Jeri Ellsworth and the CommodoreOne
By Ryan Block 
posted December 20th 2004 12:40PM
posted December 20th 2004 12:40PM
When was the last time we had the chance to give mad props to a 30-something high school dropout who cooked up a 30-game all-in-one Commodore 64 system-in-a-joystick, the CommodoreOne? (It's no Atari Flashback, but hey, what is?) And who's a lady, no less? Well, mad props Jeri Ellsworth, you've earned every QVC-driven penny. For the complete rundown on the chip-designing dynamo, we now refer you to our friends at the Times.
This is no Mame.
Unlike many of these new all-in-one devices, Jeri devices don't run games under emulation. Her devices perform the hardware functions of a real Commodore 64. All the software runs natively.
Even the QVC joystick version of her nifty tech has a spot to hook in a keyboard and disk drive. Making it a fully functional Commodore 64.
Very nice gizmo at a great price. I bought 2 for stocking stuffers.
So, how many Slashdotters have emailed this woman marriage proposals this morning?
puts my old hardware hacks to shame...
wonder what licensing issues she had to get around to get the rights issed to her (or are those games and c64 system public domain now?)...
kudos on the QVC gig. good to see 'girlpower' at work on the gaming front as well as the hardware design of things.
h0tt!
Did I miss something? I bought one of these a few weeks ago on QVC and didnt see any spot for Keyboard etc... now where is my philipshead....
Call me silly, or maybe just nostalgic, but I just ordered one from QVC. The main reason being the comment about her adding the ability to add monitor, keyboard, and disk drive to it. Should be a fun hack...
Dolomite -- All the circuitry is there, but there are no connectors. You would have to solder them to pads that are left on the circuit board. (Connectors cost money, but gates are essentially free. For the QVC audience and price target, that's the best she could do).
There are also ROM easter eggs, but I'm not tellin' ;-)
It's an extremely stylish and clever little hack. I hope they sell a few million of them!
I once owned successively two 6502-based machines (an OSI C1P and a Commodore 64). I learned to program in machine language on the OSI (if I remember right 0x80 is return from subroutine or is it 0x8D?), and both machines were really gloriously ahead of their time.
Interesting side note is that the 6502, produced by MOS Technology, was the price breaker of its day. Intel and Zilog had expensive chips. Chuck Peddle, also the inventor of the 6502-based Commodore PET, offered his chips at about 90% less than the competition, which forced them to drop their huge-margin prices.
I'm in love!!!!
Gonna pop her bubble here, but the games supplied are not the best selection. I mean sure there's the Epyx collection, but this is gonna wear thin after a while.
What I'd love to see, and surely this would be so simple to do, would some kind of USB socket on the side that could read from a portable USB Drive. On this drive you could have the images that you'd normally run on an emulator!
After all, if it's a fully blown C64 chipset, then attaching the 1571 diskdrive as the USB drive and doing a LOAD "$",8,1 would show all the contents wouldn't it?
Think I'll stick to my emulator TBH.
If I wasn't married....
A geek gurl is the HOTTEST! (and... she's actually kinda hot too).
X0X0X
Dave Boulton, if you have urls that go into more depth about hacking the device, please do share...
Here's a nice one-page on how to add external power, ps/2 keyboard, and serial 1541 drive.. (no ide, sorry)
http://thedarkside.ath.cx/dtv/ports.html