The MEGA65 Project, Inspired by Commodore's Cancelled C65, Shows Off New Dev Kit Hardware

The MEGA65 project, an effort to do what Commodore could not and continue the legacy of the Commodore 64 and Commodore 128 eight-bit home computers, has reached a major milestone: the creation of functional development kits.

Everyone — or, at least, everyone of a certain age — will remember the Commodore 64, one of the best-selling home computers of all time. Few, however, will remember the Commodore 65, a successor device planned by Commodore to fill the gap between rival eight-bit systems and the company's freshly-acquired Amiga family. There's a good reason for that: The Commodore 65 never entered production, and only a handful of prototypes exist.

The Museum of Electronic Games & Art (MEGA) launched an effort to finish Commodore's work and bring the Commodore 65 to market as the MEGA65 in April 2015. Since then, volunteers have been working away to design a system which is inspired by — but far from a slavish copy of — Commodore's cancelled system.

Now, the project has hit the prototype milestone, creating a board which is housed in a transparent acrylic case — and which differs from the company's original Commodore 65 design, moving the 3.5" floppy drive from its front-facing side-mounted location to a side-facing rear mount which echoes the positioning of the drive in Commodore's Amiga 500, 600, and 1200 machines.

"The DevKit is an option for people, especially developers, to get a MEGA65 before it is fully finished and be able to carve the machine together with us and to develop software for it before its release," the project's creators explain. "The top shell is bent to give it a more slick look and to avoid hurting those precious developers hands.

"As it is the first version of the DevKit case we found a couple of things that we want to improve, such as better and quicker access to the board for accessing in terms of programming/flashing the board and keyboard as well as access to the SD drive slots. The new revised parts are already in the mail so expect an update soon. The final version of the case will sport an engraved MEGA65 logo and also a prominent DevKit serial number to make it a great collector‘s item as well. This should shorten the dreadful waiting time for the final machine to be available significantly."

So far, there have been two revisions of the MEGA65 kit: The second lowers the motherboard to provide extra room for programmers and other accessories, meaning it's possible to close the case with all hardware still attached. The second revision also comes with a guesstimate at pricing — "it will most probably cost under €1,000 [$1,111] but more than the final machines," the team writes — and a target release date of summer 2020.

More information is available on the MEGA65 website.