Relive Your 1980s Youth Thanks To New Commodore PET Smart Phone

If you were anything like me, you spent a large portion of the 1980s stuck in a small room typing “*”, “8”, “1” and waiting 10 minutes for your 5¼-inch floppy to load so you could play your muscle car expansion disk for Test Drive 2. I’m talking, of course, about the Commodore 64; a beautiful enthusiast gaming computer that acted as the gateway drug to the addicting hobby of PC gaming. While the Amiga outclassed it and you could do more with a cobbled together 386, the Commodore 64 retained its popularity long after the hardware entered the fossil record.

If you’d like to relive those days, you’re in luck: A new smartphone is launching that ships with a built-in legal emulator for the Commodore 64. Using a modified form of the Android operating system, the phone is still capable of doing everything you’d expect a normal smart phone to do, only it has that beautiful C64 logo that brings back so much nostalgia. With a 1920×1080 display and a 13 megapixel camera, it’s a fairly competent device even without the ability to play classic games, so if you need a new phone you now have one more option than you did before.

The Commodore PET, as it’s called, is launching first in France, Germany, Italy and Poland for anywhere from $300-$365, depending on what model you want. Though you can still emulate the Commodore 64 courtesy of emulators like Vice, there’s something to be said for being able to play the games on a phone that is specifically tailored to do so.

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About

Carl is both a JRPG fan and a CRPG'er who especially loves European PC games. Even with more than three decades of gaming under his belt, he feels the best of the hobby is yet to come.


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