The Workbench on OldSilicon

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Not a Gamer Review: Two Legit Commodore 64s and a Linux Box Pretending

Upper left: the new FPGA-based Commodore 64 Ultimate . Lower middle: the original 1980s breadbin. Upper right: TheC64 game machine from Retro Games Ltd. Three machines that all call themselves Commodore 64s, on the bench: the brand-new Commodore 64 Ultimate (FPGA, shipped 2025), the original breadbin I bought in college and finally restored in 2017, and a TheC64 from Retro Games Ltd.

Apr 28, 2026

The Chip That Proved Sun Couldn't Kill the SPARCstation 2

If you want to know how dominant a piece of computer hardware really was, don’t look at its launch. Launches are easy to game with marketing budgets and reviewer freebies. Look instead at what happens three years later, when the manufacturer has already moved on to the next thing, and ask: is anyone still bothering to build accessories for it? By that measure, the SPARCstation 2 might be the…

Apr 27, 2026