So they made it much more
Commodore 64 like in its layout
In fact it'd be quite funny to open up and point and laugh at the chips because it's a ridiculous waste of space
Can we open it up?
Yeah, we can open this one up
Three simple screws in this one, but this one at some point has overheated. You can see the tracks of the motherboard
Here on the case. It's no wonder this machine was dead when I got it. So this is one of my restoration ones
Cassette has absolutely killed the board and yet it's still amazingly worked
There's a fair bit of space in there
There is a lot of space in that, so of course it's a Commodore 64 case
Just painted
black with um
Rather nice fetching charcoal grey keys. As you can see, I have heatsinked the main processor so that is an 8501
Processor this is the Ted chip
Which is the 8360 so that does all the sound, video
joystick,
tape player,
everything is on that chip really. And then we have the three chips next to it is the kernel ROM, the PLA, and
The third one that escapes me. But a lot of things that can go wrong with this
Apart from the two chips that they're the ones that really need heatsink in straight away
These voltage regulators can crack a bit under stress and also it's been known to kill one of these machines
Just pulling the joystick out while it's on
So if you need to adjust which joystick you have in there, you should really turn the machine off first
It can just put a bit of an extra strain on the Ted that you don't need, so um
If you opened up a commodore 64 it would fill that would it? It's a lot bigger
So for instance, I think we're the sid chip and everything is would cover this grill. That's the reason that grill's there
So, as you can see, we've gone from the little c16 machine and
They've literally just elongated the board. So it fits all the ports. It's an evolution of the 1-6. Yes, I believe it was given to
Commodore Japan again who I think just thought let's turn it into a replacement for the vic-20 and
There it is is. Absolutely no changes
To the functionality between this and the
C11 6 it's possibly a little
less reliable because it hasn't got all the heat protection that the 116 has in so
yeah, if you get one of these, add your own heat sinks immediately. Also, I should mention as well that
Both the 116 and the Commodore 16 can be upgraded relatively easily to 64k
I've got one
I haven't got like a little daughter board sits on top
with the extra memory on and it's got a little switch in there to switch between
16 and 64 K as far as I know there is one single game
Contemporary to when these machines were about between 84 and 86 that does not work on both machines
As it actually says Commodore 16 for some reason
It doesn't work on the +4 that might be something it's likely to do with the ever so slightly different processors
There are ways to know whether you have got a dead
Ted or a dead processor in one of these
So if you turn it on and you've gotten Hera light and you've got a totally black screen then your Ted is dead
If you've got a gray slightly noisy screen
Then your processor is at fault. Also, if we have a little look around the machine the power lead now goes in the side as
does the
joystick
We've got the cassette port we've got the serial port for printer as well as its own
Disk drive it will use
1541 or any of the other commodore disk drives we'll work on that. We've got the video out the RF out and then
Much like the other Commodores we have the cartridge port
so
They were not very many cartridge games released for the 264 series. There was one or two games
I think scott adams had all these adventure games released on cartridge
there's quite fun puzzle one called the dazzles a
Diagnostics car as well, but what this is very handy for on the commodore 16 and the commodore one one six is
Expandable ram packs. I know of only two games
that ever used 32k all and
One of them is bandits at zero where you just get slightly better sound effects
But getting hold of a 64 K round pack for this these machines now is nigh on impossible
I haven't seen one in the wild for years
So it's far easier to get them upgraded
internally to 64 K than to try and track down a
64 K round peg, how will that work in terms of the game itself?
Then would be a separate version
If you've got a ram pack, would you load in something different audit just load more stuff. It just seems to like more stuff in
also
There are very few versions like that that have got a little extra on there I'm now struggling to find a
64 K game much as I did back in the day. Here we go. We've got
This one here. So this is +4 only so all these games are 64 K
Versions of 16 K games if you had an expanded Commodore 16 there just load straight in the commodore + 4 did have its own
64 K games, but they weren't very numerous what tended to happen was
You got games for the machine that sold by far the best and the machine that sold by far?
The best was the Commodore 16 it was far cheaper
Commodore as she didn't make as many mistakes of it particularly in the UK and
This is where we see all these most of the games
Say C 16 straight + 4. So they'll work on either Commodore in America. They I don't think they did much with it
far more successful were Commodore of UK who sold it very very well as a learning computer as your first computer and
It was a pretty reasonable price where I think it was. I think they tried to get 129 pounds first
It very quickly went down to 89 pounds and it's it sold
Particularly over what a Christmas period in 85 really well
There's a lot of things on the internet so total disaster it didn't sell
But one of the biggest software houses in the UK at the time was master tronic and they were sending messages out to their
Freelance programmers. Can we get some software for this machine for some reason it's selling like hotcakes
Can we get some game sold and in the end I think math electronic produced from 53 games for it
Which they certainly wouldn't have been bothering to do that
If the machine had been a total disaster sales rise and muster tronic in my memory
So I remember every one or two of these titles. We're kind of pocket money games were theywere
So these were like $1.99 each
I think we've got one of the biggest sellers certainly on Commodore 16 here was Rockman which is a
Boulder desk loan. So most of these ones are $1.99. There is the odd one here. So we have one on the mad title
So milestone tronic added dimension
These were a bit partially Salar $2.99 big money
Also master tronic were also doing little compilations
I mean this did an absolutely brilliant version of pack mania or the
Another huge seller was formula 1 simulator and it's totally different to the other versions because master tronic and a few other companies
we've got
gremlin graphics
Do games like The Magicians curse? They seem to really understand the Machine and they play to its strengths
so
nice colorful short little action games
They're always
Amazing artwork on the front of these games and they're you'd see that picture and then you turn it over
Straightaway and say what did it actually look like? Yeah. We've got a good example here. So we've got gun law
the actual M
game, then it's incredibly slow to play and
Also to keep the memory down you couldn't move diagonally
So you can move up down left and right so there was no diagonal control Shree lowborn up. Yes
What should we ever go at? I do actually want to show you
What is one of the most criminally?
Awful games but I can understand why it was criminally awful because they tried to cram it into one load Green Beret
So they never bothered with a full-price release of it. These are the advertised screens on the back
So spectra version there, I think that's BBC Amstrad and Commodore I think now let's have a look at the Commodore 16 version
I'm cringing already. Yes. Don't even put it in the tape though. If anyone knows what green beret should look like I
Wouldn't be at all surprised if the tape player chews it up in disgust
So to give you some idea of the difficulty with the game all the weapons apart from a knife for missing
from the Commodore 16 version
So everyone's coming at you with guns and you have literally only got a knife to ward them off obviously graphically
You're severely compromised sonically as well. So I think there's one sound effect in this entire game and
detail in the graphic so you couldn't have too much detail, which is
Why the horror of what you're about to see makes?
You've literally got wireframe graphics. It looks like it's been written in basic
Sorry - whoever wrote green beret for singling this game out
But it is a great demonstration a lot of the machines at the time
They were increasing their memory and then Commodore took this somewhat backwards step trying to basically turn their
What should have been a cheap business machine?
Into something. It wasn't really capable of being right. Here we go
You can already see the lack of sprite capabilities is the first problem. So everyone's got a huge lack now at random
Let's try and get a bit further
I think he's only got about four frames of animation as well as more and more things appear on the screen
Obviously we're starting to struggle. Oh
I don't know what then
from behind
back
And of course yes, or no, then it got a knife
So it's the whole thing of bringing in a knife to a gunfight, isn't it? It really is
It's it's just what else is there to say about the 16-bit if it's a flop in the States, did they have other plans then?
so
For the Commodore 16, not really so it sold for a couple of years
pretty well in the UK and a couple of other countries and then
Commodore quietly bend it and
But at least it was far more successful than its larger brother. I
Would do a shout out to a couple of programmers
so I'm going to load in a game called Earth annoyed and
This is by a guy who any Commodore 64 owner should know Sean southern
microchip software who if it hadn't been for Sean southern and of others who donates