The first public hint that Commodore was working
on a new successor to the Commodore 64 was in a 1989 issue of Compute's Gazette. Here they talk
a little about how Apple had come out with the IIgs a few years earlier, and wondered if
Commodore might have something similar. "The latest rumor says Yes. We've heard
reports from several sources of new machine from Commodore - a 64GS if you will."
And then they went on to talk a bit about the rumored hardware capabilities.
Apparently not everyone at Commodore was onboard, with the engineers calling this
the son of a Plus/4. Nevertheless, Nintendo and other game consoles had eaten a big hole in
Commodore's market and the 64 was not selling anywhere near the volume it used to. The Amiga had
never really taken hold of the market the way the 64 did during its heyday. And so I think they were
looking for something low-cost to replace the C64. Let's take a look at the Commodore timeline
a bit to see where this slots in exactly. Commodore had quite a few products here, and
I'm not even showing all of the variations or the PC clones. But I think it's important to
also realize this timeline shows the time of introduction. But keep in mind the C64 was still
being sold. The first 4 years it was the breadbin, and then the 64c continued to be sold
until Commodore's ultimate demise in 1994. So apparently this new project was being
developed around 1990. And the thing is, there's no doubt about it, it would have directly
competed with the Amiga 500 most likely stealing sales away from that. As well as the 600, which
was probably already on the drawing board by this time. Maybe even the CD-TV. As all of these
were meant to be low cost computers for consumers. So that's my guess as the most probable reason
this product was never finished. Nevertheless, I have a Commodore 65 prototype
here and it's amazing how close to production it appears to have been.
Most collectors believe there are less than 200 of these in existence, and
probably even less than that which are actually functional. Every now and then one
of these will come up for sale on ebay, and they usually sell for between $20,000 and $80,000.
This particular machine comes from Bo Zimmerman's collection. I picked it up from him last
time I was driving through Austin. And, I'll be returning it after finishing this video.
I want to start off by talking a bit about the exterior design language. Here it is compared
to a 64c. You can see it definitely shares a lot in common with this and perhaps even moreso
with the 128. However, notice there are no ports on the right side, most likely because
the disk drive mechanism is in the way. The keyboard sits slightly lower than the 64c, and
the keys themselves are also lower profile, more similar to what is on the 128, actually. On the
left side, you'll find the typical joystick ports, power switch, reset, and power input.
I should also mention the badge here. Apparently no C65 units had a badge. But Bo
installed a custom badge on his which has the typical Commodore design language. But there's no
guarantee the badge would have looked like this. And here's the rear with most of the ports,
but we'll circle back to these in a moment. First I want to talk a little more about the power
port. Like the C64, it is a DIN style connector, but it's not actually the same layout. It
turns out it uses the same power brick as the 1581 disk drive. So yeah, for the 1581
and 1541-II, Commodore used an external power brick. And so that's what the C65 came with.
Speaking of disk drives, I also have here the companion disk drive, known as the
1565. The color is slightly less yellow, which suggests Bo's C65 may have yellowed a bit
over the years. This is a cute little disk drive. There are a few things I'd like to point out.
First of all, look at the power port. It's the same power port as the computer. In fact, this is
the power brick I got with the drive. Notice it says it works with the 1541-II, 1571-II, and
1581. Except I've never heard of a 1571-II. Sounds like Commodore was planing to make a 1571
drive with an external power brick at some point. OK, now let's talk about these rear ports. Let's
start by talking about this tiny little disk drive port. So it's not the standard Commodore
IEC port. In fact, here's the cable that was supplied. It looks kind of like an off-the-shelf
mini-DIN cable. However, it does have a cable label on it, which says CBM 1521, and that it's
10 feet. So anyway, that just plugs in here. So on the back of the drive, it's pretty obvious that
they originally had a larger port here. Probably a regular sized DIN. But I can't quite tell
if this plastic was filled in after the fact, or if this was just a quick and dirty change to
the plastic mold, and thus manufacturered this way. Anyway, our cable connects up here like so.
Well. what if you wanted to use a standard Commodore IEC drive, well it has a port for
that way over here. Just like previous systems, it is simply labeled as "serial." And so you
can plug in your regular disk drives like so. It's worth pointing out that the internal drive
is always drive 8. And if you hvae the external drive, then it is drive 9. And then if you have
any IEC disk drives, those have to be configured as drive 10 or above. We'll circle back around to
this later, as we need to talk more about this. But for the moment, back to our ports discussion.
So, this little section here is audio/video. You do get a standard Commodore DIN style video
connector. This is the same kind used on the C64, Plus/4, and VIC-20. And it just breaks out into
the usual RCA style connectors. Oddly enough, it still includes an RF modulator. I'm
sort of surprised for a more high end product like this. Next over is an RGB video
port and standard stereo RCA jacks for audio. But let's talk about that RGB port. This is
sort of an oddball port. It looks very much like the same kind of RGBI port you'd find on
a Commodore 128, or on any IBM CGA compatible computer. However, it's not wired the
same. This is an analog RGB output, and thus electrically it is more like what you'd
find on the Amiga or an Apple IIgs. Exactly why they chose this design, I really have no idea.
So, at this point I thought it was time to connect up a monitor so I could power this thing
on. I figured I'd start with my Commodore 1084, and just run with the standard seperated
chroma/luma connection since I don't have a proper RGB cable. Well, I powered it on and it
does work, but it appeared in black and white. So, my first thought was that this computer
must not support the seperate chroma/luma style video signal. I suspected I could
fall back to composite video, if need be. But, I also realized it might be pretty quick and
easy to connect it to my RGB modded television. So I made a little custom cable like so. I was able
to hack this together in just a few minutes. Well, unfortuntaely, it didn't quite work. I
got a picture, and it was in color, but it was still rolling. So I figured there must be
something different in how the sync signals work. Of course, I was totally wrong about all of this.
It was actually something far more fundamentally wrong. And I should have picked up on it
sooner. But the way I figured it out was when I started trying to record video, even the
black and white video from the 1084 monitor. it looked good in person, but my camera would not
sync with the picture on the screen. And then it hit me exactly what was wrong. The lack
of color, the wrong frame-rate. This unit was outputting PAL video and I'm trying
to use NTSC monitors. So, as you can see, once I adjusted my camera to 25 frames per second,
it looks rock solid, albeit in black and white. Fortunately the Commodore 1084 is very happy
to display 25 frames per second, but my north American version still won't decode a PAL color
signal. My poor Samsung TV is not at all happy with 25 frames per second, and just goes bonkers.
So after doing a bit of research, one of the things I found out is most if not all of the
c65 prototypes that are out there in the wild are all PAL units. Apparently Bo Zimmerman
neglected to tell me this, but to be fair he's been running this thing on an RGB monitor
for years, so it probably just slipped his mind. So, I realized the only way to get color and
25 frames per second was going to be to use my 1084 in RGB mode. So I hacked together this
little temporary solution into an Amiga video cable. And sure enough, I powered it on and got
color! And no surprise, the picture is very sharp, much like you would expect from an Amiga
running in RGB mode. And this is actually 80 column text you're looking at. Of course, I
can't help the moire effect being produced by my camera. So you'll just have to take my word
for it, that the picture looks really nice! Okay, so now that I have it up and running,
one of the problems is there just not really a lot of software to show. One problem is is
that one c65 isn't necessarily even compatible with another c65 because all the prototypes out
there have like these different ROM versions and so certain demos only even work on certain
ROM versions. I did find this one demo that did show off the 256 color Graphics capabilities,
unfortunately it's a picture of a topless woman so I've kind of censored it out here a little bit
for you because it's not normally the kind of thing that I would show on my channel. But, it is
quite literally the only demo that I could get to come up showing any kind of 256 color graphics.
Well, I figured if there wasn't any software to show, then I could make my own. Remember
that little kaleidoscope demo I designed on multiple different computers as
a comparison of BASIC speed? Well, I figured I could load in the Commodore 128
version of that on here. And it does load and I can list the program. It won't run of course
because the graphics commands have been changed. It actually took me quite a while to figure out
how the commands work, as you can see I have it here almost working. But I eventually figured
it out. And the thing is, I'm pretty disappointed. It looks like it's running about twice
as fast as the Commodore 128 version, and I really was expecting it to be faster than
that. After all, this computer is supposed to run at 3.5 mhz. Even if I jumper the commander
X16 down to 4mhz, which should be in the same ballpark, it's a night and day difference. So,
I'm going to chalk this up to most likely just a slow implementation of BASIC on this computer.
Of course, it isn't like there isn't ANY software that runs on it. After all, it is supposed to
be backwards compatible with the Commodore 64. In fact, you can use the familiar Go64 command
to put it into C64 mode. And there we go. I know it doesn't look it on camera, but it's sort
of unnatural seeing the C64 boot screen so sharp and clear due to the RGB video interface.
It's almost like I'm looking at an emulator. of course, this brings us back to the problem
I mentioned earlier. little to no C64 software exists on 3 and half inch disks. And
even if I connect an external drive, most C64 software won't load from anything other
than device 8. So this really limits what C64 software you'd be able to run, especially if this
had been released in 1990 and they were expecting people to use their off-the-shelf C64 software.
Fortunately, I can make my own disks. And so I copied the C64 version of Petscii Robots over to
a 3 and a half inch floppy. And I know this will work because there is no copy protection on this
game. Another reason I wanted to start with this game, besides to toot my own horn, is because if
anything doesn't work or seems to be incompatible, I will most likely be able to narrow
down exactly what is wrong and maybe even devise a workaround. So here goes.
Ok, well, it sort of works. The music sounds terrible. But after listening to it a bit,
I think the filter caps on the SID chip may have gone bad. So this may not be a compatibiltiy
thing. So i started the game and disabled the game music. Interestingly enough, all of the
sound effects sounded totally normal. In fact, everything from this point seemed perfectly
normal for the game. So I'd say if it weren't for the SID music, it would be a 100% success.
So, I used my 1581 to copy over some more games. By the way the internal drive reads the
same format as the 1581, I guess I should have mentioned that. Anyway, what I've copied
over are a handful of cracked, single-file games. These sort of files shouldn't pose any
problem for the disk format or drive number. By the way, I discovered I could press F1 in
order to switch to 40 column mode. Anyway, switching over to C64 mode, the first game
I tried was Gianna Sisters. And behold, it works. And I mean, it works pretty much
perfectly. Even the sound was mostly clear. The next game I tried was Panther. I did need
to turn off the turbo load in the loader menu, though. This game played almost correctly.
There seemed to be some sort of glitch with the bottom info panel. But I also realized
there is a possibility this game is meant for NTSC and maybe because I'm running on a
PAL system, this could simply be a result of that. I don't have an easy way to tell.
So it may or may not be the C65's fault. next, I tried Qbert. And it seemed to work
perfectly. No complaints there. And then I tried Ghosts and Goblins. This also seemed to work
mostly. There is a slight glitch on the text area at the bottom, much like Panther. So again, could
be a PAL NTSC thing. And the last of these games, I tried Spy Hunter. Again, kind of the
same glitch at the split screen area. But other than that, seemed to work fine.
OK, so I wanted to try one more experiment. A few years back, Magervalp created Ultima
4 Gold, which is cracked and fits the whole game on a 1581 disk. So I gave it a try.
Unfortunately, it does get stuck at this screen here. So then I thought, let's plug in
the real 1581 drive and configure it as device 10 and see if it works. And unfortunately,
no, it doesn't. But it was worth a try. So yeah, I think the c64 compatibility is
not nearly as bad as what I thought it was based on some stuff that I had read in the past.
And, I think the majority of the problem is the disk drive situation. Now, it is possible had
the machine come out and been successful that software companies would have course created
special versions of their c64 games that would have been on a 1581 or c65 compatible three
and a half inch disks, but you know who knows. So, the next thing we need to do is
take this thing apart so we can have a look at the inside and see what we
might learn. Here's the serial number, number 47. So if you ever see this up on ebay,
chances are somebody robbed Bo's Commodore Museum. I think it's really odd that a prototype
unit would have a warranty seal on it in the first place. But whatever. Anyway,
it appears that is the only screw you need to remove to take this apart. There are
just two snaps over here you have to move. And it just occurred to me, I should probably take
out the RAM expander. It's a trap door system just like the Amiga 500. There might be a screw
or something under here, so better safe than sorry. and it just slides right out, just like the
Amiga. So this is an official C65 RAM expander. If my math is right, I think this is adding in 1 MB
of RAM. I should mention that on power up, it was saying no expansion RAM was found, but Bo tells
me this is due to an incompatible ROM version. OK, let's take this top cover off. It appears
the keyboard is connected with a ribbon cable. So I'll need to carefully remove that. At
least this one has an unlock so it is zero insertion force. And now the RF shield will need
to come off. I'm just going to lay it to the side so I don't have to unplug that disk drive cable,
which does not appear to have an unlock feature. OK, and so here's the motherboard. It really
doesn't resemble any motherboard from the 8-bit era. But I guess this is technically a 16 bit
computer, so that makes sense. here are those two SID chips and I suspect one of the nearby
caps may be bad, but there's nothing obvious. One intersting thing I want to point out is
that the board is called the C64 DX. I've seen some other documentation referring
to it as such. I guess they changed the name to C65 at the last minute.
Anyway, here's the onboard 128K of RAM. This is the 4510 CPU, which is a
16-bit CPU that is backwards compatible with the 6502 series and runs at 3.5 Mhz. This
should be every bit as fast, if not faster, than the 7 Mhz 68000 chip found in the Amiga due
to the different way in which 6502 chips work. And here's the 4567 video chip, otherwise
known as the VIC-III. This chip, while it works differently, is comparible
in features to what is found in the Amiga. And believe it or not, this chip here
is a DMA controller and Blitter. Again, adding more Amiga like capabilities. And here
we have dual SID chips, which is a nice touch! That would give 6 voices in stereo.
Here's our 128K of ROM. And finally, the floppy drive controller.
I think this could have been a really great system had it come out a few years earlier,
maybe instead of the Amiga. But the problem is, the the comparison that one engineer made to the
plus4 is not necessarily wrong. Because, what you have here is a computer that's almost as good as
the Amiga, maybe even better in certain aspects, and yet it's not compatible with the Amiga. Now,
granted the price would have played a big role in that. For example, if the machine had come out at
like half the price of an Amiga 500, well then I think it would have been a success. But, also the
more I think about it the c64 compatibility aspect of this machine is somewhat of a double-edged
sword especially because it doesn't work 100% correctly. And with the disk drive situation and
all that, so I think what would have happened is it would have probably led to a lot of really bad
reviews in the Press. Because, they would have gotten the machine, tried their c64 software
and realized that they couldn't run it even if the machine technically could and so that also
raises the question of how well would the software Market have supported the native C65 capabilities.
Well, if the computer had been released a couple of years earlier, then it would have probably
seen similar support to the Apple IIgs. But, I think by 1990 it was becoming obvious that
the world of IBM clones was where all of the software support was going. So maybe that had
some effect on the decision to can this product. So, what about the Mega65? I'm sure
people are going to ask about it. Well, I don't know a lot about the system. I had been
promised several times over the years that they would send me a unit to review, but I never got
one. But from what I can tell, the Mega65 does look a lot like the Commodore 65 prototype.
And it is somewhat based on the C65 operating system. But ultimately, the Mega65 is a lot more
powerful. And one of the things Bo Zimmerman told me is how disappointed he was that all of the
Mega65 specific games that have come out won't actually run on a real C65. So, unforunately,
for the various owners of these rare machines, about the only software they'll ever be able
to run will probably be C64 stuff in C64 mode. Well guys, that's it for this episode.
As always, thanks for watching!
