Transcription
So today we're going to be checking out the brand new 3.1 release of one of the quirkiest operating systems around right now. We're going to be having a look at Commodore OS.
Now first, just to give you a bit of background on this, because I had been aware of Commodore OS for quite a while but never got around to trying it. This actually started life all the way back in 2010 under a company which were briefly around called Commodore USA. Now, they caused a bit of a stir in the retro computing scene when the founder Barry Alman started appearing on Amiga and Commodore forums, claiming he'd acquired the licensing rights to both Commodore and the Amiga brands.
Now, around this time, Commodore USA released and announced a handful of products. The most notable being the Commodore 64X. Now, this was essentially an Intel Atom powered PC built into a surprisingly decent modern recreation of the classic Commodore 64 case, complete with integrated keyboard. And for a while, they even sold these cases separately for people who wanted to build their own systems.
Some of their other machines, though, were a little bit more controversial, including the so-called Amiga Mini, which was essentially an off-the-shelf PC housed inside a modified third-party case. In this case, it was simply a Streetcom F1C case with an Amiga logo engraved on the front and a Commodore badge glued on. And as you can imagine, this caused quite a big backlash with parts of the Amiga loyalist community at the time, with many of them being annoyed that machines not running Amiga OS were being marketed using the Amiga name. And Barry Alman himself became known for getting into some quite heated and abrasive arguments on the forums.
But after that, he kind of conceded a little bit and tried to make the machines feel a little bit more unique than just rebadged PCs running Windows. And Commodore USA began to work on their own operating system called Commodore OS Vision. Now, the idea was that they would take a standard Linux distribution, but then recreate some of the feel and personality of the classic Commodore machines with custom themes, retro styling, and heaps of built-in emulators for the old-school Commodore systems. And the project was spearheaded by Commodore USA's then CTO Leo Nigro, who today is actually a key player in the new rebooted Commodore company.
Now, sadly, Barry Alman passed away suddenly in late 2012. And not long after, Commodore USA effectively disappeared before Commodore OS Vision even officially reached version 1.0. But amazingly, this wasn't the end of the story. In 2021, a company called My Retro Computer acquired the remaining Commodore 64X stock and the production molds and brought the machine back following a successful Kickstarter campaign. Now, I do actually have one of these keyboards and cases. It has been sitting in my wardrobe for a while. I will eventually get round to building a proper PC in here. And around the same time, Leo announced development of Commodore OS Vision would continue for the return of the Commodore 64X. And in fact, development has continued ever since. And right now, both the Commodore 64X and Commodore OS Vision are officially part of the new rebooted Commodore. And you can still buy a modern PC kit and the case. And in fact, just a few weeks ago, at the end of April in 2026, the new version 3.1 of Commodore OS was released.
Now, the interesting thing is this doesn't just run on the Commodore 64X. You can install this onto basically any modern PC hardware. So, for a bit of fun in this video, I'm going to install it onto this, the Atari VCS. Now, if you're not familiar with this, it is essentially a standard PC built inside a case that is inspired by the classic Atari 2600. Now, this was released a few years ago by the modern Atari company back in 2021. Originally, they announced this as the Atari box. And to be honest, I haven't used this thing very much lately. But internally, it is basically a compact AMD Ryzen powered PC with 8 GB of RAM, USB ports, and an internal M2 SSD slot. So, in theory, this should be perfect for running Commodore OS Vision.
Now, just before we get to the install, I wanted to give a quick thank you to this video's sponsor, my fantastic friends, at PCB Way. Now, if you're working on a hardware project, PCB Way can actually take it from idea to finished product, all in one place. Now, alongside their very well-known PCB manufacturing and assembly services, did you know they also offer 3D printing, CNC machining, sheet metal fabrication, injection molding, SMT stencils, and lots more as well. So, have a look at their website and also check out their shared retro project section for some great ideas. You can find them at pcbway.com.
All right, then. So, let's download Commodore OS Vision version 3.1. Now, there on the website, there is a direct download, but to be polite, I will grab the torrent and of course leave that seeding for at least 24 hours to help out everybody else. And the good news is version 3.1 is a lot smaller than the previous release. That one weighed in at over 37 GB, as basically they bundled a load of free Linux games with it, but they have listened to feedback and massively reduced the installer size and let the user choose what they want to install, which sounds a lot more sensible. So that means the 3.1 download is a much more manageable 9 GB. And once downloaded, we'll write the image to a USB stick using Etcher, which of course you can get for free for Windows, Mac, and Linux. The procedure is exactly the same. Leave that writing for a few minutes, and then we're ready to check it out.
So, inserting the USB stick into my Atari, which still sounds really weird to say. It boots straight into the menu. And like most Linux distributions, it will first boot into a live environment. But of course, to really use it properly and get the full experience, we'll want to install it to the SSD. And if you're wondering exactly what this is, well, it is a Linux distribution based on Debian with a heavily customized desktop environment and window manager using Mate with Compiz and Emerald enabled, which you might remember was all the rage in the Linux world back in the mid-2000s, and a load of their own custom retro skins, scripts, desktop effects, and sound effects, too.
So, after seeing the very nice boot animation, we get our first glimpse at some of those effects. And this is cool. It even talks to us. "Welcome to Commodore OS Vision." So after reading the T's and C's, we get a pretty lengthy media check. And while it's doing that, we get some very cool Commodore 64 SID-style music playing. And as the installer starts, it gives us a chance to check out the wobbly windows. Very cool. And there's some more of the Compiz effects that are enabled here. And we can even configure a few things while it's formatting and installing to the SSD, which is quite handy, being that the installer took quite a while. I think around 20 minutes to complete. And after that's finished, we can remove the USB stick and reboot the system.
And then we get our first glimpse at the OS boot selector in classic C64 style, which is a very nice touch. And if you wanted to dual boot this with another operating system, this is where you do it. But we've only got Commodore OS on here. So, we'll boot into version 3.1 first thing on the menu. And now it boots very quickly, um, from the menu to the desktop in roughly around 10 seconds. And here we get a few little wizards to help us with the setup. So, first thing we'll do is connect to the Wi-Fi. And it also mentions the default system password, which of course is advisable to change. And after we've connected to the Wi-Fi, it then asks us to set up our own account. As I'm just doing this as a demonstration, I'll leave all that at default. We then get to see some handy keyboard shortcuts and some tips on setting up the emulation, which we'll do in just a minute.
And then this is quite interesting. They mention Commodore's current approach of being a digital sanctuary with no toxic social media apps, no data tracking, no nagging. And it mentions that much of the web has become an unhealthy place filled with stress and harmful influences. So, it gives you the option of whether or not you actually want to install a web browser. Now, as much as that does kind of sound cool being offline, I think I would quickly miss not having a web browser. So, I'm going to say yes to it. And then Firefox and Chromium are then installed. And after that, we can choose the level of desktop animations from maximum to very little. Obviously, I want to get the full experience, so we'll leave that at default. Same for the speech. I'm going to leave that on. And the sound effects as well.
And then it mentions that it comes with an open-source C64 compatible ROM out of the box, but it might not be fully compatible with all of your old programs. So here it gives us the option of downloading and configuring automatically the proper Commodore 64 ROMs from the C64 Forever Express package. So we're going to say yes to that. And this is cool. The terminal is actually configured to look like a high-resolution C64 on a nice glowy CRT. So from here it mentions that we can set up Commodore 8-bit and Amiga emulation automatically from here. So we'll press number one for the 8-bit first and uh pressing one from here looks like the easiest option and it opens a web browser and instructs us to click the download button manually. So, I'll do that. And then after waiting a couple of minutes, I didn't get any download progress meter and I'm not really sure what to do next. So, being that it's not given me any more information, I'll just close the web browser and hope for the best. Yeah, and that appears to have worked. It's found the installer and then it automatically extracts the ROMs and sets it all up for us, which is very nice. So, that would have been handy to uh give me a little instruction to close that web browser. And after that's all done, we then press any key to exit. I was kind of hoping that would allow me to do the Amiga ROMs next, but it looks like it's just going to drop me onto the desktop. So, I guess we'll do that bit a bit later on.
And it looks like the installation is done, so it's time to jump in and explore. All right, so I've changed the screen mode to 720p to make things a bit easier to see on video. But before we jump in, can I take a second to admire the desktop theme and the icon set here? Now, I am a big fan of neon-style icons anyway, and I think these look beautiful. As you can see, they subtly glow as you mouse over them. So, I'm a big fan of the icon set and the color scheme and the fonts are all very easily readable. And there is a nice dock on a 3D shelf at the bottom of the screen. Kind of reminds me a little bit of Mac OS 10 Leopard. And as you can see, the icons rotate when you mouse over them. Now, even though I'm not the biggest fan in the world of the Compiz animations, I kind of feel they get a bit old after you've seen them a couple of times. Of course, you can turn them off, but I think this is a really nice-looking OS otherwise.
Now, I imagine the biggest draw for most people will be the classic Commodore emulation that is built into here. So, we'll check that out first. Now, clicking on the Commodore icon in the dock takes us into a folder with directories for several classic Commodore machines. So, hopping into the C64 folder, as you can see, it's then separated into demos and games. And we have a bunch of games that it installed earlier when we did the setup. And to be fair, there are quite a few classics in here. Now, we'll choose the legendary Arkanoid. And double-clicking on the archive then automatically launches us into the Commodore 64 emulator. All nice and easy. And it seems that the emulator is set up to match the speed of a real Commodore disc drive, as in very slowly. And we're greeted with a naughty cracktro. And getting through that, we can then choose to play with the joystick, which to be fair is a horrible way to play Arkanoid. Obviously, a mouse or a paddle would be ideal, but it will give us a chance to try it out. Now, by default, the joystick is mapped to the keyboard automatically using the shift key or the space bar for the fire button and the cursor keys. So, we can play Arkanoid that way. And actually, to be fair, it does control pretty well. And then we can hold down Alt and Q to quit back to the desktop.
And just quickly trying out another Commodore 64 game, Big Mac, that I was a huge fan of on the Commodore Plus 4. I haven't played the C64 version before, but I can see that it's already very different. But again, very easy to control with the keyboard. And at this stage, I did try plugging in a USB Competition Pro joystick just to see if it would automatically be recognized, but unfortunately it wasn't. However, exiting full-screen mode, we can then access the Vice Emulator menus. We can enable the joystick from there. And after that, it works just fine. We've also got heaps of Commodore 16 and Plus 4 demos that work just the same as the Commodore 64. Double-click and they launch into Vice full screen. Now, I did see a few graphical glitches on some of these, but most of them work flawlessly. And it was quite cool to check out some of these productions. Even though the Plus 4 was my first computer, I only really got into the demo scene with the Amiga. So, a lot of these are brand new to me.
Although, sadly, I couldn't get any of the included Vic 20 demos to work, though. Double-clicking them either brought up an error message or they just failed to launch. There are a few in here that are zip files which if I double-click those it does then launch into Vice but they load up into Commodore 64 mode which obviously doesn't work. So either something went wrong with the Vic 20 installer when I ran the setup at the start of the video or there are some config files that the team might need to look at for the next release.
And there is a bunch of standard Linux stuff installed as well. We've got like LibreOffice on here for example, the Synaptic package manager, but I'm going to ignore all that stuff. Something else that is of note though is the inclusion of Comoserve. Now, this is interesting. I've tried this out on my Commodore 64 Ultimate. This is Commodore's new official file hosting service, and you can run games and demos directly from here. Now, there is quite a random bunch of software on here right now, and it's not on the same level as something more complete like the Assembly 64 database, but searching for games, we see some of the titles that I assume they've got the rights to distribute. That's what I initially thought, but then you see some random things in here like Ocean Software's 1983 game Hunchback. And it does bring up a disclaimer at the start that you must have the rights to download these titles yourself. So, it is a bit odd that not everything seems to be here. It does seem a little bit random at the moment, the selection. I'll hit return on here though and it will automatically launch in the emulator which is really nice. That means no manually downloading and running them yourself. And it is early days for Comoserve though, so I'm sure a lot more will come to it over time. So it is nice to see it included here.
And another really cool new addition to version 3.1 of Commodore OS is Worker, which if you were an Amiga fan back in the day, I'm sure this will look instantly familiar. It is a Directory Opus 4 style file manager for Linux. Now I'm a big Directory Opus fan. I even used Opus 13, the latest version of it on my Windows 11 box. So seeing a native port of it for Linux, I think is really cool. And this could be a bit of a hidden gem inside Commodore OS.
Now this is Commodore OS Basic V2. Now this is a new BASIC programming language that has compatibility with Commodore BASIC version 7. Now unlike traditional interpreted BASIC, this is actually designed to compile executables and disk images not only for the Commodore 64 but also for the Amiga. And also it can spit out native executables for Linux and Windows as well as doing HTML web pages. And it supports things like sprites, character sets, and bitmaps and scrolling. All designed to work as they do on the Commodore 64, but also it allows graphical and sound enhancements on more powerful hardware. And there's even experimental support available for the PET, the C16 and Plus 4, and the Vic 20. And they're planning many more additional systems over time as well. It even comes with a cross-platform IDE. Now, even though I'm not a programmer, I do see the potential in this. It could be huge if the community gets behind it.
And there are some nice audio tools included. We've got Goat Tracker, which can create SID music, and then Milky Tracker if you love your old-school Amiga mods. And for classic pixel art fans, we've got Graphics 2, which they describe as a tribute to Deluxe Paint. And just like the later versions of Paint, it can also do animation. And it is nice to see that Amiga LHA archives are supported, too. You can just extract them by double-clicking them. Nothing else to install.
And interestingly, Amiga ADF disc images. Now, double-clicking these takes you into the Amiga emulator, but you might remember earlier in the video, I didn't actually get round to setting that up. So, it looks like it tries to run the open-source Amiga AROS Kickstart ROM if you don't have the proper Amiga ROMs installed. But obviously, you're not going to get full compatibility then. So, let's try and get the Amiga emulation properly set up. So, I managed to find that installer script again by going into the settings and then in here, option five to go into the emulation settings. And this time we'll select option two, which allows us to extract the ROMs from the Amiga Forever package. Now, unlike the Commodore 64 emulation, this doesn't have a free option, I'm afraid. So, either you'll need to provide your own ROMs or you'll have to purchase Amiga Forever if you don't own that already. So, pressing option one in this menu, same as before, opens a web browser, and you can see the different pricing tiers in here. Now, the Plus Edition is selected by default, and that is €39.95. There is a cheaper Value Edition, but that will only run Amiga 500 games, not A1200 titles, as it only comes with the Kickstart 1.3 ROM. So, for most people, if you want full compatibility with like everything that you could get on the Amiga, you'll want the Plus Edition, which actually quite handily, I already own that. So, I'm not going to buy it from here. Instead, I'll uh copy it over from a USB stick with the installer on it. And Amiga Forever is a Windows-only program, but luckily Commodore OS has Wine, the Windows compatibility layer installed out of the box. So that means we can just double-click Windows programs and they should run. As you can see, we'll go through the installer here, and all we really need from Amiga Forever is the ROMs anyway. So once it's installed, the operating system will extract the ROMs and place them in the suitable folder for the included emulation. So we'll quickly run through all this. I'll put my registration details in and once that's done, I'll give it a quick test. And yeah, appears to be okay. So we'll come out of that, back into the settings. This time I'll let it know that we have installed Amiga Forever now, and it will do the rest. Copying the relevant files so we can use the built-in emulation.
So, let's quickly test it. Now, I've got a disc image of the legendary Jim Sachs artwork that I downloaded from the AmNet. Now, double-clicking the disc icon, you can see just like the 8-bit stuff that we did earlier, it automatically loads the emulator. And if I edit out a couple of minutes of disc loading, we can see that the slideshow runs very nicely on here. Now, as incredible as Jim Sachs is, most people I imagine won't be running slideshows that want to try out the games. So, I've actually got a couple of classic disc images here of some of my favorite Amiga games. Again, double-clicking and skipping a bit of the loading. Lotus Turbo Challenge 2 running beautifully on this machine, even on this modest PC setup. You can see how smooth it is. and the classic Oh No More Lemmings. Yep, just as fun as always playing it inside Commodore OS.
And one thing I did wonder is if WHDLoad has been set up. Now, so far I've been playing these titles from floppy disc images, which are slow, and if you've got games with multiple discs, you then need to change them. WHDLoad allows you to play them from hard disk, so it's a lot quicker. Now, I did download a WHDLoad title, and at first when I double-clicked it, it looked like it was going to work. But then I got an error saying that this title needs the AGA chipset. And it looks like it's using the free AROS ROMs, not the proper Kickstart ROMs I installed earlier. Now, I did try changing it by pressing F12 to bring up the emulator's built-in menu, and then selecting the A1200 ROM and changing it to the AGA chipset, and then giving the emulator a reboot. And this time it brought up a uh new rather aggressive error as it turns out the ROMs also need to be set up inside the emulated machine for WHDLoad to work. And it doesn't look like this is set up out of the box. So it is something it looks like you're going to have to do manually, but it would be a nice step to have the OS take care of that for you, too.
So, that's been a look at Commodore OS Vision 3.1, the latest release of it, running on the Atari VCS, which is definitely one of the weirder sentences I've said on this channel. And actually, I do really like this. Now, I will admit, I'd probably written off Commodore OS a bit in the past, has just been Linux with Compiz turned on and a Commodore skin slapped over the top. And yeah, it is still a Debian-based system with Mate, Compiz, all the emulators, and a lot of retro-themed polish on top of it. But actually, after spending some time with it over the last week, I think that conclusion felt a bit unfair. There is a lot of work that's obviously gone into this. You know, stuff like the C64-style boot menus and the preferences, even stuff like, you know, it is a bit of fun, but the speech and the glowing icons, but the built-in emulation and Comoserve being in there and the BASIC tools I think have got a load of potential. the included music and graphics software, those installer scripts as well that take a lot of the headache out of manually setting up emulation, and just all of the little retro touches that make it feel more than just a theme pack. It does kind of feel like they're actually really trying to make a a proper Commodore-inspired creative environment here.
And there are some rough edges. You know, the Vic 20 stuff didn't quite behave for me. It would be nice to have WHDLoad fully set up out of the box. And uh I'll be honest, some of those visual effects are probably a bit much if you're going to be using this every day. Uh but even without all that, I do think it is a very impressive effort. And I think that's kind of where Commodore OS kind of makes most sense to me. It's probably not going to be your main daily Linux distro, but it is something you could install on a spare mini PC or a Commodore 64X if you got one of those or apparently an Atari VCS and just have a bit of fun with as well. And uh I think considering how controversial Commodore USA were when they were around briefly, um just over a decade ago, it is really interesting to see this project is still alive and still being updated and now officially sitting under the new Commodore umbrella. So I'm very interested to see where this goes next. And if you want to give it a try for yourself, as I mentioned, it's completely free to download. Works on pretty much any PC. So links will be in the video description.
And if you enjoy my videos here on YouTube, quick reminder, I do a podcast that comes out every Friday, bringing you up to speed on all the big stories in the world of retro gaming and tech. And I interview industry veterans on the show every week. You can get it on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, anywhere you get podcasts from, or now as a video podcast here on YouTube. Links again in the video description. And while you're on my channel, here are a couple more of my videos I think you might enjoy. I'll see you next time.