This has been bouncing around the net for a few days now. Does anyone know if it is real?
The web site contact uses a non-commodore email address and the ABOUT US tab is not even a sylable on it. The site says they will be launching June 1st.
Given C= bankruptcy, its new focus on licencing, and the CONFIG page showing standard PC parts, this may simply be a standard PC with a added licencing cost. If it is just that, it should sell in the $350-$700 range depending on spec and I might buy one... small is good.
Barry Altman, apparently one of the Commodore USA's principles sent me the following:
this is very real....not a Psystar adventure!
will run ALL OS's...even Mac OSX, although that will not be offered as an installed or supported OS. Customer will need to purchase an Efix dondgle, and install on their own.
will come with Ubuntu @ n/c barebones unit will run approx $395, full blown w/ 3.0 quad core, 4 gig ram, 2 TB hd, blue ray, bluetooth, etc approx $995....please don't hold to me these #'s, but they are close.
also....AROS????
Further, http://www.commodoreusa.net is now functional and contains more information than it did yesterday. The site now has "Commodore is the trademark of Commodore Gaming, based in Amsterdam, Netherlands" at the bottom which indcates to me that he is likely an official licencee.
I was surprised to see the waisted money and space on a Parellel Port and was wondering if they are going to try to some wacky classic Commodore connection through it. Then I thought about using this as a Point Of Sale (POS) device some of which still use parallel printers. This idea was advanced when I saw http://www.commodoreusa.net/i//zpc9100_card-1.jpg which shows a card reader.
I would think this model will be preloaded with a VICE like emulator and ship with a few classic games but there is no mention of that at this point.
The most notable modern PC limitation I see in the photos and specs is a lack of eSATA or USB3 support. Further, as DVI and VGA are about to die, the lack of HDMI or Display Port may be an issue for some in the very near future. The Intel GMA 3100 integrated video will be too weak for current games but should handle business apps and older (say pre 2007) games quite well. Hardware limitations can be overcome in one of two ways:
1: design/marketing
2: price
The design is quite interesting and while the price is just slightly to the high side, I think it is close enought to the market competition that this may be a practical business proposition..
While there is no name on the product most of the graphics have address' like zpc9100_card-1.jpg, so I think we can assume they are going to call it the Z PC 9100.
