Another C65 sold, record so far?

[eXeler0]

https://www.ebay.com/itm/13498914285...mis&media=COPY

That’s a pretty insane price :-)

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by eXeler0

https://www.ebay.com/itm/13498914285...mis&media=COPY

That’s a pretty insane price :-)

If link goes dead, the winning bid (65 bids ;-) was €35,605!

[abu_the_monkey]

[stx2199]

such computer shouldn't be worth more than 150 $
yet the are some retro-nerds that pays super inflated prices for unusable things that they won't be able to take them to the afterlife.

[paul1981]

If they can afford it then that's great for them! I hope they enjoy their C65.

[jotd]

256 colors out of 4096 that was more than the A500!

Strange that they manufactured that with the amiga AGA arriving the year after.

[d4rk3lf]

Originally Posted by stx2199

such computer shouldn't be worth more than 150 $
yet the are some retro-nerds that pays super inflated prices for unusable things that they won't be able to take them to the afterlife.

Don't you think that their families will be able to sold them at even much higher prices to the museums in the future?

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by jotd

256 colors out of 4096 that was more than the A500!

Strange that they manufactured that with the amiga AGA arriving the year after.

AGA was supposed to arrive the same year, and then it would have made some sense.

Yes the C65 has 256 colors, but they are bitplane colors so the 8 bit CPU has to write 8 bytes to set the color of 1 pixel. Furthermore the memory map only has space for 1 bitplane. They mitigated this by mapping the bitplanes to a block of 8 bytes with 1 byte per bitplane. This allows the CPU to write 8 pixels in a row with 8 consecutive writes, which is efficient for character-aligned rendering. However a true chunky mode would have been better IMO, as this is a better match to the 8 bit CPU.

The C65 design team appears to have been influenced by the Amiga, which is a bit disappointing. IMO they should have developed a unique design that extended the 64's existing architecture. I would have stuck with 16 colors in 4 bit packed pixel format at 320x200/160x200, and possibly 256 colors in 160x200 with one byte per pixel. No need for higher resolutions apart from 80 column text. Instead I would have given it more sprites. I would also have stuck with a single SID chip, but added one or two 8 bit PCM channels.

Finally I would have mimicked the C64's BASIC screen, not the horrible 80 column text with color bars that prototype C65's had. The idea is to make it act like the C64 but with enhancements 'under the hood' that addressed the C64's major limitations - not try to make it a poor cousin of the A1200!

The C65 got canned for 3 main reasons:-

1. It was too close in specs to the Amiga, at a time when the C64 scene was running out of steam. Better to encourage C64/128 users to upgrade to an Amiga.

2. It took far too long to develop, partly because the engineer working on the essential DMA chip refused to be rushed.

3. When Gail Wellington tested an early prototype she was not impressed by the low compatibility with C64 titles, mostly due to issues with booting games off a 1541 drive.

The C128 remained popular due to its high compatibility with the C64. The C65 needed this even more since it would be released at a later date when development of new C64 titles was waning. So Commodore made the right decision in canning it.

The good news is that the few prototypes are now 'worth' lots of money, and will continue to get more 'valuable'. I support this redistribution of wealth from the rich to those who may make better use of it.

[SkulleateR]

In 2017 there was a working C65 sold for more than 80.000€ ... so, no record here

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by eXeler0

If link goes dead, the winning bid (65 bids ;-) was €35,605!

65 bids is excellent. However I'm disappointed that it only went for €35,605.55 (NZ$64,288.21). If I was bidding I would have bumped it up to exactly NZ$65,000.

I leached all the images off that eBay listing, so now I have my own personal museum entry for it. Thanks for the link!

[VladR]

For all we know it's just the typical scheme of Person A "buying" from Person B and then handing over the differential so as to bump it further in next run...

Of course, in theory, somebody with money to burn might have actually bought it, but it's much less probable...

[dreadnought]

It could be scheme, but 35K is not too wild for a nerd, who are well known for having deep pockets. C64 was rather popular, so this line has still many fans...

[CCCP alert]

Another 10 years anybody interested in owning obscure 8bit prototypes will be dead, or close too it.

[jotd]

I'm 53 I hope to live longer than that thanks

[grond]

Originally Posted by jotd

I'm 53 I hope to live longer than that thanks

But in ten years you may be considering saving that sort of money for retirement rather than blowing it on a prototype with hardly any software to run on it.

I largely agree with Bruce's comment above. A less ambitious C65 with good C64-compatibility (without going to a special C64 mode like the C128), 80 character text and some additions for graphics and sound would have been a attractive product in 1985-87 but not any more once the A500 came out. The efforts that went into the C128 and the 264-line could have been saved with such a product.

[alexh]

Originally Posted by grond

But in ten years you may be considering saving that sort of money for retirement rather than blowing it on a prototype with hardly any software to run on it.

The classic car prices mirror classic computer HW prices. But with a much older lineage you can see the trends more clearly.

Prices peak at launch, go gradually down and hit rock bottom a few years after the last sold of that item reaches the end of it's working life expectancy. Values slowly creep up as nostalgia and collection kicks in. Noticeable downward blips in value once in a while can be observed. They seem to correspond to drops in disposable income of the collectors and thus demand. They usually equate to periodic life events such as Marriage and Children. Rapid increase in value approx 18-20 years after these blips which must correspond to increase in disposable income of collectors. (Perhaps dependents leaving home? Perhaps pay rises? Perhaps start of retirements?). Then a massive fall off as 1st hand owners die, their collections are put up for sale and complete fall off when those who used them 2nd hand die.

1930's cars are now worth a fraction of what they once were with the prices for 1980s cars at all time high.

There are timeless classics that buck the trend, E-type Jaguars for example. I expect CBM A3000T will still demand a high price after we've all gone.

I think 10 years for 8-bit hardware is perhaps a little soon but not far off.

[S0ulA55a551n]

Amstrad did their Plus upgrades is a much better , vastly more compatible way and they still sunk.

Was flogging a dead horse at that point with the 8 bits

[jotd]

A museum would probably have it, maybe not at this price.

Personally, 8-bits don't attract me so much. I have a fully working Oric with some custom made Erebus interface which loads most games in a few seconds from a SD card, but I rarely play it. Mostly really crap games or too limited.

[Cris1997XX]

Originally Posted by S0ulA55a551n

Amstrad did their Plus upgrades is a much better , vastly more compatible way and they still sunk.

Was flogging a dead horse at that point with the 8 bits

I'd say it was a case of "too little too late", it would've been much better if they released their Plus models and the GX4000 a couple of years earlier.

[AestheticDebris]

Originally Posted by Cris1997XX

I'd say it was a case of "too little too late", it would've been much better if they released their Plus models and the GX4000 a couple of years earlier.

In the previous few years they'd been too busy raking in money selling Spectrums. In the runbup to Xmas '89 they made the mistake of thinking the 16-bit era was still a long way off and so they could make do with a cheap 8-bit console as long as the graphics were improved. The Batman Amiga pack launched and ushered in the 16-bit revolution at last. By the time they'd designed the console, it was hopelessly too late.

Commodore made the same mistake but had a lot less reason, they already had 16-bit hardware and knew the price would come down to a reasonable amount. The C65 just made no sense at all.