It’s interesting that Dave mentioned education as a possible market for these. I thought kids were learning Javascript on their school-issued Chromebooks these days. It would be nice to teach students about the concepts of computer hardware architecture… but the Commander’s architecture is kinda weird, being a hodgepodge of ancient (6502) and modern (FPGA), with bank-switched memory and the desire for backwards compatibility with Commodore peripherals hanging off of it like a lamprey. Sure, students could learn about computer architecture on it, but it’s hard to see how it’s better than other, cheaper options. Big money awaits if they can pull it off though.

Isn’t educational use the whole point of Raspberry Pi? It seems like that has way more opportunity for it with a modern architecture, ready-made robotics kits, and other maker-type applications that could get kids excited about electronics and programming.

Though I really like the concept of building a new device which incorporates the inherent ease of programmability of the computers of yore, I think the 6502 is just too weird and limited for doing so. For example, in order to cram a halfway decent amount of memory into the thing they had to resort to bank switching. At the least they should’ve gone with a 65816 (apparently they tried but they initially had some problems with the '816 address bus multiplexing).

Death to America