The C64 Mini World’s Best Selling Home Computer – Reborn! By Michael Thomasson

The marketing boldly promotes the C-64 Mini as “The World’s Best-Selling Home Computer – Reborn!”, and in many ways, that proves to be true. At a buck and a quarter per game, the C64 Mini has a lot to offer. While not perfect, most of the promises made by this new device are met with optimism and fulfill expectations. High definition output, HDMI connectivity, and a fair price-point make the device
appealing. Heck, the sticker price on the Commodore computer with 64 games back in the day would have cost over two and a half grand, and that’s before you include thirty-six years of inflation!

Of course, the real meat of any plug-in-play device are the games. The included library of software offers up some hits. Sure, some heavy hitters are missing, but a lot of the excellent Epyx libraryis present, promising a good time – Impossible Mission, Jumpman, and the California/Winter/Summer Games collections, for starters. Chips Challenge is worth the price of admission alone.

As an owner of nearly a dozen full arcade machines, including cocktails, full size standups and cabarets, it’s not like I really needed another arcade machine in my house. But after seeing products by Rec Room Masters at the Southern Fried Gaming Expo this summer, I wanted to see what I could do with an “Xtension Alpha-Cade Series Scaled Down Arcade Machine.” Much like how I built my own Game Boy sized emulation machine with the ClockworkPi Gameshell (also covered in this issue), a sense of pride comes from building something yourself, and it happened again with this Xtension arcade machine.

The Alpha-Cade from Rec Room Masters comes unassembled, in a Ikea- style format if you are familiar with the Swedish Retailer that is the king of shelves and furniture that require you to assemble. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Ikea, basically they give you all the wood precut, pre-grooved, pre- drilled and well labelled, plus the bolts and parts that put everything into
one piece, and some easy to follow instructions. Rec Room Masters has done the same thing, but specializing in arcade cabinets/ machines of different sizes. They offer full size uprights, pedestals, cocktails and many other variants that we don’t have room to discuss here.