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The Triumphant Return Of The Commodore 64

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As a child I spent many hours hunched over the loudly clicking keyboard of the Commodore 64, typing out programs in BASIC and saving them to cassette drive. Commodore brings that wonderfully noisy keyboard back, only this time there's a hard drive as large as one terabyte hidden inside.

This is what I've been missing, all of these years. Today's ala carte keyboards are nice enough, but I long for the days when the keyboard was a part of the computer; one massive unit that you only needed to hook up to your television. That's exactly what the new Commodore 64 is.

Packed inside that lovably ugly container with its Cherry-brand keys is a mini-ITX PC motherboard featuring a Dual Core 525 Atom processor. The original 64kB of RAM has been upgraded to either two or four gigabytes, and built-in wireless and bluetooth negates the need for a dusty old coupler modem.

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With DVI, HDMI, and standard VGA outputs, the new Commodore 64 is ready to plug into most modern televisions and monitors, with the Nvidia Ion2 graphics chipset powering the picture.

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It might not be a hardcore gaming rig, but I got plenty of hardcore gaming done on one of these back in the day. Commodore is preparing a Commodore operating system with classics game package for the unit, though it currently comes with an Ubuntu 10.04 LTS disc, ready to install. Or you could slap Windows on there. Your choice.

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My choice? I need one of these, immediately. If I didn't already have two babies on the way, this would have made an excellent baby replacement. Starting at $250 barebones and reaching $895 fully-packed, maybe they could do without a stroller for a few years.

The New Commodore 64 [Official Page, via Igniq]