A couple of months ago, I stumbled upon some youtube videos praising the new commodore 64 ultimate. It’s a FPGA recreation of the original hardware, with a bunch of convenience features on top. Probably an awesome addition to any retro computing enthusiast or someone that already knows they want a C64, but…
I guess I learned the hard way that it wasn’t really for me? I think my intro to PC computing was probably a decade after the C64 released–so I’m thinking MS DOS/Windows 3.1 on a 386 or 486 with a turbo button. The C64 is more like 1MHz. Even the Oregon trail game that was made for C64 wasn’t the one that I played when I was a kid, which was slightly disappointing.
Other than some demo games that weren’t too fun, I haven’t tried much programming other than printing text or basic loops with the kids. I don’t think this generation of kids is really impressed or curious with these old computers anymore. I can see why… It’s probably too much to expect them to want to learn how to write BASIC on the old computer. On the plus side I guess it boots immediately and teleports you back to the days without user accounts or distractions. Maybe with the networking capability there may be some interesting telnet scenarios to give it more life.