Yeah, really. I remember floppies and spending what seemed to be ages for the disk to load.

Giant pile of Crapware. I don't need this shit to play on a C64 emulator O_o

Id be interested if it didnt cost so damn much. They overkilled the hardware in it and made it way to expensive because honestly, most people who would buy that would buy it to play old c64 games for nostalgia sake and very few would for other reasons. Hell my cell phone is overkill for those games.

After it bombs Ill grab one cheap off ebay maybe.

But cool as it might be I can still get emulators and games off the net for free and play with on my pc I already own.

This, they're competing with a netbook that costs 250 dollars and does the same thing. I think only the most nostalgic will spring for this thing. Do you have a working 1541 drive and any working discs? Because those both went long ago. I think my mom sold the actual C64 while I was away.

I have some of the old media for mine still, but after storage in an attic (where I found it) I'm not sure it works. The drive was broken. And without Turbo those long loading times were like 4 minutes, I think that's a valid complaint:)

They weren't that long. You're talking to someone who played Last Ninja 3 from a disk 2 days ago. Hell, i still have the TV, i can measure the time for the game, and each level, i'm that sure of what i'm talking about.;)

Fanboish blablah:
I do remember my friends Atari 65XE loaded Civilization for about 7 minutes from a tape [i was watching the clock on the wall in amusement, don't remember the actual number of tape spins though]. But the C64 was a wee bit faster in the loading department. I know PC games that load longer, though, since CPUs change, it's not relevant.

I don't even remember how many times dad fixed my first c64 [gotta love old hardware, a good soldering iron and basic electronic skills could make Your computer run for ages] until one of the RAM chips burned. Technically, i could fix it, but i'd have to search for a similar machine on the market. And yes, i urge You to grab the soldering iron, a multimeter, and something for shaky hands.

Play Bard's Tale and total up the loading time entering and exiting houses on a single street. Also, I didn't have a Turbo option on my stuff, I've only seen that on emulators.

Ports usually aren't the best determinant. Anyhow, gives us one game in around 15000.;)

Turbo in emulators? As in warp? Turning off the processor speed cap? That's a different thing.
Turbos were programs that allowed to, in modern speaking, overclock, the hardware, to make it operate faster. The tapes and disks actually spun faster [like watching movies in fast forward]. Later on, they became standard features of cartridges.

Ah! Got it! The western [proper] term for Turbo is (the program names were usually *turbo*, like [url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QexZAwJqAvU]ABCTurbo, though i preffered those that made sound. ;) )

Bard's Tale was a port? I'm pretty sure it's one of the signature games on C64, though there are many others. Games were made on multiple platforms I'm sure, in those days, but no one considered the C64 a second rate platform. It was THE platform.

There were many different turbo loaders for the C64. Some were cartridges, others were pure software. The fastest I recall was called "30x speedup" and the name was pretty accurate. Of course, it only worked for disk-based games, and only for loading the initial program, not for in-game loading, but still, turbo loading is not only a feature of emulators.

Tapes had their own turbos, which were essentially packing/unpacking programs. That's the only way it could really work with tapes, since the tape ran at a fixed speed. This also meant that a game had to be loaded from the tape with the same turbo loader it had been saved to the tape with. I think the most common one was ABC Turbo.

Edit: Somewhat ninja'd by Arteveld.

Originally an Apple II game, like the Ultimas [also, poorly ported to the C64].;)
I guess it all depends on what we had, i'm a c64 junkie, most of the people around here had Ataris, and they'll tell You THAT was the platform [including the theory that Commodore killed video games in '82;p], and then, You have the Apple owners, who look upon the C64 as a poor mans imitation of a computer.
Anyhow, Bards Tale was originally dev'd for the Apple, and most of the attention was given there.

Also, check out how the speccy ports looked like, they even shared the Spectrums 1bpp limitation, despite the C64 having a bit more capabilities here. I was a kid, i didn't know about it back then. Now i know, and things like that piss me off. I mean, seeing games on platform X using platforms Y limitations or standards. Today we have "Press O/X/triangle/dong" on some PC games, back then we had poor loading times, poor optimization, and some limitations brought from different platforms.

Anyhow, some games were a bit too big for the C64, one of the Ultimas had no music, because of the memory limitations. The C128 version had music.