I just purchased commodore 64 ultimate last month, for myself and my 8 year old to geek out on.

I miss the days of:

1. Platform you can understand and own fully with some effort

2. Hacking hardware through software and doing weird things to it.

I never owned a c64 as a kid, so this is new to both my son and I. I loved his joy when he did the most basic loop of two print statements (10 print "bey blades", 20 print "rule!" 30 goto 10) and saw something that he did work :).

I'm excited that the community is growing just as we are joining it!

(A lot of what I am seeing is of course AI assisted, ranging from pure AI slop with no real human value, to experts of old using AI to speed up some truly amazing works of craft and art. I'm personally at a stage where I'm using AI as a mentor to learn and supplant books, while crafting code by hand, until I have enough knowledge and confidence to involve ai more fully while still feeling in control)

The title music will always be in my head. I only recently found out that it's from Bach's "Prelude and Fugue in C major" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKsAypz6Ou8

What really influenced my imagination forever since childhood was the tiny things like spelling "Wolf" with a "u" and the font and the little rhymes when you picked up a piece of the medallion...

> 256 screens of jungle. One way out.

Ah AIisms. :)

But that's okay. Indeed when I first played with AI a couple years ago, one of the first things I did was recreate the loading screens of old Spectrum and C64 games. :)

They struggled to deliver the same pace of development when GameCube came out. Nintendo lost confidence and let Microsoft buy the controlling share [1]. They haven't been the same since.

Dinosaur Planet, an unreleased Rareware N64 title, has recently resurfaced [2, 3]. I've been meaning to give that a go.

[1] This is a fantastic video essay on how the Nintendo-Rareware split happened: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIt4sSVpors

[2] Here's the trailer of what Rareware turned into Star Fox Adventures. This game feels like it had more soul: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKFJx-FQ86w

[3] Some coverage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkiPTtrunPg