I love retro but this is getting silly. :P

What's next? Get read for an 8 Track this Christmas!

To be fair, most people don't have the time to mess on with C64 setting up, plus owning the original systems in full working order is getting harder and harder by the year. With this, you just plug it into a HDMI port and you're done. The emulation is pretty good in itself, complete with the programming tools.

I get people tthink it's just a cash grab, but the mini craze/rebirth is also a pretty good example of preservation and convince...apart from that Capcom stick, 200 quid?!

Anything Commodore related is a welcomed discussion in my book. I'm still sad that they closed down 25 years ago. The C64 had in general decent ports but its obviously far inferior to most things the Amiga had to offer. However, the Amiga community in the 80s was far more friendly towards the indie scene as the C64 parts but thats mostly because of online reach. Most C64 users couldn't use the internet back then while you have a ton of 80s and early 90s indie games for the Amiga. Several thousand games for the Amiga are made by hobbyists without a publisher. Tons of good ideas but they're often unpolished due to the nature of the machine as a hobbyist workforse. I remember knowing about several teams still making games for it for fun even in the late 90s, good times. Commercial Amiga indie games are still being released even to this day.

Here is a youtube video showing off "all games". I don't know if the claim is fully true however, but it already should be several times larger than anything the C64 library has to offer, booth in scale and quality.

There is a reason Amigas were used as the CG workhorse of choice (but were also very favored by NASA).

It'll cool down soon, 3d Emulation is more tricky than the older stuff, as people found out with the Playstation Classic.


Or we'll get the 3DO Diddy

Next Christmas, The Mini PlayStation 4.

I don't understand the appeal of all of these emulator-in-a-box systems. Software emulation on a PC is superior in almost every way.. Sure, the keyboard may be slightly different, but not enough to make such a thing worthwhile.

Do you really want to have 5-10 little single-purpose systems that can't even do standard emulator features like state saving & such because the manufacture didn't want you to? (And I'm saying this as someone who used to have a stack of 5 different machines in the basement with different architectures so I'd have physical hardware to test compiler targets on; I don't have these any more, though.) Each system with their own keyboard/controller/mouse/video output/etc?

Also, who gets money for such machines? Do the original game developers get a single cent? If not, how is this any different from just downloading the roms yourself and using vice?

For some, it is a nostalgia thing. I could care less about having the NES/SNES emulator boxes, but a C64 was something I grew up with. The touch of it looking just like the system adds to the feeling of still having one. Portability for trips is something else. Plug it into the TV at a hotel for the kids at night, so the big kids can use the actual notebook.

As far as the original developers getting any monies from these. I would say I don't think they do, but that's just going off a few articles I've read online. They should be getting reimbursed, which is something that does make me lean towards not wanting to pickup one. Some of these software companies don't exist anymore, some have had their IP bought by other companies. Legally, I think it's hard to track down who is is that should be receiving money for these.

My first PC was a VIC-20. Then a C64, then Amiga, then IBM PC clone running Linux. I guess I should be nostalgic, but these systems do not even let me do the things I did with my old VIC-20 and C64. These machines had expansion ports that I could plug stuff into. Stuff I made myself. After I abandoned my 8-bit machines, my father continued to get used VIC-20s for his electronics projects. I also glued an edge connector into my Amiga for the same thing, but I never carried my electronics hobby forward to my PC clones. This is not just because I basically hated the PC clone hardware (and still do in some ways), but also because electronic parts and the necessary equipment to deal with them became too expensive and too hard to come by for individuals like myself.

When I get nostalgic for a C64 or VIC-20 game, though, I just fire it up in vice and everything's the same as it ever was. No physical parts needed. My floppies are mostly melted from years of inadequate storage, so I can't use any of my old stuff any more, anyway. I definitely prefer PS2-style gamepads (currently using a DS4) over the old Atari-style ones, including my old Epyx 500XJ.

I wanna mini nintendo gamecube that I can also use as a keychain!

Sounds like you're comparing the wrong era, DOS/Amiga are 16-bit systems. The games you're comparing must either be later enhanced ports to 16-bit systems or 16-bit games which were backported to 8-bit systems.
But C64 versions are often the best amongst 8-bit systems - particularly on the sound front.