Okay, for the record it's 100% fine if you don't want the new C64. But don't make asinine arguments like "why would I get that when I can get a real one for $20?". First off, my good bitch, show me where the fuck you shop because I'm about to buy their whole stock.

I don't personally think of retrocomputing as reaching back in time. I think what some of us are really reaching for is sanity and control in our devices, a sense that the machine was engineered for a human being to use and understand. It just happens that it's old machines that work that way.

This Hacker News reply actually is very interesting to me. Do you think this feeling is common? Certainly I would love the machine they describe.

There will very probably be more installed units of the Commodore 64 Ultimate than there are of the ZX Spectrum Next (a great machine in its own right!). So if people are coding to target the Next, and they are, then there’s no reason not to target the unique features of the C64U.

I think there's a connection between autistic intolerance for falsehood and the right wing's genocidal hatred of autistics. See, conservative life functions on lying -- you lie about everything, to everyone, and they play along to protect their lies, and so on. You can do whatever you want as long as you don't get caught. To a large percentage of autistics, the presence of so many lies in such a small space is anathema -- we are chronically addicted to the truth, to the point where someone who is obviously lying about something makes us physically uncomfortable. We are also frequently hyper-perceptive -- we will spot the inconsistency between word and deed, and we will call it out, which is lethal to the whole conservative social contract. They respond to us being essentially walking lie detectors by painting us as the flawed ones, the defective ones, the ones to be exterminated. Don't listen to him, he's the victim of vaccines or adrenochrome or whatever it is they're blaming this week.

C64 GAME DEVS: What are your favourite native (not cross-platform) C64 game dev related programs?

Every new retro system that comes out is an opportunity to show someone else a way to use a computer that isn't making the world worse.

For me, it's not about nostalgia. It's not about "RETVRN" to anything. For me, retro is about the people. Most of them are awesome. Much nicer in general than I am -- as long as you can tune out the wankers. It's also about the tech -- retro systems, in many ways, work better than new ones. A retro system does what you tell it, and NOTHING ELSE. It exists to serve you. It doesn't pretend to offer things it doesn't. It just does what a computer is supposed to do.

Let me put it to you: How many active Commodore 64 users, "real" hardware and modern equivalents, do you think there are in the world? 5,000? 10,000? Retrocomputing is a small world.

Sprite Machine is a sprite editor for the Commodore 64, perfect for exporting the raw binary data to be baked into your assembly program.