Commodore has set up a microsite to help steer you towards its unique vision of a modern operating system. If you head over to commodore.net/closewindows, you will first see a banner image of the Commodore 64X PC with OS Vision. But that is essentially an x86 PC in a C64-style ‘bread bin’ chassis, so don’t worry about the hardware.
I’m downloading it. Ya. Takes a minute.
I’m gonna give this thing a whirl. I know, its gonna just be another linux distro.
But it sure would be neat if I actually liked it …Hey. I just don’t know much about the following. This is from the setup instructions.
What ROMs are we talking about here? Why does this matter?Instructions on how to obtain and install legal Commodore ROMS can be found in the Commodore OS Settings manager by navigating menu: System --> Commodore OS --> Commodore OS Settings and selecting “Emulation Settings” and then “Cloanto Commodore ROM Setup” option.
NOTE: Whilst Commodore’s 8-bit ROMs cannot be included Cloanto does provide their C64 Forever package for free online and Commodore OS is capable of downloading and extracting the 8-bit system ROM files and games via the above process. It is suggested you perform this step even if you retain the valid ROMs yourself.Commodore games. ROM is the common term for a game cartridge dump.
I never owned a Commodore. I didn’t know they had cartridge games. At the time, my family owned a TI 99/4a. I think it did have a cartridge, but the BASIC one just stayed in there. We didn’t have anything else. I hand-typed in games from Compute! magazine and saved em on tape drive. Lotsa debug involved.
The c64 actually did have game cartridges, but be it tape, cartridge, floppy, cd - in the emulation space, ROM (Read-Only Memory) just generally means the file with the game data no matter the medium.
But technically, it’s a ROM only if it truly is a dump of an actual ROM chip.
Are they bringing back Workbench?
35GB!!
I want to know what the games are. A lot of the games I played on the Amiga 1000 were licensed, so I doubt those are included. A lot of freeware, too, but the licensing would be murky, they’d have to contact each developer for quite diminishing returns on each.
Also, “Commodore OS”? What about AmigaDOS? What about Workbench? I’d love to see those get modern styling.
I hope people take the time to look up what Commodore means (it’s a naval rank BTW, above captain and below rear admiral — I knew it was naval, had to look up where the rank fell) because it looks like “common,” and worse, “commode.”
Amiga is owned by another company. They don’t have the license for any of it. If you wan’t Amiga OS you can buy it.
Amiga is owned by another company.
Kind of. Apparently the rights are a mess and owned by 3 different companies, one of which is Commodore, although it seems like the current version of AmigaOS is owned by a different company.
The most recent version of AmigaOS is 4.1 which was released in 2014, and requires a PowerPC CPU. It’s kind of hard to argue that’s a modern OS, although apparently a 4.2 release is in the works. The dependency on PowerPC is kind of a problem at this point as their CPUs have stagnated and it’s hard to find any modern ones that aren’t custom CPUs for game consoles (and even then mostly old game consoles).
Additionally there’s the problem of software availability. The new Commodore OS is just a tweaked Linux install so it gets all the Linux software essentially for free. AmigaOS on the other hand is legitimately its own OS and therefore only runs Amiga software.
Wasn’t the Xbox 360 a PowerPC machine?
Yes, but it’s also 20 years old now and has been discontinued for almost a decade. Likewise the Wii had a PowerPC CPU in it. None of the current consoles use PowerPC, They’re either x86 (Xbox One and PlayStation 5) or ARM (Switch 2).
