An industrial designer with a love for old computers has created a working prototype of a Commodore 64 laptop. This is kind of an alternative history remake device. By that, we mean Commodore never made a laptop, the closest it came was the SX64 luggable (~22 pounds) computer. However, Kevin Noki has drawn inspiration from the original C64 "bread-bin" design melded with an era-appropriate Apple Macintosh Lisa portable.
I Built a Commodore 64 Laptop That Never Existed - The Portable 64 (Concept Design) - YouTube Watch On
The above video shows Noki’s journey from concept to working prototype. In the intro, he sums up the idea behind this work as a plan to create a “fully functional custom design C64 laptop, built like it could have existed in the 1980s, but powered by modern hardware.”
To begin this journey in hardware and software, Noki used 3D design software to model the Portable 64. He decided to split the finished design into parts for 3D printing on his Bambu Lab P2S. In total, there were about 30 parts, resulting in a total print time of 38 hours using a 0.4mm nozzle.
Next up, we see the designer and maker put the case together using superglue and metal pins. Subsequently, it is sanded, primed, spray-painted. It starts to look great already, with the original C64 reference colors – a kind of sandy beige.
The keyboard chosen to fit this computer wasn’t an off the peg design, and would constitute a major effort to build. For 3D printing, the keycaps alone took 24 hours to output. Noki used a finer 0.2mm nozzle to reduce layer lines on the final print.
For accurate legends, the maker scanned and vectorized an original C64 keyboard. Making a light on dark design, waterslide transfers with white laser toner was the method chosen. Waterslide transfers are quite fragile, so once in-place and dried, they were protected by several coatings of a clear acrylic lacquer spray.
PCBWay made the custom keyboard PCB. Noki had to solder 60+ small diodes to the board, and slotted in a Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller – flashed with the well-known QMK customizable keyboard firmware, to act as an interface between the switches and the Raspberry Pi 5. One of the last processes the keyboard required was the soldering of the key switches. Noki chose a switchlock caps lock key for an authentic feel.
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With the keyboard out of the way, the Portable 64 designed turned to building up the structure and supports for various PCBs and I/O plates. Knurled brass inserts pressed into pre-positioned holes with a soldering iron laid much of the foundations. It was also interesting to see the implementation of a push-latch magnetic mechanism for the retractable laptop handle.
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