This computer is a machine that is now pretty much regarded as 'vaporware'.

For some reason, towards the end of 1990 Commodore decided to design and create a successor for the already hugely popular C-64.

By 1990 the C-64's star (like all of the other 8-bit machines) was on the wane as the more powerful 16-bit machines took hold of the home market.

Despite this (perhaps they saw what those folks over at MGT were doing with the SAM Coupe) they worked on a prototype called the 'C64 DX' before settling on the moniker 'C65'.



The C65 did have some new fantastic features such as:

A special version of the 7510 with lot of new op-codes

Great graphic modes which were actually superior to those sported by the likes of the Atari ST or the Commodore Amiga (500 and 600 models). This was quite something considering the fact that these machines were 16-bit

A great new processor was fitter which was a DMA/Blitter. This chip could be programmed with a list of instructions to copy or set blocks of memory which was a fantastic feature for assembly programming.

Dual SID chips allowing for full sterio sound

128KB of RAM as standard which was exandable to a mind blowing 8MB

An internal 3.5" floppy drive

The new graphics mode allowed the machine to be capable of producing 256 colours from a palette of 4096 which was again, pretty impressive.

It also had a lot of display modes available including: 320×200×256, 640×200×256, 640×400×16, 1280×200×16, and 1280×400×4

As you can see the design folks as Commodore really put a lot of thought and effort into this machine, and made a real attempt to please their current vast base of users.

All of this hardware coupled full Commodore 64 compatibility meant that we would be in home computing heaven right?

Well unfortunately, this turned out not to be the case...