A Blast from the Past: The Commodore 64 DTV

Toms Hardware Guide does a review of this awesome retro toy … A Blast from the Past: The Commodore 64 DTV

Thought the days of typing in Load “*”,8,1 were in the past, did you? Well they were, until Mammoth Toys brought the Commodore 64 back to life after being in the grave for over 20 years.

It’s basically a joystick with a built in Commodore 64 !!! You just plug it into your TV and start playing – and it is a real C64, so you can even put in your old favourite POKE commands (although with only a virtual screen keyboard, it can be a little slow to type it all out).

The list of games on the box include some old favourites of mine:

• Impossible Mission (this was the very first computer game I ever played on the C64 once we got one at home) … remember Elvin: “Another visitor. Stay a while … stay forever ! Mwahahahaha”
• Impossible Mission 2
• Jumpman Junior
• Cyberdyne Warrior
• Cybernoid
• Cybernoid II
• Paradroid (this was cool)
• Pitstop (the first computer game I ever bought – I spent hours and hours mastering this game – remember watching the colours of the tyres to see when you had to pit before they blew ?)
• Pitstop 2
• Gateway to Apshai
• Tower Toppler
• Uridium (I thought this was an awesome game)
• Eliminator
• Summer Games (I think this was the second computer game I ever bought – joystick breaker !!)
• Surfing (apparently this is the event from California Games, there are a couple of these, but I’m disappointed they didn’t include the whole game)
• Exolon
• Firelord
• Flying Disk (this is another event from California Games, I would have liked to see the hackey-sack and BMX events in there too)
• Super Cycle
• Silicon Warrior
• Ranarama
• Winter Games (I also played this one)
• Speedball
• Zynaps
• World Karate Champion A
• World Karate Champion B
• Bull Riding (this is one of the events from World Games, again, there were other fun events in the full game such as Caber Tossing and Log Rolling)
• Sumo Wrestling (another World Games event)
• Championship Wrestling
• Sword of Fargoal

I’m also disappointed to see other games like Wizball not on the list – that was my all-time favourite game, and I even thought the original C64 version was better than the Amiga version.

Apparently there’s an entire website devoted to hacking this thing – C64 DTV Hacking

I’m still trying to find where these can be bought in Australia – it may be that they are only available from the US. Perhaps Ziggy can start importing them from the manufacturer in China ? :D