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
Well we’ll see what we can find. We’ve been offered an number of video games embedded in joysticks. I never had a C64 (I was an Apple //e zealot) so I didn’t recognise any of them as C64.
You are aware that there are a couple of C64 emulators that run under Intel processors and will run all your original games?
;)