Sunday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
·
Sunday, December 28, 2025
·
8 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
Follow Steven on
Twitter and/or
BlueSky.
********************@
This is interesting. New Commodore 64 computers will go on sale shortly. Preorders are being taken now, at a somewhat reduced price. Here’s a review.
I suppose there’s a huge nostalgia factor. The C64 was a capable machine for its time. I didn’t own one, but a friend in high school did. I spent lots of time in his home, along with a few others, playing the hell out of that machine. I recall Summer Games, Winter Games, Zaxxon, Castle Wolfenstein, even Zork.
It might also serve t teach new generations what old computers could do and how they were used. Though I suppose the interest for that will be tiny at best.
Brigitte Bardot 91
RIP
@Gregory Lawrence Brown:
I told one of the aides in rehab that BB had died, and she looked blank and replied, “Who’s that?”
@Kathy: That’s hilarious. It got me interested. That lasted about 10 seconds.
@Jay L. Gischer:
If they were cheaper, I’d buy one and a joystick. Alas, with shipping and import duties it’s around $400. I’d rather put that towards a new desktop PC for next year.
Maybe once they hit the second hand market…
@Kathy: I understand the nostalgia a little bit. OTOH, you can buy a Raspberry Pi 400 system-in-a-keyboard-case for less than $100 and get an almost-real computer that can run a C64 or C128 emulator. Or the Pi 500 for less than $120. There are sites that claim to have the entire C64 game catalog available online. USB joystick emulators seem to run $20-30.
@Michael Cain:
I’m not surprised. there have been emulators for older gaming systems sine the 90s at least. Some even work 🙂
I vaguely recall a gadget some years ago that had an Atari joystick, and claimed to contain hundreds of Atari 2600 games in its internal memory. It hooked to a TV, too. I think it was back before HDMI became the norm for TVs.
@Kathy: Over the last 30 years there’s probably been hundreds of all in one emulator systems like what you described. Some clearly better than others though for sure.
My go to for emulation for a decade was an original Xbox with a v1 motherboard that I heavily modified. The v1 board had pads for more ram you could solder in and the output chips were better for emulation. Ran linux and emulated every prior game system on that one box. Since it used USB ports for controllers it was a simple matter to grab a couple adapters to hook up any USB device including keyboard, mice and the OG controllers I had modified for USB usage. I had full MAME and specialized arcade games galore on top of ALL the consoles going back to the first atari. Then the PSU blew zapping the hard drive’s fuse and possibly doing more damage. I partially repaired it before I ended up moving all my emulating needs back to my computer. Prior to the xbox I ran emulators on my desktop. The xbox was way more convenient to bring with me when visiting family and friends.
The go to for emulating these days seems to be rasberry Pi based as mentioned prior.