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  Fits in nicely with old cassettes and floppy disks. [credit: 8BitDo ]

The Commodore 64 introduced a generation of future computer geeks to personal computing. The 8-bit system first launched in 1982 and was discontinued in 1994. During that time, it made its mark as one of the first and most influential personal computers, and many still remember the computer fondly .

A Commodore 64. (credit: Bill Bertram/Wikimedia Commons )

Gaming peripherals maker 8BitDo wants to bring that nostalgia to people's fingertips and this week announced the Retro Mechanical Keyboard - C64 Edition . 8BitDo is careful not to use the name "Commodore" outright. But with marketing images featuring retro Commodore gear in the background, press materials saying that the keyboard was "inspired by the classics," and certain design cues, the keyboard is clearly a tribute to the '80s keyboard-computer.

8BitDo starts with the sort of beige that you only see on new peripherals these days if the gadgets are trying to appear old. A rainbow stripe runs horizontally and north of the function row, like on Commodore's computer. There's a power button with a bulb popping out of the keyboard case ready to illuminate when it receives the signal.

Enlarge / Zork running on a Commodore 64 at the Computerspielemuseum in Berlin, Germany. (credit: Marcin Wichary (CC by 2.0 Deed) )

The source code for many of Infocom's foundational text-parsing adventure games, including Zork , has been available since 2019 . But that code doesn't do anything for modern computers, nor even computers of the era, when it comes to actually running the games.

Most of Infocom's games were written in "Zork Implementation Language," which was native to no particular platform or processor, but ready to be interpreted on all kinds of systems by versions of its Z-Machine . The Z-Machine could be considered the first real game development engine, so long as nobody fact-checks that statement too hard. Lots of work has been done in open source realms to create modern, and improved, versions of these interpreters for pretty much every device imaginable.

The source code for these Z-Machine implementations (virtual machines, in today's parlance) appeared like a grue from the dark a few days ago in a GitHub repository owned by Andrew Plotkin . Plotkin, a major figure in modern and classic text adventure realms (and lots in between ), details what they are and how he found them in a blog post on his site .

Enlarge / The disks and diagrams Mike Brixius has to work with in finishing his 1984 CRPG project. (credit: YouTube/RavenWolf Retro Tech)

There are stories that some of us, at a certain stage of adulthood, should never hear. Not if we value our time or our storage space. I regret to inform you that Mike Brixius, on his RavenWolf Retro Tech channel, offers just such a story about his quest to finish his own Commodore 64 CRPG from 1984 . He's going to be able to do it, too, because he kept all the disks, tapes, notes, and hand-documented assembly code print-outs ever since his teenage project.

"It's one of those loose threads in my life that I deeply regret," Brixius says in his video. He hopes his Patreon supporters and YouTube community can give him the "moral support and accountability" he needs to complete his game after all these years.

Digital Dungeon Master ( DDM ) was based in part on the Avalon Hill tabletop games Brixius loved at the time, but more so on Avalon Hill's foray into dungeon-crawling RPGs, Telengard . Brixius wanted to recreate Telengard 's limited line of sight but add in a surface world, akin to that of another favorite of his, Ultima IV .

Enlarge / Linus Åkesson playing his homemade "Commodordion" in a YouTube video. (credit: Linus Åkesson )

In late October, a Swedish software engineer named Linus Åkesson unveiled a playable accordion—called " The Commodordion "—he crafted out of two vintage Commodore 64 computers connected with a bellows made of floppy disks taped together. A demo of the hack debuted in an 11-minute YouTube video where Åkesson plays a Scott Joplin ragtime song and details the instrument's creation.

Åkesson—a versatile musician himself—can actually play the Commodordion in real time like a real accordion. He plays a melody with his right hand on one C64 keyboard and controls the chord of a rhythm and bass line loop (that he can pre-record using the flip of a switch) using his left hand on the other keyboard.

A fair amount of custom software engineering and hardware hackery went into making the Commodordion possible, as Åkesson lays out in a post on his website. It builds off of earlier projects (that he says were intentionally leading up to this one), such as the Sixtyforgan (a C64 with spring reverb and a chromatic accordion key layout) and Qwertuoso , a program that allows live playing of the C64's famous SID sound chip .

Enlarge / An example of eight papercraft vintage computer models designed and assembled by Rocky Bergen. (credit: Rocky Bergen )

Yesterday, a Winnipeg, Canada-based artist named Rocky Bergen released a free collection of miniature papercraft vintage computer models that hobbyists can assemble for fun. They are available on The Internet Archive in a pack of 24 PDF files that you can print out on letter-size paper and fold into three dimensions.

Among Bergen's Barbie-size papercraft models, you'll find representations of classic computers originally released during the 1970s and '80s, such as the Apple II, IBM PC 5150, Commodore 64, Apple Macintosh, and even the rare Apple Lisa 1. You'll also find papercraft models of a few classic game consoles like the Sega Master System and the Nintendo GameCube.

Bergen began creating the papercraft models in the summer of 2016, starting with an Amstrad CPC 464 he designed for a CPC fanzine. "I grew up with a Commodore 64 and have always been a fan of old computers and their industrial design," Bergen told Ars Technica. "I would love to have a huge collection of them, but it's not always practical for people to have a massive amount of hardware with them at all times."