> I really don't understand the love people have for the commodore 64. It wasn't especially advanced for it's time nor was it especially good. Finally it basically required the use of a horrible language like Basic to use. There's like zero reason to re-create it as a retro computer.

Happy to help you understand:

Like a lot of people, I owned a C64 and not an Amiga, which was very expensive and uncommon in my country.

Agreed the included Basic was horrible, but I also started my programming journey with it. One upside, unlike with current computers, is that the C64 had an "instant on" appliance feel to it -- you plugged it in, and it booted up almost instantly, greeting you with the READY prompt, ready to go at your command. Turning it off was likewise instant.

You could also write assembly with it.

The C64 had a vast library of games, many very good, and the SID music from those games was simply amazing. It still is. I still listen to C64 music from time to time, and I love it.

The demoscene around the C64 was amazing and -- get this -- it still exists!

Finally, though less importantly, the C64 was a massive success and sold lots of units, and helped kickstart an era in computing, so it has great historical importance.

Hopefully this helped you understand the widespread love for the C64.

I would add that the popularity of the original machine and the vast library of games built off of each other, and the result is a large community with love and nostalgia for the C64. That in turn perpetuates modern projects, newcomers to the scene, and new generations of community here for their own reasons.

"Retro" exists independently of "nostalgia:" it's a broad cultural category that encompasses fashion, technology, and new reasons to appreciate old things. I would recommend Commodore-adjacent stuff—VICE, TheC64, Ultimate 64 in a new case, MEGA65, refurbished machines with new accessories and adapters—to people with a variety of interests that have never seen an original Commodore.

Just the other day I ran into this video of a recent C64 demo. It just blew my mind (5:02 is my favorite part). THere were demos at the time I played on the C64, but this is just pushing the limits so far, it is pure art.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q56-23D7omY

Very cool, thanks for sharing!

> One upside, unlike with current computers, is that the C64 had an "instant on" appliance feel to it -- you plugged it in, and it booted up almost instantly, greeting you with the READY prompt, ready to go at your command.

That's true of all the 1980s 8-bit home computers. Oric-1, BBC Micro, Enterprise 64, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, whatever. Turn on; beep or click; ready to go.

But with an Oric or a Spectrum or a CPC or other cheap home micros, you could do sounds and graphics in BASIC. Not on a C64.

> You could also write assembly with it.

Also not really fair or accurate.

All mainstream computers can be programmed in assembly. The C64 did nothing to help. It didn't have a machine-code monitor (like the Sharp MZ-80K did, say). It didn't have inline assembly in the BASIC (like the BBC Micro and Acorn Electron did, say).

The SID chip in the c64 is very unique, it's specifically designed for music versus the PSG-like square wave generators in other systems at the time. (I will say the Atari POKEY is magical though.)

Comparing c64 to Amiga isn't fair, the Amiga was a generation later. What the c64 should be compared with is the Atari 8-bit systems (400, 800, 65XE, 130XE), Apple II, Colecovision.

Having the 64k RAM, plus sprites, plus a sound chip that implemented ADSR and different waveforms other than square did introduce a lot of possibilities and excitement in 1982 though, even if you tried your best to use them from the absolutely shitty BASIC and/or had to wait minutes for things to load from disk or cassette.

I'm not going to judge other people's retro-crushes but as an old-timer who used several of these 80s computers in the 80s, you're correct about the Amiga being especially notable from an historical perspective.

I would even say that the Amiga, at the time it shipped, was the single largest step-up in capabilities of any widely available computer that's ever occurred. Compared to all the other computers available to consumers at the time, the Amiga's graphics, sound, operating system and processing were best of breed. From today's perspective it's hard to appreciate just how stunning the Amiga was versus status quo. It literally drew crowds of people at local computer stores just to watch someone run through all the demos.

While today's PCs are many orders of magnitude more powerful and capable, I can't recall any single increment over the decades being nearly as significant across so many different dimensions (visuals, sound, speed, OS, UX, I/O, etc).

The c64 was cheap, easily available, and dominated the market. The Amiga was not cheap, was not made in anything like the quantities of the c64, and was fighting with the ST for third place behind the Mac and IBM PCs.

The Amiga 1000 was a decade ahead of it’s time, but Commodore sat on its ass for longer than that, with very little investment in upgrading the thing.

I say this as someone who went from a c64 in her teens to the Amiga in her twenties, and held on to the Amiga well past the time when it was obviously dead in terms of technological prowess and software availability.

The c64 was also a lot of people’s first taste of programming in a time when C compilers cost hundreds of dollars.

And if you don’t understand c64 nostalgia, I bet you must be even more befuddled by Spectrum nostalgia. Which was even cheaper and shittier than the c64, but completely ruled the UK for a while.

It's heartwarming to see some people still enjoy the old breadbox and others still enjoy telling everyone everything was better on the Amiga.

The Amiga launched at $1300, while the C64 was going for $200. By the time I could afford an Amiga, I got a PC instead.

With the C64, you could literally understand what every single memory address on the machine did. You could hold the whole thing in your head. Coding on it was about as abstraction free as you could get, especially in assembly language.

Now, we run npm and have barely any idea of how any of it works. That makes sense in a way, things get bigger and more complex. For me at least, it's not fun in the way coding on a 8 or 16 bit computer is.

My family couldn’t afford an Amiga when I was a kid, but we could afford a C64 so that’s what we had.

I really don't understand the love people have for ${literally anything}.

Nostalgia is a hell of a drug.