This is the ultimate version of a 1982 computer, and it is a beautiful love letter to the era, with plenty of features to bring it into the 21st century.
Why you can trust Tom's Hardware Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test.
It's the end of 2025, and here I am, reviewing something that I owned as a child. The Commodore 64 (C64), announced at CES in 1982, is the best-selling desktop computer of all time according to the Guinness Book of Records. From August 1982 to April 1994, 12,500,000 units were sold around the world, and this “beige breadbin” sparked the imagination of many children, including me. The C64 wasn’t my first computer; that honor goes to the Commodore 16, which was released after the C64 as a cost-reduced machine to compete against the likes of the Sinclair (Timex) ZX Spectrum. But the C64 is where I found my feet and learnt some of the foundation on which I built my career.
What is in front of me right now is the closest I have seen to a “real” Commodore 64 in some time. I own a C64, a collection of parts akin to Dr Frankenstein’s monster, but the Commodore 64 Ultimate is real, and on my desk. The $299 price tag is fair, but it will make many think twice. In contrast, the price of a beaten-up C64 on eBay is astronomical right now, and I’ll address that later. The Commodore 64 Ultimate is an FPGA-based recreation of the C64, and provides accurate “emulation” of the original hardware, but with much newer hardware and features that would have cost the earth back in the 1980s, and they’re not cheap in 2025 either.
The Commodore 64 Ultimate comes from a new team that recently purchased the company. Co-founded by Sean Donohue, Leo Nigro, and retro YouTuber Christian “Peri Fractic” Simpson, Commodore International is made up of new faces and many from the early days of Commodore and the retro computing scene. We have the Father of the Commodore 64, Al Charpentier; Jeri Ellsworth, who created the C64 joystick, which was a fully working C64 in a joystick; and Dave Haynie, who was an original Commodore engineer and is closely associated with the Amiga. There is also Bil Herd, one of the engineers from Commodore’s 8-bit era, and RJ Mical, who contributed to Commodore’s Amiga, as well as the Atari Lynx and the 3DO.
In the press materials and website, the Commodore 64 Ultimate promises a lot, and those promises will form the basis of this review. Why? Simply because I can’t benchmark this setup as I would a Raspberry Pi, I can benchmark it against a real C64, though. I’ll be looking at the promises made on the website and seeing if they are fulfilled.
What are the promises?
Play original games from original cartridges, disk drives, or datasets (cassette storage devices).
Load games from USB, no SD2IEC or other methods to load games.
Multiple SID sound chips, compatible with real SID chips.
... continue reading