I wanted a C64 back in the days but my parents could afford only this. This was a blessing: lack of software base and superior basic made me an IT professional for life. Less is more! Thank you C16! ❤
The exact same thing happened to me !! I still have this beautiful machine along with all its accesories in my home office, I'm looking at it right now.
I had one for Xmas 1985. I was 11 at the time. It cost £49.99 from Dixons. It was all my parents could afford at the time. Like you I bought all the Mastertronic games I could get my hands on. The one I remembered hating about the machine was the joystick ports which were not the then standard d9 ports you found on Atari and other computers. I had an adapter cable. The computer died 4 years later, it was sent off for repair but we never paid for the repair so I don't know what the shop did with it. Ended up selling everything else at the local flea market, got about £20. Turns out the chips on this machine are prone to overheating due to lack of heatsinks. By 1987 I had already moved on to a more powerful machine, the Atari 65XE, again all my parents could afford.
And me too, same story. Mastertronic did some good games back then considering the C16s spec. Game conversions were mainly awful but I do remember Airwolf being one of the best. I moved on to a C128 which spent 99% in 64 mode. C128 games were minimal in existence and maximum in price.
Brilliant...I love reading about how our generation only received machines that our parents could afford...rather than getting in to debt to buy something they couldn't. I started with a Texas TI-99 4a as that is all my parents could afford...but by scrimping, saving and doing weeat school, I finally made it to an Amiga...😂
A lot of Commodore Plus/4 games were limited to make it compatible with the C16. Paperboy was colourful, but was half the game length of other systems.
My dad bought me a C16 when I was 8. It had some problems and didn't load any game properly. He took it back to wherever he got it from and came back with a C64 which I still own today. I'm so glad the C16 was broken out of the box.
I was just the same mate, played the BBC Micro at school, and i was obsessed, went on and on at my mum and dad for a computer, and thy got me a c16, i was over the moon, had loads of fun with it, my fav games was tutti fruity, finders keepers, speed king, big mack, later i got a C64 for Christmas and this was mind blowing the jump in sound and graphics, The C64 is my Fav Micro of all time, love it to bits, great video mate👍👍
This was my second computer, after starting with a ZX81. I used it and all my home computers for programming up to and including a couple of Amigas and then my first PC. By the time I had an Amiga I was working in IT. Although home programming tailed off for me, it had stood me in good stead for a long career in programming, right up to present day.
The irritating thing about the lack of RAM in the C16 meant that almost all games on the Plus/4 were written for the C16 primarily so all that extra RAM was never used. The main reason for the C16 was due to Jack Tramiel wanting a competitor to the upcoming Timex Sinclair. Of course, he then left the company and the new management didn't know what to do with the architecture hence the sink or swim
Tramiel only wanted the 116 as a super cheap machine for developing countries. The 16 and Plus-4 were the first failure of the new management who didn't understand anything.
Main rule of thumb of the 80's was that you fondly remember what you had (and secretly craved what your mates had). I loved al the systems I had as a kid (C64/Genesis/Amstrad PC Compatible etc). However, in relation to why the 'lesser' platforms 'failed' it was usually all down to software or price. There's a sweet spot for price and a sweet spot for software. Too much of one or too little of the other were fatal. IMO Commodore worked best when Jack Trammiel was fully in charge and deploying his plan to make the best possible machine for the lowest possible price. And then work to bring the price down even lower over time (Computers for the masses, not the classes). The C64 was probably the apex of that philosophy. It was a tad more expensive than the main competition (Speccy) but was a LOT more powerful and gave a much closer 'arcade experience' which was what the home computer market was all about. Playing arcade games without burning through a pocket of coins. Once the C64 was established, it was pretty pointless making a 'cheaper version' as you had to compromise on what made people want the C64. Add to that the limitations for coders, you were only ever going to get bare bones cut down ports of popular games that couldn't compete with the real thing. Whilst there was a market for low priced computers, it wasn't really going to sustain the industry or a manufacturer and the established main players were tough to dislodge. Only Amstrad (and only in Europe) managed to muscle in on the big two and only really ever took market share from Sinclair (which they bought out). Unless you were a millionaire and had an MSX, Commodore 64 was the machine to have until the 16 bit machines ST & Amiga came on the scene (and matured their software library). Even in the early days of 16 bit, the lack of software still gave the C64 the edge almost up to the end of the 90's. I skipped the Amiga/ST altogether and went to Genesis/ PC Compatibles. I still use a C64 to this day.
121 colors - because 8 shades of black are all black (the color palette was 16 colors each with 8 shades, 16x8 = 128, but the black shades were all black so it was (15x8)+1=121 colors )
This was my first home computer, moving to it from my Atari 2600. I don't recall any full price games. I was living Mastertronic's titles. It had some classics, like Kickstart. Shaun Southern was a wizard.
It seems to me that you are getting a lot of the story all backwards. The TED series was originally Jack Tramel's scheme to snatch-up the lower-end price-slot in the market that the ZX Spectrum was occupying. Which is why the C116 looked very similar to the original rubber-keyed Spectrum, and intentionally dissimilar to the VIC20 and C64, as a clear indication of the differences. He had also spotted an opening in the market for cheap business machines, which he planned to grab with the 264 and the 364 models, aka the B (business) series. The 264 later on becoming the Plus/4 (I'm sorry, but "Commodore 16 Plus 4", although related - that wasn't a thing). Some prototypes of the 364 do exist, but didn't make it into production, and the project later on turned into the B128, before it was eventually given to Bil Herd. Who made it backwards compatible with the C64 and renamed it the "Commodore 128". Yeah, the C128 wasn't just a beefed up C64, but based on the 364 with added backwards compatibility, with the C128's own version of the 6510 (the 8502), its own version of the VIC-II (next to it's VDC), a SID6851, and a Z80 CPU for a snail-paced version of CP/M... and with the "Internal Function ROM" U36 socket, which was sort of meant as an extra internal cartridge port for business use, and clear evidence of it's lineage back to the 264 (Plus/4) and 364 models. - All this happened just before Jack Tramel "jumped ship" over to Atari. Suddenly leaving the marketing department clueless to the originally intended purpose of these models and how to market them to the customers. In an attempt to cut production costs, and because of the C64s already basically selling themselves, someone came up with this "brilliant idea" of using the same already globally spread C64 molds and keyboards for the C116 instead of that odd Speccy-looking case... and TADA! your beloved C16 was born, to great confusion for many of the customers and at a much higher price-slot than Jack had originally intended for it. - I'm sorry for breaking it to you, but your Commodore C16 was basically an afterthought by some people in marketing, who didn't understand the intentions behind those later 8 Bit models. But that doesn't make it any less of a Commodore in my eyes. I actually own a C116 myself, along side several of both C64s and C128s. I suggest you watch some of Bil Herds talks here on YT. They are not only great for getting ones facts straight (I certainly discovered how much I needed that myself), but also full of juicy and ridiculously hilarious Commodore insider stories. He is more or less doing the same talk every time. But with variating content, depending on how much time he was given to talk. My own personal favourite here on YT is called "VCFMW 11 - Bil Herd: Tales From Inside Commodore".
@@daviniarobbins9298 The C116 was intended (by Jack) to be the cost reduced version of the TED business series, in order to take on the ZX Spectrum. Since the Spectrum was considered a gaming computer, which also didn't have hardware-sprites either, that seemed to line up just nicely. He never intended it to end up in the breadbin case, which the C16 is; a C116 in a VIC20/C64 style case. The C116 and the C16 are fundamentally identical, electronically. - But don't take my word for it... go watch Bil Herd's VCFMW talks.
I always thought the C16 and Plus4 projects were set up by Tramiel to try to ruin Commodore as he set them going then jumped ship to Atari. This was what I remember from the early 80s when they came out at the time, there was a lot of speculation about that in the computer press from what I remember. But again, was a long time ago!
I love the c16, always wanted one just for the bread bin black look, shame the 64 didnt have that black color, but bought one second hand (never played and still boxed) and now sits alongside the 64 and vic 20 in my collection, shall treasure it.
Back in the second half of the '90s I heard this crazy rumor, that the reason why the Windows blue screen of death is blue, was because of that infamous "no thanks, I'm already married" deal that Jack Tramiel pulled on Bill Gates, for the (up to) Basic 2.0 interpreters on the PETs, the VIC20, and the C64. So, Bill made it resemble the C64's blue start-up screen to get back at Commodore. Jack allegedly never said that, just like Bill allegedly never said that bit about the 640KB of RAM. - Although as funny and juicy as those stories may be, they are also just about as ridiculous as they are hilarious. Especially that blue screen of death one, since Microsoft got much better license deals for the updated versions of Basic on the TED machines and was even credited in retrograde back to 1977 on the green start-up screen of the C128. I'm quite sure that far most of those "juicy Commodore stories" we heard back then, where really only stories made up by kids and teens like us, with over-lively imaginations, geting wilder and wilder through each re-telling in a pre-internet world. - But the thing is that the real "juicy Commodore stories", were at least as (if not even more) juicy, hilarious, and far out ridiculous as the ones we made up... and I personally love those real ones a lot more... I gobble them up like sugary breakfast serial in front of Saturday morning TV. I also love ALL of the old vintage home computers, regardless of their differences, quirks and oddities... not just the Commodores. - I mean, take the Texas Instruments TI-99 4/a; with its 16 bit processor with only 256 Bytes of dedicated RAM (nope, "Bytes" not a typo) and has to "lend" VRAM from its 8 Bits GFX-chip to store its Basic program... and without the PEEK function or POKE command, which was actually presented in the manual as a positive feature. It just doesn't get much more weird than that. And who can resist such a lovable good and proper freak, am I right? Nope... They had/have character precisely because of their differences. Which is more than I can say about the soulless computers of today, which are just more and more and more of the same. When you buy a new computer today, regardless of the brand, you pretty much already expect it to be able to do exactly what your old one did, only slightly ♪ ♫ Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger ♫ ♪ My C116 is in need of some TLC; its keyboard is deader than a ZX Spectrum's dead-flesh keys (my first computer, BTW)... likely because the ribbon-cable is non-existent and the connector on the motherboard looks like someone dropped the worlds tiniest nuke on it. - But I am going to do all I can to bring it back. I'll probably totally hate typing on its horrid rubber-keys, but I'll still love it for being such an adorable quirky and odd freak.
We had a plus 4 at xmas that mum got in sale as i guess they were being sold off, was huge upgrade from our zx81 , fond memories of fire ant and treasure island
I had it and I was the happiest boy in the world since it was my first home computer. Certainly 16Kb of memory was very limiting, seeing some masterpieces done on the Plus4 (which mainly had more ram than C16). For me it was the beginning of a passion
@@scottythegreat1 They tried, at least where I live. MSX machines were heavily advertised, there were magazine review and they were in the stores, albeit at prices above the C64, not below it like the 116. The one place I never saw an MSX was in my mates rooms, but that also applies to the C16/116/+4. Everone had C64s and later Amigas. A few got CPCs and one particular unlucky guy had a "Schneider Joyce", he must still be hating his parents for that.
You missed out Summer Events, probably THE best game for the C16. How the programmer got that out of a C16, even though it was a multi load, is still a mystery, including making the computer forget it had borders! However like a lot of people, we couldn’t afford a C64 and remember the ad for the C16 with Rolf Harris - that doesn’t age well lol - and his art program on Cartridge, and I remember bothering my parents for ages for it lol
I loved the C16 back then despite the pittance of good games. I played Airwolf conversion by Elite a lot and Sword of Destiny by Gremlin Graphics. They were the other publishers that were supporting C16. There was a Commando knock off called Legionnaire. It was so bad they could’ve called it legionnaire’s disease.
Thanks for showing what the games were like on the C16 since I had never seen them before. I only saw a working C16 once and the only thing I saw it do was run some Basic demos. Anyway, here in the US the C16 and Plus/4 were instant flops. Within months you could buy either one for next to nothing.
I somewhat envy you britains who were given access to those dedicated school computers such as the BBC Micro. We had none of this stuff, at least not until the later classes where one could choose to attend a programming course. So the first computer I saw was an Atari 520ST, but it was the C64 I was playing the most until I finally got my own computer. And that was the C16. Unfortunately I was then old enough to want of course a C64, but got the other one. Shortly after my C16 was exchanged by a Plus/4. Yes, there were few games as good as the many on the C64 back then. ACE +4, Winter Events and Trailblazer were some of them which I had. Nowadays there are new games for the Plus/4 proving what the machine is really capable of. I highly recommend checking out Psytronik's Plus/4 games for anyone interested.
I recommend: G-Man, Scramble, Zodiac, Xadium, P.O.D., Sabouteur, Terra Cognita, A.C.E. and the best of them all, and only available for the TED family: Oblido. Soboteur which I had on the Plus/4 was a 1:1 C= 64 port.
No one was looking for an updated VIC-20 and a downgraded C64 in 1984, fortunately the Amiga 1000 was launched just a year later. The C16, Plus/4 and C128 were all a huge waste of money for Commodore.
There's a lot that could have been said about why the C16 failed; Jack Tramiel's desire to conquer the sub-$99 computer market, which became the Plus 4 & C16 by the time Tramiel was pushed out. Without Jack, Commodore management had little vision for those two machines, and quickly moved onto the C128.
Also my very first Computer.. I actually just brought myself one for pure nostalgia. The problem was that games companies were (for the most part) releasing ports of games for the more powerful systems of the time, and because of the C16s limitations this just resulted in terrible games. The Berks trilogy of games were exclusive to the C16/plus 4 and they are great!. Also can't believe you didn't mention Punchy ? One of the games that was included in the C16 package and its fantastic ! - been playing it again recently :)
It wasn't all bad. It had decent sales in the UK when the price was dropped. It sold very well in Eastern Europe. Wish i had kept my Plus/4 with a lot of C64 games being converted to these machines now.
Never heard the Plus/4 called ‘C16 Plus/4’ before. My first computer was a Plus/4 which I still have and as of a few months ago when I last used it, still works. It was mostly C16 games that worked on it, however there were some exclusive Plus/4 or upgraded games such as Saboteur, Mercenary, Ace and the excellent Plus/4 version of Tomb Thumb. Icicle Works was a good Boulder Dash clone that came with the machine. Despite having to play mostly C16 games, there were some good ones. And Basic was much better than my mates C64 version.
Most of the games produced in the past couple of decades or more (and there are many) have required 64K, so the Plus/4 is much better taken advantage of now.
Well, a nice review. Maybe worth to mention, that the initial idea was the cheap, compact, ZX Spectrum looking, rubber key C116 version, and I think THAT's why the joystick and the datasette sockets are the very small mini-DIN versions instead of the C64 versions. They would simply would not fit to such a small machine. Later on the C16 was created with simplier, less crowded design in a black c64 housing. I suppose they could have added the C64 connectors (the biggest initial claim towards the machine), but I suppose it would be a great confusion to create hardware incompatibility within the range.Though most of the C16 buyers would have thanked for that :-) Even the PSU of the C16 is completely compatible with the ZX Spectrum's PSU :-) , voltage, connector type, polarity, power (I am not confident, that the VIC-20 sound is much worse than the 264 with 3 channels and lower frequency sound) On the other hand you brought up that sad Sabouteur C16 game. It is beyond bad, but I think you spent a little too much time and focus on that specific game. There were literally hundreds of commercial games, and that Saboteur games was rated as one of the worst one There were a lot of nice games for C16 like Tutti Frutti, Kickstart, Magician's Curse, Xcellor8, Tom Thumb, Zylon, Winter and Summer Events, Arthur Noid, Trailblazer, Fire Ant, Timeslip, Auf Wiedersehen Monty just to name few classic, great looking, and sometimes even great sounding games, just within 16K. You cannot compare them to a VIC-20 game, they are far surpassing that quality.
Jack was gone and had nothing to do with the C16. His vision for the TED/264 computer was most closely matched by the cheaper and rare C116 that was only made in small quantities for a very short time. It was just meant to be a better replacement of the VIC-20 for the low end. And it was. It was just supposed to be even cheaper than the C16.
My Feeling (being a Spectrum 48k user at the time) was that the market was saturated, when it arrived here in the UK, UK manufacturers like Oric and Dragon were folding. I could not understand why Commodore were releasing it/putting effort into developing it. In hindsight with better knowledge. They had a plan, that was to counter the Japanese consumer electronics giants moving into the US Market. If it had 32k (using all the 64k the chip could read), it might of worked. But ram was expensive at the time. If the apps shipped in the Plus4 had actually been usable, it might have worked. But they made an appalling mess of it all.
16K of RAM was a lot of memory back in the day, and the bad game ports just show that those people were incapable of using the machine to its full extent. I had a VIC-20 with 16K RAM expansion at that time, and it was simply mind-blowing to have that much memory available. I never made a game that used up all the memory. On the C-16, it's probably much easier to run out of memory, but still, there was a lot you could do with that amount of RAM.
By the time the C16 hit the market in 1984, 16k was well below the norm. The C64 has 64k, the Sinclair/Timex Spectrum had 48k, most MSX machines had 32k minimum, the Amstrad CPC had 64k....
@@81632bit At the end of 1984, I went on a Christmas stroll through a computer shop with my mom and we bought an Amstrad CPC with green monitor, which was fairly cheap. I still kept using my VIC-20 for some years after, but also the CPC. I had my first floppy drive for the CPC (a Vortex 5,25" drive with 704K capacity) and the first machine monitor module (Maxam module), but sadly since I didn't have the DevPak, I couldn't fully use it (I did have Rodney Zak's Z80 book though). On the VIC-20, I found out a lot of things by just trial and error (later on I had a VIC-20 internals book), on the CPC that was pretty difficult (there wasn't much documentation available beside the DevPak). Had I known about the features of the C-16 beforehand (like the built-in machine monitor), I probably would have wanted that instead.
@@81632bitI don’t get how you would save money going down from 64kB in C64. It had 8 (off the shelf) chips. 16 bit computers had 16 and IBM had banks. 8 chips is the bare minimum for DRAM. SRAM was available with 4 data pins.
A lesson in how to destroy an entire MARKET!!! Putting to market a product that you KNOW will leave your victims feeling burned and discouraged- is a sure fire way to destroy the entire market.
The commodore 16 was my second computer. The first was an out of date ZX81. I thought I was really upgrading to machine with colour & sound. One plus point, the basic was better that the C64's version. I know the C64 can do more but it was easier on the C16. Loved graphics programming but it ate 10K of ram. Not a problem if you had the plus 4. I had friends who had a commodore 64 and one with a zx spectrum. Games were usually ported over to the C16 a few months after these systems and as usual was a disaster. Ever tried to play commando on the C16 - killed instantly. Now there's a demand for retro and there are 64K games and demos available including some fixes for games that had bugs. There's life in the old system yet!
I've fixed dozens of Commodore machine. The Plus4 doesn't have that many issues. Most of the problems can be fixed by simple chip swapping, either the CPU or TED or PLA. Other than that there are no other common issues.
It was released after the C=64 and was worse. That's why it failed. Being mildly cheaper wasn't enough. Commodore had terrible marketing as well. You don't sell a worse system 2 years later after you've already made a better system. You cost reduce the original system while you develop a better system.
@@aleksazunjic9672 Commodore never seemed very forward thinking. They should have factored in falling prices. The Amiga only existed because they purchased the company Amiga. Amiga was great, but the next better computer was MUCH more expensive, not just a little. The Amiga was fine until the mid 90's, but in 1990, the current model was the 2000, and that was like $1,500, twice the cost of the 500. They should have cost reduced the Amiga in the late 1980s and made something like the CD32 by 1990. If they sold that at $400 bucks, I would have bought it. A CD32 with the option to plug in a keyboard, plug in the OS on CD, and have an external HD would have been a killer back then. If they just made a keyboard port compatible with IBM (same with mouse), and forced you to buy an external drive, I'd be happy with it. I remember being frustrated that PlayStation wouldn't turn THAT into a computer, it would have been easy to do. The only reason game consoles aren't made to act as computers is that consoles are sold BELOW cost initially, and they make up the difference in licensing fees from developers. I think MS takes 30% for every game sold for XBox, or once did. Oh well, it doesn't matter now. All computer chips are basically the same in terms of power in both computing speed and literal power consumption. Doesn't make a big difference if you're on an ARM or an x86 really, except ARM is tiny as a core and slower, but they make up for it by having more cores. You can buy a 64 core ARM today. I'd move to that architecture, if it was available, and it's not.
My first home computer also! Loved it and wish I'd never traded it in for a Spectrum +3. However, just bought a broken one and swapped out the TED and now it's not dead (at the moment). Love Xapp which came with it...Though the graphics program it came with has not aged well (mainly do to the person who endorsed it.... 'do you know who it is yet'). Football Manager (without the rubbish screen play) was actually better on the C16 🙂
The C16 and the more expensive Plus 4 failed for the same basic reasons. Neither of them were compatible with the C64, which was still selling well, and was getting cheaper all the time, and they weren't even compatible with the Vic20. Despite the extra colours, the hardware was in many ways a step backwards from the aging C64. It seems Commodore let their engineers work on their own, competing pet projects, but nobody had any clear idea what most people wanted.
The commodore Plus 4 was not a Commodore 16. The Plus 4 was a 64kb Micro designed to be a work/home hybrid computer, but it used a cost reduced chipset, doing away with chips like the SID, and the VIC chip, and just using the TED chip. The system was less capable than the 64, but easier to program, and was shipped with inbuilt WP, Spread sheet and database program. The C16 was a cost reduced version of the Plus 4, which Commodore made to replace the Vic:20 as sales of the old machine had ground to a halt. The games for the Commodore 16 were al low effort games, and most were sold as budget titles. Unfortunately the developers never made any games for the Plus 4, as all C16 games ran on the Plus 4. Because of this the Plus 4 was incredibly unpopular and both systems were discontinued.
Commodore needed something to replace the aging VIC-20? They had it already. It was called the Commodore 64. The C64 was everything the VIC-20 was but better... and more. In the early days, if the C64 was too expensive, people could still buy the VIC-20. By the time the VIC-20 was completely discontinued, the C64 was fast dropping in price at at one point was cheap enough that anyone could buy one. If people couldn't afford the 1541 disk drive, they got get the Datasette instead. Commodore absolutely should have been developing the C64's replacement (i.e. a backwards compatible C128 without modes) but not the VIC-20's replacement. No one was saying they wanted to buy a C64 but less good in 1984.
Yeah, who uses the Z80 in the C128 anyway? With even more memory than the C64, a 16 bit solution would have been needed. Atari ST ! Maybe the SuperCPU could have gotten a foothold before illegal instructions became popular? VIC III before Demos abused internal timing? CPU and VICIII need to absorb the PLA and drive the chip enable lines on the bus themselves. Make them 32 bit. 17 bit for RAM, and the others for chip enable. 16 bit databus. Clock signal at twice the clock of the bus master clock to let 6502 finish internal math while VIC reads graphics like in 256 color mode . 80 columns. Small borders. Flicker free modes on EGA or monochrome monitors. ROM seems to come in 16kB size even from the MOS fab. For SID-2 I would store a quarter sine in there. Every odd value is taken as the average. Gives me 16 bit -> 16 bit sine for nice DSP bass. At 4Mhz memory clock I can add quite a few channels and overtones at 48 kHz. Commodore should just have saved money until the Amiga.
@@ArneChristianRosenfeldt Exactly right. They purchased the Amiga and it was a very good purchase. It was a miracle that they were able to properly follow the C64 with yet another competition killer. Except that it didn't really work out that way. Commodore needed to eat, sleep and breath Amiga, once it was released. That means working with productivity software developers and market the hell out of it. And then they needed to realise it was a platform, not a computer. That means a steady stream of new models - not just more RAM and cheaper components but better CPUs like the 68020, 68030 & 68040 (I know this happened but waaaay too late). Apple got both of these things right with the Mac and they only just survived the 90s themselves. And Microsoft... well they had the momentum of a freight train. But Commodore, with their technology that was at one stage superior could have used years worth of C64 profits to double, triple, quadripple down on their lifeline... the Amiga. No C16s, C128s, Max Plus 4 something or rathers, and Colts. PET to VIC-20 to C64 to Amiga. That was the path to victory. They could have had it, if their directors cared more about changing the world than they did about planning their golden parachutes.
A machine that looks like a C64 with 16K in 1984 for $99 and no software compatibility .. It's better than the TS1000/ZX81 with color and full travel keyboard but ...
The Commodore 16 had a lot of other issues. The TED chip lacked sprites and other features that the C-64 offered. It was really supposed to be used for non gaming tasks. If you used cartage based software the limited ram was far less of an issue. The disk drive interface was also a lot faster than the C-64. I Commodore had really wanted to make an Commodore 65+ that would have sold like crazy would to have made the drives a lot faster and put an improved Basic on it. Maybe add a seek command to the disk drive for better random access and just maybe a real UART for the serial port. Of course that is just my opinion.
Honestly, it's baffling to have an immensely popular 8-bit platform and then confuse things with an incompatible platform in pretty much the same market space. By '84 there had to be some ways to consolidate the 64's ICs into a smaller board and maybe go with a chicklet keyboard.
It failed because Jack Tramiel was ousted from Commodore by Irving Gould and clueless Commodore marketing got hold of the computer and thought they could make the hardware into a business machine (Plus 4), oh dear. The C16 was almost what Jack envisaged, he wanted the rubber keyboard though. That did appear as the C116.
I'm so glad I didn't buy this piece of trash at the time it was out, but waited until I'd saved up the money for a C64. It would have been such a waste of money, had I given in at the time.
Mr. Puniverse was by far the most technically impressive title on the C16. I have no idea how they managed to pack so much in. A very playable but challenging platformer heavily influenced by Manic Miner. The graphics are impressive for the system with animated level objects such as crushing pistons and sentries that shoot projectiles etc. Some decent character animation, in-game sound can be a little annoying but the menu screen sound track is good. The screens/levels inter-connect as well, you get the sense that you're playing in a very large cavern. I was lucky enough to find a copy in a local second hand shop back in the late 80s, could hardly buy C16 games in normal shops by then. Family couldn't afford a C64. ruclips.net/video/zRNS3i0QUAo/видео.html
The thing is that Commodore didn't want a cheap alternative for the C64. So if they made a C16 with 64k of ram (and not the office kind of things like the plus4) it would hurt the sales of the C64. Sure it didn't had the SID sound (but a lot of computers back in the day didn't had that), it didn't had hardware sprites (but also common for a few homecomputers), but the 121 colors was something that the C64 didn't have. It is the same reason why they didn't put the C65 on the market, because that would hurt the Amiga line.
Actually that computer was not needed at all. Looking at games, upgrade from VIC 20 to C16 didn't make any significant difference. With memory upgrade costed similar to C64 and games were made assuming you don't have one. However Plus/4, if it would be with SID chip, maybe upgraded a bit, it could be more popular. Worst thing in Commodore universe was, that they were not compatible with older machines, cutting off massive libraries of software. Exception were C64 and 128 (and I believe C128 was also unnecessary waste of resources which should be used on Amiga).
Let's face it, from Jack Tramiel to Irvin Gould to Ali Mehdi, no CBM manager ever had a clue what they were actually selling and to whom. And even less why. They were selling an affordable all-purpose computer to people who would game a lot. Compability was of the utmost essence. The C16 was killed by: 1. incompatible, 2. worse than C64, 3. aimed at budget gamers and utterly useless because the whole system screams "I am bad at gaming". A downgraded C64 would have done a lot better, e.g. simpler keyboard, integrated tape drive (the Brits would have loved it), leaving out the IO-Chips for IEC-access and wouldn't have cost much more than a C16 but less than a C64. Also in 1984 people were ready for an upgraded C64 - but trust me, the C128 was not. CBM should have simply kicked the whole CP/M-subsystem and make the system more affordable.
Exactly. It was the Commodore 64 that really got the home computer market going. Once they struck gold with it, they didn't need another low cost computer. Either look to the future or market what you already have. A computer than was a little bit better than the C64 but mostly much worse was just confusing and had no place in the market. Maybe they were going after Sinclair rather than trying to replace the VIC-20?
1980s micro computers didn't use cartridge based games. Especially not at the low end like the C16. Companies shipped games on cassette tapes or floppy discs. They were limited by what could fit into the systems ram. So 16k was a problem.
outside of North America the MSX computers would have seemed a far superior choice - and with so many manufacturers surely there would have been MSX computers at competitive price points
You would think so, but no. Outside of Japan, Brazil, and The Netherlands, the MSX was a non-entity really. The US had the C64 & Apple II/IIGS. The UK had the ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC range (as well as the C64). Germany was a Commodore stronghold. MSX just didn't factor, sadly.
lol this thing launched the same years as MacOS classic, a year before the NES and also a year before the next computer Commodore were developing, the Amiga. Of, and of course, 2 years after the C64, also from Commodore. Whatever were they thinking!!? That's like as if Macintosh would have tried pushing PowerMacs... AFTER releasing the iMacs. Even if slightly cheaper, none would have wanted it!
If the C16 could have had even 32K of RAM it would have been an interesting machine, due to something your video fails to mention: better BASIC than C64. But even with its improved BASIC it was hamstrung with its lack of RAM.
The Plus/4 had 64 KB of RAM and more of those 64 KB were available for BASIC programs than were on the Commodore 64! The TED was the first SoC, system-on-chip, in the history of computing. If you still have your C= 16, upgrade it to 64 KB with the Saruman RAM expansion, slap the SID cartridge into it and you'll have more than a decent system. The TED family failed because it was incompatible with the Commodore 64, so its vast software library was out of reach.
Failed due to low RAM. Because of this, there were no good games for this machine. You can't write anything good in 16kbytes. Maybe it would have been more successful with 48kbytes of RAM. (Commodore 48) But in fact this machine was completely unnecessary, and in fact the Plus 4 was too. Rather, they should have thought the opposite and released earlier the C128 instead. An advanced C64 with more memory! But with more improvements than what happened, because otherwise it was also a wrong machine as it was. There should have been 6 audio channels (double SID stereo), and a real 320x200 color graphics with 16 colors. That would have been a great successor of the C64. Then the first Amiga could have been 512 kbytes, not 256. And at least 8 MHz, not 7. As it was in the Atari ST. Commodore made quite a few strategic mistakes.
Arguably, there were good games even for Atari 2600 which had way less RAM+ROM. More like they missed market segment, at the time it was released price of C-64 dropped (due to components becoming cheaper) , so C-64 became budget computer.
The main reason was sales and they had a machine competeing with it upon release it only had 16k memory which was like a super atari 2600 the ted chip was an advancment upon the c64 its just that they made a million machines and never made anymore they didn't lose any money they then made the c128
I wanted a C64 back in the days but my parents could afford only this. This was a blessing: lack of software base and superior basic made me an IT professional for life. Less is more! Thank you C16! ❤
The exact same thing happened to me !!
I still have this beautiful machine along with all its accesories in my home office, I'm looking at it right now.
Every time you call the "Commodore Plus/4" the "Commodore 16 Plus/4", another TED chip somewhere dies... ;)
To be honest TED chips have died for less, I sneezed once within 5 metres of my C16 and the TED failed
@@ctchich4469 I farted in my car on my way home and somehow it knew. So it shat itself as a way of waving back
I looked at my C16 once and the TED died
That bothered me, too. I have heard that the TED chips die over time far more than most other chips. I hope mine are still working (C16 and Plus/4).
Though it is well known that the Commodore Plus.4 was also called the Commodore Minus 60 by everyone who owned a C64 :-)
I had one for Xmas 1985. I was 11 at the time. It cost £49.99 from Dixons. It was all my parents could afford at the time. Like you I bought all the Mastertronic games I could get my hands on. The one I remembered hating about the machine was the joystick ports which were not the then standard d9 ports you found on Atari and other computers. I had an adapter cable. The computer died 4 years later, it was sent off for repair but we never paid for the repair so I don't know what the shop did with it. Ended up selling everything else at the local flea market, got about £20. Turns out the chips on this machine are prone to overheating due to lack of heatsinks. By 1987 I had already moved on to a more powerful machine, the Atari 65XE, again all my parents could afford.
Same story with me, got it from dixons with the 4 game pack and datasette and 1 joystick, it was an upgrade from my zx81 so I was really happy with it
Shame, you would have been much better served with a Speccy.
And me too, same story. Mastertronic did some good games back then considering the C16s spec. Game conversions were mainly awful but I do remember Airwolf being one of the best. I moved on to a C128 which spent 99% in 64 mode. C128 games were minimal in existence and maximum in price.
Brilliant...I love reading about how our generation only received machines that our parents could afford...rather than getting in to debt to buy something they couldn't. I started with a Texas TI-99 4a as that is all my parents could afford...but by scrimping, saving and doing weeat school, I finally made it to an Amiga...😂
A lot of Commodore Plus/4 games were limited to make it compatible with the C16. Paperboy was colourful, but was half the game length of other systems.
My dad bought me a C16 when I was 8. It had some problems and didn't load any game properly. He took it back to wherever he got it from and came back with a C64 which I still own today. I'm so glad the C16 was broken out of the box.
I was just the same mate, played the BBC Micro at school, and i was obsessed, went on and on at my mum and dad for a computer, and thy got me a c16, i was over the moon, had loads of fun with it, my fav games was tutti fruity, finders keepers, speed king, big mack, later i got a C64 for Christmas and this was mind blowing the jump in sound and graphics, The C64 is my Fav Micro of all time, love it to bits, great video mate👍👍
This was my second computer, after starting with a ZX81. I used it and all my home computers for programming up to and including a couple of Amigas and then my first PC. By the time I had an Amiga I was working in IT. Although home programming tailed off for me, it had stood me in good stead for a long career in programming, right up to present day.
The irritating thing about the lack of RAM in the C16 meant that almost all games on the Plus/4 were written for the C16 primarily so all that extra RAM was never used. The main reason for the C16 was due to Jack Tramiel wanting a competitor to the upcoming Timex Sinclair. Of course, he then left the company and the new management didn't know what to do with the architecture hence the sink or swim
Tramiel only wanted the 116 as a super cheap machine for developing countries. The 16 and Plus-4 were the first failure of the new management who didn't understand anything.
No such thing as a Commodore 16/Plus 4!
Main rule of thumb of the 80's was that you fondly remember what you had (and secretly craved what your mates had). I loved al the systems I had as a kid (C64/Genesis/Amstrad PC Compatible etc). However, in relation to why the 'lesser' platforms 'failed' it was usually all down to software or price. There's a sweet spot for price and a sweet spot for software. Too much of one or too little of the other were fatal. IMO Commodore worked best when Jack Trammiel was fully in charge and deploying his plan to make the best possible machine for the lowest possible price. And then work to bring the price down even lower over time (Computers for the masses, not the classes). The C64 was probably the apex of that philosophy. It was a tad more expensive than the main competition (Speccy) but was a LOT more powerful and gave a much closer 'arcade experience' which was what the home computer market was all about. Playing arcade games without burning through a pocket of coins. Once the C64 was established, it was pretty pointless making a 'cheaper version' as you had to compromise on what made people want the C64. Add to that the limitations for coders, you were only ever going to get bare bones cut down ports of popular games that couldn't compete with the real thing. Whilst there was a market for low priced computers, it wasn't really going to sustain the industry or a manufacturer and the established main players were tough to dislodge. Only Amstrad (and only in Europe) managed to muscle in on the big two and only really ever took market share from Sinclair (which they bought out). Unless you were a millionaire and had an MSX, Commodore 64 was the machine to have until the 16 bit machines ST & Amiga came on the scene (and matured their software library). Even in the early days of 16 bit, the lack of software still gave the C64 the edge almost up to the end of the 90's. I skipped the Amiga/ST altogether and went to Genesis/ PC Compatibles. I still use a C64 to this day.
121 colors - because 8 shades of black are all black (the color palette was 16 colors each with 8 shades, 16x8 = 128, but the black shades were all black so it was (15x8)+1=121 colors )
This was my first home computer, moving to it from my Atari 2600. I don't recall any full price games. I was living Mastertronic's titles. It had some classics, like Kickstart. Shaun Southern was a wizard.
In the right hands the C16/Plus 4 was a very capable machine.
It seems to me that you are getting a lot of the story all backwards. The TED series was originally Jack Tramel's scheme to snatch-up the lower-end price-slot in the market that the ZX Spectrum was occupying. Which is why the C116 looked very similar to the original rubber-keyed Spectrum, and intentionally dissimilar to the VIC20 and C64, as a clear indication of the differences. He had also spotted an opening in the market for cheap business machines, which he planned to grab with the 264 and the 364 models, aka the B (business) series. The 264 later on becoming the Plus/4 (I'm sorry, but "Commodore 16 Plus 4", although related - that wasn't a thing). Some prototypes of the 364 do exist, but didn't make it into production, and the project later on turned into the B128, before it was eventually given to Bil Herd. Who made it backwards compatible with the C64 and renamed it the "Commodore 128". Yeah, the C128 wasn't just a beefed up C64, but based on the 364 with added backwards compatibility, with the C128's own version of the 6510 (the 8502), its own version of the VIC-II (next to it's VDC), a SID6851, and a Z80 CPU for a snail-paced version of CP/M... and with the "Internal Function ROM" U36 socket, which was sort of meant as an extra internal cartridge port for business use, and clear evidence of it's lineage back to the 264 (Plus/4) and 364 models.
- All this happened just before Jack Tramel "jumped ship" over to Atari. Suddenly leaving the marketing department clueless to the originally intended purpose of these models and how to market them to the customers. In an attempt to cut production costs, and because of the C64s already basically selling themselves, someone came up with this "brilliant idea" of using the same already globally spread C64 molds and keyboards for the C116 instead of that odd Speccy-looking case... and TADA! your beloved C16 was born, to great confusion for many of the customers and at a much higher price-slot than Jack had originally intended for it.
- I'm sorry for breaking it to you, but your Commodore C16 was basically an afterthought by some people in marketing, who didn't understand the intentions behind those later 8 Bit models. But that doesn't make it any less of a Commodore in my eyes. I actually own a C116 myself, along side several of both C64s and C128s.
I suggest you watch some of Bil Herds talks here on YT. They are not only great for getting ones facts straight (I certainly discovered how much I needed that myself), but also full of juicy and ridiculously hilarious Commodore insider stories. He is more or less doing the same talk every time. But with variating content, depending on how much time he was given to talk.
My own personal favourite here on YT is called "VCFMW 11 - Bil Herd: Tales From Inside Commodore".
It wasn't originally intended as a games machine either hence lack of hardware sprites. It was supposed to be a business machine.
@@daviniarobbins9298 The C116 was intended (by Jack) to be the cost reduced version of the TED business series, in order to take on the ZX Spectrum. Since the Spectrum was considered a gaming computer, which also didn't have hardware-sprites either, that seemed to line up just nicely. He never intended it to end up in the breadbin case, which the C16 is; a C116 in a VIC20/C64 style case. The C116 and the C16 are fundamentally identical, electronically.
- But don't take my word for it... go watch Bil Herd's VCFMW talks.
I always thought the C16 and Plus4 projects were set up by Tramiel to try to ruin Commodore as he set them going then jumped ship to Atari. This was what I remember from the early 80s when they came out at the time, there was a lot of speculation about that in the computer press from what I remember. But again, was a long time ago!
I love the c16, always wanted one just for the bread bin black look, shame the 64 didnt have that black color, but bought one second hand (never played and still boxed) and now sits alongside the 64 and vic 20 in my collection, shall treasure it.
Back in the second half of the '90s I heard this crazy rumor, that the reason why the Windows blue screen of death is blue, was because of that infamous "no thanks, I'm already married" deal that Jack Tramiel pulled on Bill Gates, for the (up to) Basic 2.0 interpreters on the PETs, the VIC20, and the C64. So, Bill made it resemble the C64's blue start-up screen to get back at Commodore. Jack allegedly never said that, just like Bill allegedly never said that bit about the 640KB of RAM.
- Although as funny and juicy as those stories may be, they are also just about as ridiculous as they are hilarious. Especially that blue screen of death one, since Microsoft got much better license deals for the updated versions of Basic on the TED machines and was even credited in retrograde back to 1977 on the green start-up screen of the C128.
I'm quite sure that far most of those "juicy Commodore stories" we heard back then, where really only stories made up by kids and teens like us, with over-lively imaginations, geting wilder and wilder through each re-telling in a pre-internet world.
- But the thing is that the real "juicy Commodore stories", were at least as (if not even more) juicy, hilarious, and far out ridiculous as the ones we made up... and I personally love those real ones a lot more... I gobble them up like sugary breakfast serial in front of Saturday morning TV.
I also love ALL of the old vintage home computers, regardless of their differences, quirks and oddities... not just the Commodores.
- I mean, take the Texas Instruments TI-99 4/a; with its 16 bit processor with only 256 Bytes of dedicated RAM (nope, "Bytes" not a typo) and has to "lend" VRAM from its 8 Bits GFX-chip to store its Basic program... and without the PEEK function or POKE command, which was actually presented in the manual as a positive feature. It just doesn't get much more weird than that. And who can resist such a lovable good and proper freak, am I right?
Nope... They had/have character precisely because of their differences. Which is more than I can say about the soulless computers of today, which are just more and more and more of the same. When you buy a new computer today, regardless of the brand, you pretty much already expect it to be able to do exactly what your old one did, only slightly ♪ ♫ Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger ♫ ♪
My C116 is in need of some TLC; its keyboard is deader than a ZX Spectrum's dead-flesh keys (my first computer, BTW)... likely because the ribbon-cable is non-existent and the connector on the motherboard looks like someone dropped the worlds tiniest nuke on it.
- But I am going to do all I can to bring it back. I'll probably totally hate typing on its horrid rubber-keys, but I'll still love it for being such an adorable quirky and odd freak.
We had a plus 4 at xmas that mum got in sale as i guess they were being sold off, was huge upgrade from our zx81 , fond memories of fire ant and treasure island
The colour of the Plus 4 is astounding. If only it had a SID chip.
Check out Plus/4 Turbo Outrun. 😁
I had it and I was the happiest boy in the world since it was my first home computer. Certainly 16Kb of memory was very limiting, seeing some masterpieces done on the Plus4 (which mainly had more ram than C16). For me it was the beginning of a passion
That commodore was not keeping up with anyone.
Jack Tramiel thought the Japanese computer companies would come in, so they put this out before they came (and they didnt).
@@scottythegreat1 They tried, at least where I live. MSX machines were heavily advertised, there were magazine review and they were in the stores, albeit at prices above the C64, not below it like the 116. The one place I never saw an MSX was in my mates rooms, but that also applies to the C16/116/+4. Everone had C64s and later Amigas. A few got CPCs and one particular unlucky guy had a "Schneider Joyce", he must still be hating his parents for that.
You missed out Summer Events, probably THE best game for the C16. How the programmer got that out of a C16, even though it was a multi load, is still a mystery, including making the computer forget it had borders!
However like a lot of people, we couldn’t afford a C64 and remember the ad for the C16 with Rolf Harris - that doesn’t age well lol - and his art program on Cartridge, and I remember bothering my parents for ages for it lol
Yes... The less said about that celebrity endorsement, the better.
I had Winter Events, same programmer, Anirog/Anco Software by memory? Udo Gertz knew how to get something out of the C16!
I loved the C16 back then despite the pittance of good games. I played Airwolf conversion by Elite a lot and Sword of Destiny by Gremlin Graphics. They were the other publishers that were supporting C16. There was a Commando knock off called Legionnaire. It was so bad they could’ve called it legionnaire’s disease.
The machines dark grey with white keyboard looked far more attractive that the later brown approach
My reason to buy a Plus/4 from my first money was the BASIC V3.5 with the large free memory.
Thanks for showing what the games were like on the C16 since I had never seen them before. I only saw a working C16 once and the only thing I saw it do was run some Basic demos. Anyway, here in the US the C16 and Plus/4 were instant flops. Within months you could buy either one for next to nothing.
I somewhat envy you britains who were given access to those dedicated school computers such as the BBC Micro. We had none of this stuff, at least not until the later classes where one could choose to attend a programming course. So the first computer I saw was an Atari 520ST, but it was the C64 I was playing the most until I finally got my own computer. And that was the C16. Unfortunately I was then old enough to want of course a C64, but got the other one. Shortly after my C16 was exchanged by a Plus/4. Yes, there were few games as good as the many on the C64 back then. ACE +4, Winter Events and Trailblazer were some of them which I had. Nowadays there are new games for the Plus/4 proving what the machine is really capable of. I highly recommend checking out Psytronik's Plus/4 games for anyone interested.
I recommend: G-Man, Scramble, Zodiac, Xadium, P.O.D., Sabouteur, Terra Cognita, A.C.E. and the best of them all, and only available for the TED family: Oblido. Soboteur which I had on the Plus/4 was a 1:1 C= 64 port.
I had the ZX Spectrum +2 as my first computer. Most of my friends had the same, the odd Amstrad.cpc or C64. The snobs had the BBC computer!
No one was looking for an updated VIC-20 and a downgraded C64 in 1984, fortunately the Amiga 1000 was launched just a year later. The C16, Plus/4 and C128 were all a huge waste of money for Commodore.
Would've liked to hear the sound aswell.
Mine came with XZAP, Punchy, and some kind of skiing game. I loved all of them. Maybe I'll port XZAP to the C64 some day.
yeah! my first computer was C16 too
I have Commodore VIC-20, Commodore 64 and 128, and Plus/4.. Wish I had this Commodore 16 in my collection.
There's a lot that could have been said about why the C16 failed; Jack Tramiel's desire to conquer the sub-$99 computer market, which became the Plus 4 & C16 by the time Tramiel was pushed out. Without Jack, Commodore management had little vision for those two machines, and quickly moved onto the C128.
Also my very first Computer.. I actually just brought myself one for pure nostalgia. The problem was that games companies were (for the most part) releasing ports of games for the more powerful systems of the time, and because of the C16s limitations this just resulted in terrible games. The Berks trilogy of games were exclusive to the C16/plus 4 and they are great!. Also can't believe you didn't mention Punchy ? One of the games that was included in the C16 package and its fantastic ! - been playing it again recently :)
It wasn't all bad. It had decent sales in the UK when the price was dropped. It sold very well in Eastern Europe. Wish i had kept my Plus/4 with a lot of C64 games being converted to these machines now.
Hold on, I'm just downloading Punchy... it should be ready tomorrow morning sometime
The Commodore 16 is probably what the Vic-20 should have been, and the Vic-20 never released.
Never heard the Plus/4 called ‘C16 Plus/4’ before. My first computer was a Plus/4 which I still have and as of a few months ago when I last used it, still works. It was mostly C16 games that worked on it, however there were some exclusive Plus/4 or upgraded games such as Saboteur, Mercenary, Ace and the excellent Plus/4 version of Tomb Thumb. Icicle Works was a good Boulder Dash clone that came with the machine. Despite having to play mostly C16 games, there were some good ones. And Basic was much better than my mates C64 version.
Most of the games produced in the past couple of decades or more (and there are many) have required 64K, so the Plus/4 is much better taken advantage of now.
I remember running the game "Cosmic Cruncher" on my C16😂 or that may have been my VIC20
I had a Plus/4 = checkmate!
Well, a nice review.
Maybe worth to mention, that the initial idea was the cheap, compact, ZX Spectrum looking, rubber key C116 version, and I think THAT's why the joystick and the datasette sockets are the very small mini-DIN versions instead of the C64 versions. They would simply would not fit to such a small machine.
Later on the C16 was created with simplier, less crowded design in a black c64 housing. I suppose they could have added the C64 connectors (the biggest initial claim towards the machine), but I suppose it would be a great confusion to create hardware incompatibility within the range.Though most of the C16 buyers would have thanked for that :-)
Even the PSU of the C16 is completely compatible with the ZX Spectrum's PSU :-) , voltage, connector type, polarity, power
(I am not confident, that the VIC-20 sound is much worse than the 264 with 3 channels and lower frequency sound)
On the other hand you brought up that sad Sabouteur C16 game. It is beyond bad, but I think you spent a little too much time and focus on that specific game. There were literally hundreds of commercial games, and that Saboteur games was rated as one of the worst one
There were a lot of nice games for C16 like Tutti Frutti, Kickstart, Magician's Curse, Xcellor8, Tom Thumb, Zylon, Winter and Summer Events, Arthur Noid, Trailblazer, Fire Ant, Timeslip, Auf Wiedersehen Monty just to name few classic, great looking, and sometimes even great sounding games, just within 16K. You cannot compare them to a VIC-20 game, they are far surpassing that quality.
Loved my plus 4
I had a C16 back in the day. It failed bcoz it was not a C64, just a mere shell of one. Thanks Jack
Jack was gone and had nothing to do with the C16. His vision for the TED/264 computer was most closely matched by the cheaper and rare C116 that was only made in small quantities for a very short time. It was just meant to be a better replacement of the VIC-20 for the low end. And it was. It was just supposed to be even cheaper than the C16.
Commodore in competition with themselves, how could it possibly fail 😅😮😢
My Feeling (being a Spectrum 48k user at the time) was that the market was saturated, when it arrived here in the UK, UK manufacturers like Oric and Dragon were folding. I could not understand why Commodore were releasing it/putting effort into developing it. In hindsight with better knowledge. They had a plan, that was to counter the Japanese consumer electronics giants moving into the US Market. If it had 32k (using all the 64k the chip could read), it might of worked. But ram was expensive at the time. If the apps shipped in the Plus4 had actually been usable, it might have worked. But they made an appalling mess of it all.
16K of RAM was a lot of memory back in the day, and the bad game ports just show that those people were incapable of using the machine to its full extent. I had a VIC-20 with 16K RAM expansion at that time, and it was simply mind-blowing to have that much memory available. I never made a game that used up all the memory. On the C-16, it's probably much easier to run out of memory, but still, there was a lot you could do with that amount of RAM.
By the time the C16 hit the market in 1984, 16k was well below the norm. The C64 has 64k, the Sinclair/Timex Spectrum had 48k, most MSX machines had 32k minimum, the Amstrad CPC had 64k....
@@81632bit At the end of 1984, I went on a Christmas stroll through a computer shop with my mom and we bought an Amstrad CPC with green monitor, which was fairly cheap. I still kept using my VIC-20 for some years after, but also the CPC. I had my first floppy drive for the CPC (a Vortex 5,25" drive with 704K capacity) and the first machine monitor module (Maxam module), but sadly since I didn't have the DevPak, I couldn't fully use it (I did have Rodney Zak's Z80 book though). On the VIC-20, I found out a lot of things by just trial and error (later on I had a VIC-20 internals book), on the CPC that was pretty difficult (there wasn't much documentation available beside the DevPak). Had I known about the features of the C-16 beforehand (like the built-in machine monitor), I probably would have wanted that instead.
@@81632bitI don’t get how you would save money going down from 64kB in C64. It had 8 (off the shelf) chips. 16 bit computers had 16 and IBM had banks. 8 chips is the bare minimum for DRAM. SRAM was available with 4 data pins.
A lesson in how to destroy an entire MARKET!!! Putting to market a product that you KNOW will leave your victims feeling burned and discouraged- is a sure fire way to destroy the entire market.
The commodore 16 was my second computer. The first was an out of date ZX81. I thought I was really upgrading to machine with colour & sound. One plus point, the basic was better that the C64's version. I know the C64 can do more but it was easier on the C16. Loved graphics programming but it ate 10K of ram. Not a problem if you had the plus 4. I had friends who had a commodore 64 and one with a zx spectrum. Games were usually ported over to the C16 a few months after these systems and as usual was a disaster. Ever tried to play commando on the C16 - killed instantly. Now there's a demand for retro and there are 64K games and demos available including some fixes for games that had bugs. There's life in the old system yet!
I still have my plus/4. I still haven't fixed it.
I've fixed dozens of Commodore machine. The Plus4 doesn't have that many issues. Most of the problems can be fixed by simple chip swapping, either the CPU or TED or PLA. Other than that there are no other common issues.
It was released after the C=64 and was worse. That's why it failed. Being mildly cheaper wasn't enough. Commodore had terrible marketing as well. You don't sell a worse system 2 years later after you've already made a better system. You cost reduce the original system while you develop a better system.
It mainly failed because at the time it was released price of RAM dropped. Thus, it was not necessary as C64 became budget home computer.
@@aleksazunjic9672 Commodore never seemed very forward thinking.
They should have factored in falling prices.
The Amiga only existed because they purchased the company Amiga. Amiga was great, but the next better computer was MUCH more expensive, not just a little.
The Amiga was fine until the mid 90's, but in 1990, the current model was the 2000, and that was like $1,500, twice the cost of the 500.
They should have cost reduced the Amiga in the late 1980s and made something like the CD32 by 1990. If they sold that at $400 bucks, I would have bought it.
A CD32 with the option to plug in a keyboard, plug in the OS on CD, and have an external HD would have been a killer back then.
If they just made a keyboard port compatible with IBM (same with mouse), and forced you to buy an external drive, I'd be happy with it.
I remember being frustrated that PlayStation wouldn't turn THAT into a computer, it would have been easy to do.
The only reason game consoles aren't made to act as computers is that consoles are sold BELOW cost initially, and they make up the difference in licensing fees from developers. I think MS takes 30% for every game sold for XBox, or once did.
Oh well, it doesn't matter now. All computer chips are basically the same in terms of power in both computing speed and literal power consumption. Doesn't make a big difference if you're on an ARM or an x86 really, except ARM is tiny as a core and slower, but they make up for it by having more cores. You can buy a 64 core ARM today. I'd move to that architecture, if it was available, and it's not.
My first home computer also! Loved it and wish I'd never traded it in for a Spectrum +3. However, just bought a broken one and swapped out the TED and now it's not dead (at the moment). Love Xapp which came with it...Though the graphics program it came with has not aged well (mainly do to the person who endorsed it.... 'do you know who it is yet'). Football Manager (without the rubbish screen play) was actually better on the C16 🙂
The C16 and the more expensive Plus 4 failed for the same basic reasons. Neither of them were compatible with the C64, which was still selling well, and was getting cheaper all the time, and they weren't even compatible with the Vic20. Despite the extra colours, the hardware was in many ways a step backwards from the aging C64. It seems Commodore let their engineers work on their own, competing pet projects, but nobody had any clear idea what most people wanted.
Thank you for ruining my eardrums with the intro music.
Whats the music please I heard it before
The commodore Plus 4 was not a Commodore 16. The Plus 4 was a 64kb Micro designed to be a work/home hybrid computer, but it used a cost reduced chipset, doing away with chips like the SID, and the VIC chip, and just using the TED chip. The system was less capable than the 64, but easier to program, and was shipped with inbuilt WP, Spread sheet and database program. The C16 was a cost reduced version of the Plus 4, which Commodore made to replace the Vic:20 as sales of the old machine had ground to a halt.
The games for the Commodore 16 were al low effort games, and most were sold as budget titles. Unfortunately the developers never made any games for the Plus 4, as all C16 games ran on the Plus 4. Because of this the Plus 4 was incredibly unpopular and both systems were discontinued.
Same hardware, just 64k ram and an extended ROM with built in productivity apps. All C16 software ran natively on a Plus/4.
@@81632bit That was the downfall for the Plus/4 nobody wrote any software for it.
Commodore needed something to replace the aging VIC-20? They had it already. It was called the Commodore 64. The C64 was everything the VIC-20 was but better... and more. In the early days, if the C64 was too expensive, people could still buy the VIC-20. By the time the VIC-20 was completely discontinued, the C64 was fast dropping in price at at one point was cheap enough that anyone could buy one. If people couldn't afford the 1541 disk drive, they got get the Datasette instead.
Commodore absolutely should have been developing the C64's replacement (i.e. a backwards compatible C128 without modes) but not the VIC-20's replacement. No one was saying they wanted to buy a C64 but less good in 1984.
Yeah, who uses the Z80 in the C128 anyway? With even more memory than the C64, a 16 bit solution would have been needed. Atari ST !
Maybe the SuperCPU could have gotten a foothold before illegal instructions became popular? VIC III before Demos abused internal timing?
CPU and VICIII need to absorb the PLA and drive the chip enable lines on the bus themselves. Make them 32 bit. 17 bit for RAM, and the others for chip enable. 16 bit databus. Clock signal at twice the clock of the bus master clock to let 6502 finish internal math while VIC reads graphics like in 256 color mode . 80 columns. Small borders. Flicker free modes on EGA or monochrome monitors.
ROM seems to come in 16kB size even from the MOS fab. For SID-2 I would store a quarter sine in there. Every odd value is taken as the average. Gives me 16 bit -> 16 bit sine for nice DSP bass. At 4Mhz memory clock I can add quite a few channels and overtones at 48 kHz.
Commodore should just have saved money until the Amiga.
@@ArneChristianRosenfeldt Exactly right. They purchased the Amiga and it was a very good purchase. It was a miracle that they were able to properly follow the C64 with yet another competition killer. Except that it didn't really work out that way. Commodore needed to eat, sleep and breath Amiga, once it was released. That means working with productivity software developers and market the hell out of it. And then they needed to realise it was a platform, not a computer. That means a steady stream of new models - not just more RAM and cheaper components but better CPUs like the 68020, 68030 & 68040 (I know this happened but waaaay too late).
Apple got both of these things right with the Mac and they only just survived the 90s themselves. And Microsoft... well they had the momentum of a freight train. But Commodore, with their technology that was at one stage superior could have used years worth of C64 profits to double, triple, quadripple down on their lifeline... the Amiga. No C16s, C128s, Max Plus 4 something or rathers, and Colts. PET to VIC-20 to C64 to Amiga. That was the path to victory. They could have had it, if their directors cared more about changing the world than they did about planning their golden parachutes.
A machine that looks like a C64 with 16K in 1984 for $99 and no software compatibility .. It's better than the TS1000/ZX81 with color and full travel keyboard but ...
It was 3 years too late. Had it launched in 1981, it may have stood a better chance.
The Commodore 16 had a lot of other issues. The TED chip lacked sprites and other features that the C-64 offered. It was really supposed to be used for non gaming tasks. If you used cartage based software the limited ram was far less of an issue. The disk drive interface was also a lot faster than the C-64.
I Commodore had really wanted to make an Commodore 65+ that would have sold like crazy would to have made the drives a lot faster and put an improved Basic on it. Maybe add a seek command to the disk drive for better random access and just maybe a real UART for the serial port.
Of course that is just my opinion.
Honestly, it's baffling to have an immensely popular 8-bit platform and then confuse things with an incompatible platform in pretty much the same market space. By '84 there had to be some ways to consolidate the 64's ICs into a smaller board and maybe go with a chicklet keyboard.
It failed because Jack Tramiel was ousted from Commodore by Irving Gould and clueless Commodore marketing got hold of the computer and thought they could make the hardware into a business machine (Plus 4), oh dear. The C16 was almost what Jack envisaged, he wanted the rubber keyboard though. That did appear as the C116.
I'm so glad I didn't buy this piece of trash at the time it was out, but waited until I'd saved up the money for a C64. It would have been such a waste of money, had I given in at the time.
Mr. Puniverse was by far the most technically impressive title on the C16. I have no idea how they managed to pack so much in. A very playable but challenging platformer heavily influenced by Manic Miner. The graphics are impressive for the system with animated level objects such as crushing pistons and sentries that shoot projectiles etc. Some decent character animation, in-game sound can be a little annoying but the menu screen sound track is good. The screens/levels inter-connect as well, you get the sense that you're playing in a very large cavern.
I was lucky enough to find a copy in a local second hand shop back in the late 80s, could hardly buy C16 games in normal shops by then. Family couldn't afford a C64.
ruclips.net/video/zRNS3i0QUAo/видео.html
The thing is that Commodore didn't want a cheap alternative for the C64. So if they made a C16 with 64k of ram (and not the office kind of things like the plus4) it would hurt the sales of the C64. Sure it didn't had the SID sound (but a lot of computers back in the day didn't had that), it didn't had hardware sprites (but also common for a few homecomputers), but the 121 colors was something that the C64 didn't have. It is the same reason why they didn't put the C65 on the market, because that would hurt the Amiga line.
The Plus/4 was literally a C16 with 64k of ram and an extended ROM with built in productivity apps. All C16 software was compatible with the Plus/4.
@@81632bit The Commodore was on of the best selling computers of all time. Why would you say it failed? then the Amiga was the second best.
@@RandellVandergriff the Commodore 16 did fail. Less than 1 million machines sold. You are confusing it with the Commodore 64....
@@81632bit OK thanks. Yes I understand now.
Actually that computer was not needed at all. Looking at games, upgrade from VIC 20 to C16 didn't make any significant difference. With memory upgrade costed similar to C64 and games were made assuming you don't have one. However Plus/4, if it would be with SID chip, maybe upgraded a bit, it could be more popular. Worst thing in Commodore universe was, that they were not compatible with older machines, cutting off massive libraries of software. Exception were C64 and 128 (and I believe C128 was also unnecessary waste of resources which should be used on Amiga).
Let's face it, from Jack Tramiel to Irvin Gould to Ali Mehdi, no CBM manager ever had a clue what they were actually selling and to whom. And even less why.
They were selling an affordable all-purpose computer to people who would game a lot. Compability was of the utmost essence.
The C16 was killed by: 1. incompatible, 2. worse than C64, 3. aimed at budget gamers and utterly useless because the whole system screams "I am bad at gaming".
A downgraded C64 would have done a lot better, e.g. simpler keyboard, integrated tape drive (the Brits would have loved it), leaving out the IO-Chips for IEC-access and wouldn't have cost much more than a C16 but less than a C64. Also in 1984 people were ready for an upgraded C64 - but trust me, the C128 was not. CBM should have simply kicked the whole CP/M-subsystem and make the system more affordable.
It failed because there was no reason to buy it over a more powerful Commodore 64 which already existed. The vic 20 wasn't popular anyway.
The price in my country was negligible, so you were short changing yourself by buying it instead of a better supported c64.
The Vic 20 was popular in some countries
Exactly. It was the Commodore 64 that really got the home computer market going. Once they struck gold with it, they didn't need another low cost computer. Either look to the future or market what you already have. A computer than was a little bit better than the C64 but mostly much worse was just confusing and had no place in the market.
Maybe they were going after Sinclair rather than trying to replace the VIC-20?
I bet a lot of poor kids ended up getting one for Xmas at the time because it was less than £50.
Struggling to understand the purpose of this video. The C=16 was a re-hash of the C=116 but with a better keyboard. It wasn't made for games.
To be fair, none of the Microsoft available at the time were "made for games", but that's what they were predominantly used for.
16K wasn’t it’s problem, as 64K or larger games would naturally be cartridge based and it’s lack of developer support is what kills any platform
1980s micro computers didn't use cartridge based games. Especially not at the low end like the C16. Companies shipped games on cassette tapes or floppy discs. They were limited by what could fit into the systems ram. So 16k was a problem.
outside of North America the MSX computers would have seemed a far superior choice - and with so many manufacturers surely there would have been MSX computers at competitive price points
You would think so, but no. Outside of Japan, Brazil, and The Netherlands, the MSX was a non-entity really.
The US had the C64 & Apple II/IIGS. The UK had the ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC range (as well as the C64). Germany was a Commodore stronghold. MSX just didn't factor, sadly.
Those last two games were almost as bad as some Tiger handheld games at the time.
If the C16 had 64K of RAM, hardware sprites, a SID compatible chip then it would have succeeded.
It would have flopped even harder in that case.
It would be called C64 then 😆
lol this thing launched the same years as MacOS classic, a year before the NES and also a year before the next computer Commodore were developing, the Amiga. Of, and of course, 2 years after the C64, also from Commodore. Whatever were they thinking!!? That's like as if Macintosh would have tried pushing PowerMacs... AFTER releasing the iMacs. Even if slightly cheaper, none would have wanted it!
If the C16 could have had even 32K of RAM it would have been an interesting machine, due to something your video fails to mention: better BASIC than C64. But even with its improved BASIC it was hamstrung with its lack of RAM.
it was never ment as a games computer
Most home computers weren't. But that's what most ended up as.
I upgraded mine to 64K (easy job) just to play Mercenary.
I learned to code on a Plus/4 - It actually had a very good BASIC and graphics functions. Otherwise than that a pile of poo
i never understood why on earth they invested in the c16. never git it.
because was worse then the c64 of course
imagine c16 or 116 being cheap and compatible with vic20 and that cheap
The Plus/4 had 64 KB of RAM and more of those 64 KB were available for BASIC programs than were on the Commodore 64! The TED was the first SoC, system-on-chip, in the history of computing. If you still have your C= 16, upgrade it to 64 KB with the Saruman RAM expansion, slap the SID cartridge into it and you'll have more than a decent system. The TED family failed because it was incompatible with the Commodore 64, so its vast software library was out of reach.
Failed due to low RAM. Because of this, there were no good games for this machine. You can't write anything good in 16kbytes.
Maybe it would have been more successful with 48kbytes of RAM. (Commodore 48) But in fact this machine was completely unnecessary, and in fact the Plus 4 was too. Rather, they should have thought the opposite and released earlier the C128 instead. An advanced C64 with more memory! But with more improvements than what happened, because otherwise it was also a wrong machine as it was. There should have been 6 audio channels (double SID stereo), and a real 320x200 color graphics with 16 colors. That would have been a great successor of the C64.
Then the first Amiga could have been 512 kbytes, not 256. And at least 8 MHz, not 7. As it was in the Atari ST. Commodore made quite a few strategic mistakes.
Arguably, there were good games even for Atari 2600 which had way less RAM+ROM. More like they missed market segment, at the time it was released price of C-64 dropped (due to components becoming cheaper) , so C-64 became budget computer.
Simple, it was 48 too little.
c64 killed it
Vic20 was even worse
Never heard of that. You made that up, didn't you?
What?
Weird way of speaking.
I certainly love his accent
The spectrum was a piece of junk tbh
The main reason was sales and they had a machine competeing with it upon release it only had 16k memory which was like a super atari 2600 the ted chip was an advancment upon the c64 its just that they made a million machines and never made anymore they didn't lose any money they then made the c128