to find out, is it any good?
Is it worthy of carrying the C64 name?
And how does it compare to the one that was released in 2004?
So, all of these questions shall be answered.
Let's get right to it.
So here it is, the C64 Mini.
It's a nice looking box, I must admit.
On the back it does give a list of all of the included games.
This already presents somewhat of a disappointment for me.
Now, I realize what I'm about to say is entirely subjective, and everyone will have
a different viewpoint than me.
But, this is the truth.
This is the list of games that come built-in to the system.
And it's an impressive number of games.
Here's the problem.
I've highlighted all of the games here that I'm familiar with.
So, the ones shown in black I have at least played myself or seen somebody else play these
games.
Now, I consider myself to be an experienced veteran when it comes to Commodore 64 games.
And so I was surprised that there were so many games on here that I've never heard
of.
However, it gets worse, at least for me.
Because, I don't even like most of these games.
In fact, narrowing the list down further, these 3 games here are the only games on the
entire list that I have actually spent any amount of time in my life actually playing.
Now granted, I plan to try all of these games and maybe I'll find some more than I like.
Well, let's open it up and see what's inside!
Inside the first box we get another box.
And this one also has a beautiful design on it.
Hahaha.. there it is.
It is soooo cute.
If Commodore 64s could have babies, this is what it would look like!
And over here is a life-sized remake of a classic Commodore 64 joystick, only there
are some notable differences such as it has a lot more buttons and, of course, the connector
on the end is USB instead of the traditional Atari-style joystick port.
And underneath, we get an HDMI cable, and a USB power cable.
Notably absent is any sort of power brick.
Apparently you are expected to supply your own USB power source, which is fine because
I think these days most people have a few extras laying around since everything uses
those these days.
And last of course is the users guide.
Very nice.
So I thought I should compare this thing to a real C64 and see how it looks.
Besides the size, I noticed the color was off.
The real C64 I have here is the original color, and no it has not been retrobrited, this one
has been stored in proper conditions as to preserve the original color.
Still, this isn't a huge problem.
So, it appears the real C64 is about twice as tall, and roughly twice as wide.
Now, as nice as this thing looks, I have to mention that the keyboard is fake.
It's just one big piece of plastic and is there just for cosmetic purposes.
In fact, I have some video from the factory and these keyboards actually start out white,
but are spray painted.
Then, a laser is used to burn away the paint, leaving the original color of white behind
in order to put the letters on the keys.
And while they do look really nice, I will have to nitpick just a bit and say they are
missing the little graphics characters that are on the front of the keys on a real C64.
But again, just a nitpick, I can live without that.
Over here on the side we get two USB ports, similar to how the C64 has two joystick ports
there.
And a little momentary button for powering the unit on and off.
On the back is a USB power port, and an HDMI port… and ONLY an HDMI port.
So, this is actually going to be a problem.
Believe it or not, I don't actually have any small HDMI compatible TVs or monitors
in the house.
And you know that favorite composite television set I always use…
well, this isn't going to work.
However, the C64 mini isn't alone in it's exclusive use of HDMI output, because the
NES Classic and the Super NT also have the same issue, in that they are HDMI only.
So, my first thought was to try this Dell monitor.
While it doesn't have an HDMI input, it does have something closely related, a DVI
input.
And I do happen to have one of these adapter cables handy, that will adapt it to HDMI.
Time to connect up the C64 mini and then try the
little power button here.
OK, the little power LED comes on.
But sadly, nothing on the screen.
The monitor says there is no signal, at least not a signal that it likes.
So, I wondered if I was crazy thinking that might work, so I tried my Super NT console
and found that it also would not work.
Next I thought I'd try the NES classic, and it actually does work.
So I'm not crazy after all.
Of course, to say that it works is somewhat of a stretch because, the aspect ratio is
wrong, making the picture too skinny.
But also there is no sound because DVI monitors don't have internal speakers.
So even if this had have worked, it probably wouldn't have been as useful as I'd like.
Next, I decided to try my living room television.
Unfortunately, I didn't have much luck there either.
What's interesting, is you can see that it recognizes something got plugged into the
HDMI port, but it simply refuses to display anything, like at all.
So, just to be sure it wasn't a problem with the TV, I tried plugging in the Super
NT game console, and sure enough it works perfectly and I was able to play the built-in
game of Super Turrican.
I was actually beginning to wonder if the C64 mini was even working at all.
So, I asked around and one of my friends offered to loan me a small HDMI television.
And the good news is, this one actually worked.
I can see the game selection screen and there's some SID music playing in the background.
However, I noticed a problem.
This TV isn't a true 16 by 9 aspect.
I think it is 16 by 10.
And so I can see that some of the information is essentially over scanned off the side of
the screen, such as this logo, and when you go into a game there is an onscreen keyboard
that pops up along the side, but some of it is chopped off here.
I checked the menu on the TV to see if there were any relevant settings, but couldn't
find any.
Then I checked the settings of the C64 mini and while there were some settings related
to the screen, none of them solved this.
Fortunately, I managed to find and borrow yet another HDMI compatible television and
this one is a true 16 by 9.
And it does seem to work perfectly.
So now that I have a fully working screen, I can actually give you a review of this product.
When I talked with the guy in charge of this project about my monitor difficulties he said
the most likely cause of the problem is that this is a European version and it operates
at 50 hz.
And apparently some of the older North American televisions sets, even though they are HDMI,
they don't work properly at 50 hz.
But, he did say that when the North American release comes out later this year, that it
would be coded for 60 hz, so there probably shouldn't be any issues with using these
on North American monitors.
Let's try Uridium.
While it looks and sounds very much like the real thing, there's one thing I did notice
right away, which is there is some latency time between doing something on the joystick
and seeing it on the screen.
This is most likely due to the fact that this is an emulation and thus there has to be some
buffering going on.
I would imagine a lot of people probably wouldn't notice this, and I think it also depends a
lot on the specific game as to how critical the timing is.
I'll do more investigation on this later.
Next, I'll try the Temple of Asphai, assuming that is how you pronounce that.
OK, so this is one issue I wondered about, some Commodore 64 games require use of a keyboard,
and so what if you don't have one connected.
Well, you can press the menu button on the joystick and a little on-screen keyboard will
pop up to the right.
So, using this I can manage screens like this, and if need be even type my name for a situation
like this.
For all the good it does, because I can't figure out how to play this game, so I'll
just move along.
This is super cycle.
There are several racing style games on this machine.
I'm not terribly familiar with this one, but it looks like I can pick my own color
of motorcycle and helmet.
Now, check out the little flashing disk up in the right corner.
That means the game is essentially loading from an emulated disk drive and that's the
activity light for it.
So anyway, that's super cycle.
Next I'll try paradroid.
Now this is a game I've seen played, but never played it myself.
So I'm not 100% sure how to play it.
One thing I did want to do, however, is take an opportunity to show you how the save game
feature works on this thing.
So, if you press the menu button, one of the options you'll see is save/load game.
Now, when you press that, you'll be presented with 4 blank BASIC looking screens in gray.
These are essentially blank places you can save a game.
So, I'll press the save button and it will save it.
Now I can go about my game, and eventually I'll get myself killed, and then I can go
back to that screen and you'll see my previous saved game.
This actually saves the entire state of the computer's memory, so when you select this
it will take you back in time like you never died.
I should also mention that while you may see 4 save slots, it appears each individual game
has 4 save slots, so that is quite a few total.
Here's a game called Nodes of Yes.
Never heard of this one.
Can't quite figure out how to play it.
So moving along.
This one is called Nobby the Aardvark.
The graphics look really nicely done.
And there's a whole story line here.
However, I've never played this so it's totally new to me.
I found the game infuriatingly difficult.
I spent like 15 minutes trying to get past this stupid jet of water and never could.
So that's maybe a sign I should move on.
This game is called netherworld, and it's some kind of shooter game too.
It didn't hold my interest much.
This game is called Nebulus, however in the USA this game was called Tower Toppler.
It's a decently interesting and fun game to play.
This is Monty on the Run.
I do understand this was a popular C64 game because I've heard a lot of people talk
about it, but this is my first time playing it.
The graphics are pretty simple, but the music is fantastic and the gameplay is difficult
but not so difficult as to make me stop playing.
So yeah, this is a worthwhile game to play!
Next up is Apocalypse.
It's just a space shooter, nothing terribly exciting here for me.
And here's Jumpman.
This game was available on many platforms, actually.
It's one of the really early computer games and the graphics are super simple, as well
as the sound.
However, it is surprisingly fun to play.
Word of warning, this is one that will require using the virtual keyboard to select things.
Impossible Mission was one of my favorite C64 games.
And while it was available on many platforms, I think the C64 version was probably the best
version of this game.
There are so many rooms to explore and puzzles to solve.
The graphics are fairly primitive but the animation is smooth and the sound effects
are excellent.
This is another one of the platform games on here that I'm not familiar with.
The graphics and sound are good, but it's a bit hard to play.
And here's Boulder Dash.
Of course I'm familiar with this game, but it was never really one of my favorite.
And here's another one of the many space shooter games.
Well, I must admit this game looks very interesting.
However, I think it would take me some time to get good at it.
This one might be worth investing some time into later.
OK, so that's not all of the games that the machine has, but I am not going to play
all of them for you, since that would take a long time, but I did want to mention that
when I talked to the creator of this device, he said that there were a lot of games that
they really wanted to put on here, but they simply weren't able to track down who the
current copyright owners are, because these games have transferred copyrights many times
throughout the last 20 or 30 years, and nobody seems to even know who owns them these days.
But, all of the games that are on here currently are, in fact, licensed.
However, one big consolation to the game selection problem this little thing has is the fact
that it has the ability to load in new games from a D64 image.
Now, what I'm going to try to do is I'm going to try to load my copy of Planet X2,
which that's the game I created.
Now, what you'll need is you'll need a D64 image and you'll need to put it on a
USB stick.
Now, the method that they've provided is not perfect, but supposedly it works and we're
going to try it out!
So, I'll just copy the D64 image over to the drive.
But I'll need to rename the file to THEC64-drive8.D64.
Apparently you can only put one game on the USB drive at the moment and it has to have
this name.
Now here's the trouble..
In order to use this, you need three things plugged into the C64 mini.
You need the joystick, because it has the controls on it for the menu and whatnot.
And you need a USB keyboard, which you'll see why in a minute, and then you'll need
the flash drive.
Trouble is, there are only two USB ports.
So, I thought this Apple keyboard would be a good solution since it has a built in USB
hub.
So after you plug all this in, you open the BASIC program from the main menu.
The drive you inserted should emulate a floppy disk.
And sure enough, there's the contents of Planet X2.
So I'll just type the usual load command.
And off we go.
Unfortunately, this seems to emulate the original disk drive speed without any fast loader.
This is probably done to enhance compatibility.
So you may have to be patient.
Anyway, I'll fast forward a bit and as you can see it loads up just fine.
Unfortunately, I discovered a problem.
Not so much with the C64 console but rather this Apple keyboard.
The Function keys are actually mapped by default to other things and you have to press the
Fn key in order to make them actually behave like function keys.
So for a game like mine that uses the function keys extensively, this is a problem.
Not only that, but after a few times of doing this, the keyboard went crazy and started
doing all kinds of random stuff.
Nothing I could do would make it stop.
So I decided to try an older generic USB keyboard that's not Apple brand.
The trouble is, I'll need a USB hub in order to make this work.
However, it does work and I had no further trouble playing Planet X2 using this setup.
I did still notice a latency between the time I pressed keys on the keyboard and when I
saw things happen on screen.
I also wanted to try some other random games, so I started with one of my old-time favorites,
Master of the Lamps.
Next I tried another old favorite, MULE.
And that seemed to work fine, so I moved on to another one, Atomino or atomino, however
you want to pronounce that.
One thing I'm doing is saving the game each time I load one of these.
And the last game I tried was Giana Sisters.
Basically, every game I tried worked perfectly without any issues.
After rebooting the machine, I wanted to see if all of my saved games were still there….
And they are.
So what I've effectively done is added 4 new games to the machine that I can call up
without the need of a USB stick or a keyboard.
Now, I'm told that in a future firmware update, they are going to make loading your
own custom games into this machine a lot easier, possibly even adding them to the main menu
of games, rather than having to load them through BASIC with a keyboard like I just
demonstrated.
But the fact that you can load games onto this at all without having to do any kind
of hacks to the machine is really cool, because most other consoles like this don't give
you that ability.
And whether the games are downloaded from abandonware websites, or whether you programmed
them yourself, or even if you downloaded a legal digital copy, like for example, with
Planet X2, you know, my game, when you go on my website and you buy a copy of the game,
you are immediately emailed a D64 image which is exactly the type of image you need to run
on this machine.
And so, I would hope that a lot more of the future games coming out for the C64 are also
available like that so that they can be played on here.
Oh, and speaking of firmware, I was sent a new firmware for this device and so I want
to try it out and see how difficult it is to install.
All I was told to do was to copy this file onto a USB flash drive.
Then, insert the flash drive into the C64 mini.
There's no need for a keyboard or anything for this.
Then power up the unit.
Now just go over to the system information screen, and sure enough it has detected the
update and is asking if I'd like to apply it.
So I'll give that a shot.
Neat, it kind of looks like an Apple device when updating firmware.
And, I guess that's it.
Everything is back to normal.
So, the fact that there are new firmware updates coming for this thing definitely gives me
hope that there are improvements coming down the line, but for the moment I wanted to check
up on this latency issue that I showed you earlier.
I wrote a small program in assembly language, because I wanted it to be super fast.
And all this program does is wait for you to press a key and then it changes the screen
color and beeps.
I've loaded that program onto a USB drive just like I did with Planet X2 and I've
also loaded it onto an SD card so I can load it on a real Commodore 64.
I also wanted to make sure the television I was using was set to GAME mode, as this
should reduce any latency from the TV itself.
So let's give it a try on the real machine first.
As you can see the result is instant, as expected.
Now let's try it on the C64 mini.
There's definitely a delay.
The question is, how much?
Well, let's take a look at the audio I recorded.
This section here is the part we're interested in.
So, we need to measure the time from the space bar click to the start of the beep here.
And if we look down here, that shows us the length is .36 seconds.
That's the bad news.
However, there is some good news.
When I look at this in my video editing software, so here's the initial click of the space
bar, and then over here, this is where the beep starts.
But if we look at the video in slow motion, you can see the screen starts to change color
right here.
And on the next frame, it's fully changed.
So, what we're dealing with here is a video delay of about 0.13 seconds, which isn't
really that bad in my opinion, for an emulator.
It's the audio delay of .36 seconds that's the main problem.
OK, well, it's that time where we have to disassemble it and see what secrets it holds
inside.
However, there aren't any obvious screws on this thing, but I have a suspicion that
they are hiding under these rubber feet.
And, yep, there they are.
So I'll just unscrew all of those, and I think it is going to come apart.
There are already a few interesting things to note.
For example, these metal pieces.
I'm assuming these are simply to give the unit more weight so that it doesn't scoot
around as much.
But this here is even more fascinating.
What the heck is it?
I mean, if you look on the bottom, there's nothing there besides the label.
Well, one way to find out is to remove this screw and maybe we can see what this thing
does.
Interesting, it turns it it is a button.
Hiding under the bottom label.
Well, let's remove these 4 screws holding the logic board down and maybe we can get
a look at that.
And here we go.
I see a lot of really interesting things here.
Obviously, we have a big A20 dual core system on a chip here.
And over here is a 256 MB NAND flash chip, a 256 MB SDRAM chip, and interestingly enough
a spot for another chip.
So, I asked about this chip and I was told that the original board had two chips that
were half the capacity, but to reduce cost they were able to replace it with a single
chip for the full amount.
Whether it could be upgraded at this point, who knows.
And this guy here is a power management unit with some general purpose input/output pins
too.
Other interesting things are this recovery and Uboot buttons.
I asked about them and was told both of these, along with the secret button on the bottom
of the case, were used for re-flashing the firmware and other troubleshooting features,
but have been removed in subsequent versions of the board.
There's also a place for a more traditional power jack, along with a spot for mounting
an SD card reader.
When I asked about this, I was told this was how they originally loaded firmware into the
machine before moving that to internal flash memory.
And the last mystery is this header here, which I was told was used for troubleshooting
during development.
I suspect it probably gives a serial port that can be connected to a terminal or something,
since this board does run Linux at its core.
So, that's about everything I can tell you about the C64 mini.
I've tried to give a fair and balanced review of it.
While obviously it is not perfect, it's hard to really criticize it too much since
there isn't really a competitor of any sort on the market at the moment.
I was told they originally considered using the same chip that is inside the original
Commodore DTV joystick, but the main concern was that there was no way to get HDMI output
from that chip.
And as much as it annoys me that this device is HDMI only, I do have to look at this objectively
and say that I realize this console is aimed at the general public and not so much at the
enthusiast like myself.
And many of the things I complained about, including the use of HDMI, won't be noticed
by the target customer of this console.
And so my hope is that this device does succeed because that will help spur more, and possibly
better products in the future.
And while the C64 platform has seen a bit of a resurgence this last year or two with
a lot of really nice game releases, I still hope the release of this console will further
fan the flames and help to bring even more people back into the C64 community.
I'm told that if the C64 mini sells well, then they plan to bring a full-sized version
to market that would have a functioning keyboard on it.
And, so that's a product I'd really like to see as well!
I get a lot of emails from people asking about getting a Commodore 64 for the first time
or getting back into a Commodore 64 after not having used one for decades.
And, one of the problems of course is finding a functional one on websites like eBay for
example, and especially by the time you get the computer and a disk drive and some games,
you've spent a lot of money and in many cases a lot of headaches getting it to work.
And simply because the equipment is so old.
And so I sort of hope that this is an easy, quick, cheap alternative and maybe even more
reliable for those people who want to get back into the C64 or get into the C64 for
the first time, perhaps.
And so, I hope that I was able to give an objective review and I do personally hope
this unit succeeds.
So, it will be interesting to see how the launch goes on that.
And that about wraps it up for the moment, so, stick around and you can do that by subscribing
if you haven't done that already and thanks for watching!
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