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The C65 (working title C64DX) was meant to replace the original C64 around end of 1991, beginning of 1992. It was the same situation as with the A500/600. At the time of the planned introduction of the C65, the C64 sold 150,000 times per quarter of the year. In the east, in Asia or wherever. The sales in Europe (Germany) were decreasing, but not worrying enough to justify a panic reaction. Helmut Josts statements about this were always "why should I care what I said yesterday" and "the dead fish starts stinking at the head". Some kind of universal answer for every problem.....oh, I forgot, there are no problems, only solutions.
The idaes of the management were somehow "unorderd" at this time. They wanted to compete with Nintendo with the the C64 and a game like Terminator (the bundle was scheduled for christmas 1991), on the other hand, they were looking for technical enhanced successor for the C64, which should be below the price of an A500/600, but with a better performance than the C64. Doc Peter Kittel had (involuntarily) brought Helmut Jost on a trip, which kept falling back on us all the time. A game like Terminator, stored on a module, contains (of course) more data than a C64 has memory. So they used "bankswitching" to move blocks of x-Kb around, so that they didn't have to keep everything in the memory (which wasn't possible anyway). From this day on, bankswitching was the Helmut Jost's ultimate solution for every memory problem, be it in an A600, a CDTV or whatever. Why had we tried to explain something to him?":-))"
In the beginning it was only a rumor that the were working on a C64-successor in Westchester (after all, at the same time, the battle about the A4000 was fought - will there be another ECS machine before the 4000 or not?) and it seemed absurd for us to think about something like that for 1991/92. Unfortunately we were wrong.
A complete development team, consisting of 8 persons (!), led by Fred Bowen (which can be seen in Dave Haynies video) was assigned for this project.
The performance of the C65 was quite impressive, and if there hadn't been a C64 and an A500 before, it might have been a success. But unfortunately these machines already existed, and the time was against the C65.
In Germany, we had 10 C65's for testing purposes. (Sadly) we had to give them back afterwards (I would have liked to keep on as a collectors item, especially since they were ("Top Secret" as they were called) given away almost for free in the end) complete with circiut diagrams, a QuickReference guide and a demo disk (which I still could have somewhere, but I can't find it).
The C65 had two SID chips (fo stereo sound), great graphic capabilities (they were almost as good as the A500's), only it wasn't very compatible. We tested about 200 programs in Frankfurt, and the compatibility was only about 40 to 50%. Not enough if you keep in mind that the C65 was meant as a replacement for the C64, not an addition. The C65 had an internal 3.5" drive which was comparable to the external floppy 1581, only there weren't any chips available to produce 1581-floppies, since the factory simply didn't make them anymore.
There was a connector for an external 1581 floppy, but of course they wanted to make 3.5" the new standard, and then is it an bad idea to revert back to 5.25" just because you can't build new floppies. And no, an Amiga floppy didn't work either, and not only because of the 880kb format....
Given the fact that the C65 had as standard at least internally a 3.5" drive, you had to have software in this format, this means old program had to be converted and/or new programs had to be made for this format. And even the big software firms wouldn't have done that.
The two SIDs were quite nice, too, but old C64 made only some noise or no sound at all. The C65 mode was interesting, but hard to test due to the lack of software, and the C64 mode was not as good as it should have been.
Fred Bowen was invited by Commodore Germany for one week to convice us for the C65. Doc Peter Kittel and me talked with him.
After all, we were sorry for him, and we tried not to be too hard with him. We just told him our doubts about the C65, and showed him how the situation here in Germany (Europe) looks like, contrary to the USA, etc.
Of course we showed him the problems (paragraph 1 and 2), and in the end, he agreed with us in all points. To my question, were he sees the advantages of the new machine, he answered he didn't know either. He had just got the order from "above" to develop a machine with these specifications, and that's what he did. He agreed to our opinion that it would do more harm than benefit.
Fred Bowen left after this week and Doc Peter Kittel and I wrote a "argumentation paper" in which we showed more than forceful, that the C65 would finally break our necks, and that we weren't able to just let that happen.
In said marketing meeting, when we were told that Commodore wouldn't support the PCMCIA-Port of the A600, Helmut jost said also that the C65 wouldn't be realized, and that Doc Peter and I surely would be very pleased to hear that. We honored this statement with loud applause. The marketing department didn't really know what the C65 was, and so they were a little astonished about our reaction.
But we didn't give a damn. It was one of the few things were you really had the feeling that you had achieved something, even if it was "only" the prevention of a disaster.«
To be continued...
