Every time you call the "Commodore Plus/4" the "Commodore 16 Plus/4", another TED chip somewhere dies... ;)

I had one for Xmas 1985. I was 11 at the time. It cost £49.99 from Dixons. It was all my parents could afford at the time. Like you I bought all the Mastertronic games I could get my hands on. The one I remembered hating about the machine was the joystick ports which were not the then standard d9 ports you found on Atari and other computers. I had an adapter cable. The computer died 4 years later, it was sent off for repair but we never paid for the repair so I don't know what the shop did with it. Ended up selling everything else at the local flea market, got about £20. Turns out the chips on this machine are prone to overheating due to lack of heatsinks. By 1987 I had already moved on to a more powerful machine, the Atari 65XE, again all my parents could afford.

I wanted a C64 back in the days but my parents could afford only this. This was a blessing: lack of software base and superior basic made me an IT professional for life. Less is more! Thank you C16! ❤

A lot of Commodore Plus/4 games were limited to make it compatible with the C16. Paperboy was colourful, but was half the game length of other systems.

I was just the same mate, played the BBC Micro at school, and i was obsessed, went on and on at my mum and dad for a computer, and thy got me a c16, i was over the moon, had loads of fun with it, my fav games was tutti fruity, finders keepers, speed king, big mack, later i got a C64 for Christmas and this was mind blowing the jump in sound and graphics, The C64 is my Fav Micro of all time, love it to bits, great video mate👍👍

Hardware sprites... I used to dream of hardware sprites.....

My dad bought me a C16 when I was 8. It had some problems and didn't load any game properly. He took it back to wherever he got it from and came back with a C64 which I still own today. I'm so glad the C16 was broken out of the box.

The irritating thing about the lack of RAM in the C16 meant that almost all games on the Plus/4 were written for the C16 primarily so all that extra RAM was never used. The main reason for the C16 was due to Jack Tramiel wanting a competitor to the upcoming Timex Sinclair. Of course, he then left the company and the new management didn't know what to do with the architecture hence the sink or swim

Main rule of thumb of the 80's was that you fondly remember what you had (and secretly craved what your mates had). I loved al the systems I had as a kid (C64/Genesis/Amstrad PC Compatible etc). However, in relation to why the 'lesser' platforms 'failed' it was usually all down to software or price. There's a sweet spot for price and a sweet spot for software. Too much of one or too little of the other were fatal. IMO Commodore worked best when Jack Trammiel was fully in charge and deploying his plan to make the best possible machine for the lowest possible price. And then work to bring the price down even lower over time (Computers for the masses, not the classes). The C64 was probably the apex of that philosophy. It was a tad more expensive than the main competition (Speccy) but was a LOT more powerful and gave a much closer 'arcade experience' which was what the home computer market was all about. Playing arcade games without burning through a pocket of coins. Once the C64 was established, it was pretty pointless making a 'cheaper version' as you had to compromise on what made people want the C64. Add to that the limitations for coders, you were only ever going to get bare bones cut down ports of popular games that couldn't compete with the real thing. Whilst there was a market for low priced computers, it wasn't really going to sustain the industry or a manufacturer and the established main players were tough to dislodge. Only Amstrad (and only in Europe) managed to muscle in on the big two and only really ever took market share from Sinclair (which they bought out). Unless you were a millionaire and had an MSX, Commodore 64 was the machine to have until the 16 bit machines ST & Amiga came on the scene (and matured their software library). Even in the early days of 16 bit, the lack of software still gave the C64 the edge almost up to the end of the 90's. I skipped the Amiga/ST altogether and went to Genesis/ PC Compatibles. I still use a C64 to this day.

It seems to me that you are getting a lot of the story all backwards. The TED series was originally Jack Tramel's scheme to snatch-up the lower-end price-slot in the market that the ZX Spectrum was occupying. Which is why the C116 looked very similar to the original rubber-keyed Spectrum, and intentionally dissimilar to the VIC20 and C64, as a clear indication of the differences. He had also spotted an opening in the market for cheap business machines, which he planned to grab with the 264 and the 364 models, aka the B (business) series. The 264 later on becoming the Plus/4 (I'm sorry, but "Commodore 16 Plus 4", although related - that wasn't a thing). Some prototypes of the 364 do exist, but didn't make it into production, and the project later on turned into the B128, before it was eventually given to Bil Herd. Who made it backwards compatible with the C64 and renamed it the "Commodore 128". Yeah, the C128 wasn't just a beefed up C64, but based on the 364 with added backwards compatibility, with the C128's own version of the 6510 (the 8502), its own version of the VIC-II (next to it's VDC), a SID6851, and a Z80 CPU for a snail-paced version of CP/M... and with the "Internal Function ROM" U36 socket, which was sort of meant as an extra internal cartridge port for business use, and clear evidence of it's lineage back to the 264 (Plus/4) and 364 models. - All this happened just before Jack Tramel "jumped ship" over to Atari. Suddenly leaving the marketing department clueless to the originally intended purpose of these models and how to market them to the customers. In an attempt to cut production costs, and because of the C64s already basically selling themselves, someone came up with this "brilliant idea" of using the same already globally spread C64 molds and keyboards for the C116 instead of that odd Speccy-looking case... and TADA! your beloved C16 was born, to great confusion for many of the customers and at a much higher price-slot than Jack had originally intended for it. - I'm sorry for breaking it to you, but your Commodore C16 was basically an afterthought by some people in marketing, who didn't understand the intentions behind those later 8 Bit models. But that doesn't make it any less of a Commodore in my eyes. I actually own a C116 myself, along side several of both C64s and C128s. I suggest you watch some of Bil Herds talks here on YT. They are not only great for getting ones facts straight (I certainly discovered how much I needed that myself), but also full of juicy and ridiculously hilarious Commodore insider stories. He is more or less doing the same talk every time. But with variating content, depending on how much time he was given to talk. My own personal favourite here on YT is called "VCFMW 11 - Bil Herd: Tales From Inside Commodore".

This was my second computer, after starting with a ZX81. I used it and all my home computers for programming up to and including a couple of Amigas and then my first PC. By the time I had an Amiga I was working in IT. Although home programming tailed off for me, it had stood me in good stead for a long career in programming, right up to present day.

The colour of the Plus 4 is astounding. If only it had a SID chip.

121 colors - because 8 shades of black are all black (the color palette was 16 colors each with 8 shades, 16x8 = 128, but the black shades were all black so it was (15x8)+1=121 colors )

We had a plus 4 at xmas that mum got in sale as i guess they were being sold off, was huge upgrade from our zx81 , fond memories of fire ant and treasure island

No one was looking for an updated VIC-20 and a downgraded C64 in 1984, fortunately the Amiga 1000 was launched just a year later. The C16, Plus/4 and C128 were all a huge waste of money for Commodore.

I had the ZX Spectrum +2 as my first computer. Most of my friends had the same, the odd Amstrad.cpc or C64. The snobs had the BBC computer!

That commodore was not keeping up with anyone.

I loved the C16 back then despite the pittance of good games. I played Airwolf conversion by Elite a lot and Sword of Destiny by Gremlin Graphics. They were the other publishers that were supporting C16. There was a Commando knock off called Legionnaire. It was so bad they could’ve called it legionnaire’s disease.

yeah! my first computer was C16 too

I somewhat envy you britains who were given access to those dedicated school computers such as the BBC Micro. We had none of this stuff, at least not until the later classes where one could choose to attend a programming course. So the first computer I saw was an Atari 520ST, but it was the C64 I was playing the most until I finally got my own computer. And that was the C16. Unfortunately I was then old enough to want of course a C64, but got the other one. Shortly after my C16 was exchanged by a Plus/4. Yes, there were few games as good as the many on the C64 back then. ACE +4, Winter Events and Trailblazer were some of them which I had. Nowadays there are new games for the Plus/4 proving what the machine is really capable of. I highly recommend checking out Psytronik's Plus/4 games for anyone interested.

You missed out Summer Events, probably THE best game for the C16. How the programmer got that out of a C16, even though it was a multi load, is still a mystery, including making the computer forget it had borders! However like a lot of people, we couldn’t afford a C64 and remember the ad for the C16 with Rolf Harris - that doesn’t age well lol - and his art program on Cartridge, and I remember bothering my parents for ages for it lol

Well, a nice review. Maybe worth to mention, that the initial idea was the cheap, compact, ZX Spectrum looking, rubber key C116 version, and I think THAT's why the joystick and the datasette sockets are the very small mini-DIN versions instead of the C64 versions. They would simply would not fit to such a small machine. Later on the C16 was created with simplier, less crowded design in a black c64 housing. I suppose they could have added the C64 connectors (the biggest initial claim towards the machine), but I suppose it would be a great confusion to create hardware incompatibility within the range.Though most of the C16 buyers would have thanked for that :-) Even the PSU of the C16 is completely compatible with the ZX Spectrum's PSU :-) , voltage, connector type, polarity, power (I am not confident, that the VIC-20 sound is much worse than the 264 with 3 channels and lower frequency sound) On the other hand you brought up that sad Sabouteur C16 game. It is beyond bad, but I think you spent a little too much time and focus on that specific game. There were literally hundreds of commercial games, and that Saboteur games was rated as one of the worst one There were a lot of nice games for C16 like Tutti Frutti, Kickstart, Magician's Curse, Xcellor8, Tom Thumb, Zylon, Winter and Summer Events, Arthur Noid, Trailblazer, Fire Ant, Timeslip, Auf Wiedersehen Monty just to name few classic, great looking, and sometimes even great sounding games, just within 16K. You cannot compare them to a VIC-20 game, they are far surpassing that quality.

Thanks for showing what the games were like on the C16 since I had never seen them before. I only saw a working C16 once and the only thing I saw it do was run some Basic demos. Anyway, here in the US the C16 and Plus/4 were instant flops. Within months you could buy either one for next to nothing.

Would've liked to hear the sound aswell.

16K of RAM was a lot of memory back in the day, and the bad game ports just show that those people were incapable of using the machine to its full extent. I had a VIC-20 with 16K RAM expansion at that time, and it was simply mind-blowing to have that much memory available. I never made a game that used up all the memory. On the C-16, it's probably much easier to run out of memory, but still, there was a lot you could do with that amount of RAM.

I recommend: G-Man, Scramble, Zodiac, Xadium, P.O.D., Sabouteur, Terra Cognita, A.C.E. and the best of them all, and only available for the TED family: Oblido. Soboteur which I had on the Plus/4 was a 1:1 C= 64 port.

I had it and I was the happiest boy in the world since it was my first home computer. Certainly 16Kb of memory was very limiting, seeing some masterpieces done on the Plus4 (which mainly had more ram than C16). For me it was the beginning of a passion

Mr. Puniverse was by far the most technically impressive title on the C16. I have no idea how they managed to pack so much in. A very playable but challenging platformer heavily influenced by Manic Miner. The graphics are impressive for the system with animated level objects such as crushing pistons and sentries that shoot projectiles etc. Some decent character animation, in-game sound can be a little annoying but the menu screen sound track is good. The screens/levels inter-connect as well, you get the sense that you're playing in a very large cavern. I was lucky enough to find a copy in a local second hand shop back in the late 80s, could hardly buy C16 games in normal shops by then. Family couldn't afford a C64. kzfaq.info/get/bejne/sLh-hpaalbe5caM.html

No such thing as a Commodore 16/Plus 4!

Hold on, I'm just downloading Punchy... it should be ready tomorrow morning sometime

I had a Plus/4 = checkmate!

The machines dark grey with white keyboard looked far more attractive that the later brown approach

Also my very first Computer.. I actually just brought myself one for pure nostalgia. The problem was that games companies were (for the most part) releasing ports of games for the more powerful systems of the time, and because of the C16s limitations this just resulted in terrible games. The Berks trilogy of games were exclusive to the C16/plus 4 and they are great!. Also can't believe you didn't mention Punchy ? One of the games that was included in the C16 package and its fantastic ! - been playing it again recently :)

The C16 and the more expensive Plus 4 failed for the same basic reasons. Neither of them were compatible with the C64, which was still selling well, and was getting cheaper all the time, and they weren't even compatible with the Vic20. Despite the extra colours, the hardware was in many ways a step backwards from the aging C64. It seems Commodore let their engineers work on their own, competing pet projects, but nobody had any clear idea what most people wanted.

Commodore in competition with themselves, how could it possibly fail 😅😮😢

Mine came with XZAP, Punchy, and some kind of skiing game. I loved all of them. Maybe I'll port XZAP to the C64 some day.

There's a lot that could have been said about why the C16 failed; Jack Tramiel's desire to conquer the sub-$99 computer market, which became the Plus 4 & C16 by the time Tramiel was pushed out. Without Jack, Commodore management had little vision for those two machines, and quickly moved onto the C128.

The Commodore 16 had a lot of other issues. The TED chip lacked sprites and other features that the C-64 offered. It was really supposed to be used for non gaming tasks. If you used cartage based software the limited ram was far less of an issue. The disk drive interface was also a lot faster than the C-64. I Commodore had really wanted to make an Commodore 65+ that would have sold like crazy would to have made the drives a lot faster and put an improved Basic on it. Maybe add a seek command to the disk drive for better random access and just maybe a real UART for the serial port. Of course that is just my opinion.

I have Commodore VIC-20, Commodore 64 and 128, and Plus/4.. Wish I had this Commodore 16 in my collection.

I knew a kid who owned one. At the time, I was very impressed with his set-up and some of the games, but looking back, I can see it was a bad investment with limited specs, games and expansions. I understand Commodore was trying to tap into the lower end of the market (Junior computers) and compete with ZX Spectrum 16K/48K and Acorn Electron. I'm glad I ended up with a C64, even though it was second hand. I think it inspired me to pursue a career in electronics.

My first home computer also! Loved it and wish I'd never traded it in for a Spectrum +3. However, just bought a broken one and swapped out the TED and now it's not dead (at the moment). Love Xapp which came with it...Though the graphics program it came with has not aged well (mainly do to the person who endorsed it.... 'do you know who it is yet'). Football Manager (without the rubbish screen play) was actually better on the C16 🙂

Thank you for ruining my eardrums with the intro music.

Loved my plus 4

Whats the music please I heard it before

Never heard the Plus/4 called ‘C16 Plus/4’ before. My first computer was a Plus/4 which I still have and as of a few months ago when I last used it, still works. It was mostly C16 games that worked on it, however there were some exclusive Plus/4 or upgraded games such as Saboteur, Mercenary, Ace and the excellent Plus/4 version of Tomb Thumb. Icicle Works was a good Boulder Dash clone that came with the machine. Despite having to play mostly C16 games, there were some good ones. And Basic was much better than my mates C64 version.

It failed because Jack Tramiel was ousted from Commodore by Irving Gould and clueless Commodore marketing got hold of the computer and thought they could make the hardware into a business machine (Plus 4), oh dear. The C16 was almost what Jack envisaged, he wanted the rubber keyboard though. That did appear as the C116.

I remember running the game "Cosmic Cruncher" on my C16😂 or that may have been my VIC20

lol this thing launched the same years as MacOS classic, a year before the NES and also a year before the next computer Commodore were developing, the Amiga. Of, and of course, 2 years after the C64, also from Commodore. Whatever were they thinking!!? That's like as if Macintosh would have tried pushing PowerMacs... AFTER releasing the iMacs. Even if slightly cheaper, none would have wanted it!

My Feeling (being a Spectrum 48k user at the time) was that the market was saturated, when it arrived here in the UK, UK manufacturers like Oric and Dragon were folding. I could not understand why Commodore were releasing it/putting effort into developing it. In hindsight with better knowledge. They had a plan, that was to counter the Japanese consumer electronics giants moving into the US Market. If it had 32k (using all the 64k the chip could read), it might of worked. But ram was expensive at the time. If the apps shipped in the Plus4 had actually been usable, it might have worked. But they made an appalling mess of it all.

The commodore 16 was my second computer. The first was an out of date ZX81. I thought I was really upgrading to machine with colour & sound. One plus point, the basic was better that the C64's version. I know the C64 can do more but it was easier on the C16. Loved graphics programming but it ate 10K of ram. Not a problem if you had the plus 4. I had friends who had a commodore 64 and one with a zx spectrum. Games were usually ported over to the C16 a few months after these systems and as usual was a disaster. Ever tried to play commando on the C16 - killed instantly. Now there's a demand for retro and there are 64K games and demos available including some fixes for games that had bugs. There's life in the old system yet!

Commodore needed something to replace the aging VIC-20? They had it already. It was called the Commodore 64. The C64 was everything the VIC-20 was but better... and more. In the early days, if the C64 was too expensive, people could still buy the VIC-20. By the time the VIC-20 was completely discontinued, the C64 was fast dropping in price at at one point was cheap enough that anyone could buy one. If people couldn't afford the 1541 disk drive, they got get the Datasette instead. Commodore absolutely should have been developing the C64's replacement (i.e. a backwards compatible C128 without modes) but not the VIC-20's replacement. No one was saying they wanted to buy a C64 but less good in 1984.

A lesson in how to destroy an entire MARKET!!! Putting to market a product that you KNOW will leave your victims feeling burned and discouraged- is a sure fire way to destroy the entire market.

Actually that computer was not needed at all. Looking at games, upgrade from VIC 20 to C16 didn't make any significant difference. With memory upgrade costed similar to C64 and games were made assuming you don't have one. However Plus/4, if it would be with SID chip, maybe upgraded a bit, it could be more popular. Worst thing in Commodore universe was, that they were not compatible with older machines, cutting off massive libraries of software. Exception were C64 and 128 (and I believe C128 was also unnecessary waste of resources which should be used on Amiga).

I upgraded mine to 64K (easy job) just to play Mercenary.

The commodore Plus 4 was not a Commodore 16. The Plus 4 was a 64kb Micro designed to be a work/home hybrid computer, but it used a cost reduced chipset, doing away with chips like the SID, and the VIC chip, and just using the TED chip. The system was less capable than the 64, but easier to program, and was shipped with inbuilt WP, Spread sheet and database program. The C16 was a cost reduced version of the Plus 4, which Commodore made to replace the Vic:20 as sales of the old machine had ground to a halt. The games for the Commodore 16 were al low effort games, and most were sold as budget titles. Unfortunately the developers never made any games for the Plus 4, as all C16 games ran on the Plus 4. Because of this the Plus 4 was incredibly unpopular and both systems were discontinued.

I still have my plus/4. I still haven't fixed it.

If the C16 had 64K of RAM, hardware sprites, a SID compatible chip then it would have succeeded.

outside of North America the MSX computers would have seemed a far superior choice - and with so many manufacturers surely there would have been MSX computers at competitive price points

The thing is that Commodore didn't want a cheap alternative for the C64. So if they made a C16 with 64k of ram (and not the office kind of things like the plus4) it would hurt the sales of the C64. Sure it didn't had the SID sound (but a lot of computers back in the day didn't had that), it didn't had hardware sprites (but also common for a few homecomputers), but the 121 colors was something that the C64 didn't have. It is the same reason why they didn't put the C65 on the market, because that would hurt the Amiga line.

I learned to code on a Plus/4 - It actually had a very good BASIC and graphics functions. Otherwise than that a pile of poo

it was never ment as a games computer

Those last two games were almost as bad as some Tiger handheld games at the time.

If the C16 could have had even 32K of RAM it would have been an interesting machine, due to something your video fails to mention: better BASIC than C64. But even with its improved BASIC it was hamstrung with its lack of RAM.

I had a C16 back in the day. It failed bcoz it was not a C64, just a mere shell of one. Thanks Jack

i never understood why on earth they invested in the c16. never git it.

Honestly, it's baffling to have an immensely popular 8-bit platform and then confuse things with an incompatible platform in pretty much the same market space. By '84 there had to be some ways to consolidate the 64's ICs into a smaller board and maybe go with a chicklet keyboard.

imagine c16 or 116 being cheap and compatible with vic20 and that cheap

16K wasn’t it’s problem, as 64K or larger games would naturally be cartridge based and it’s lack of developer support is what kills any platform

The Plus/4 had 64 KB of RAM and more of those 64 KB were available for BASIC programs than were on the Commodore 64! The TED was the first SoC, system-on-chip, in the history of computing. If you still have your C= 16, upgrade it to 64 KB with the Saruman RAM expansion, slap the SID cartridge into it and you'll have more than a decent system. The TED family failed because it was incompatible with the Commodore 64, so its vast software library was out of reach.

Struggling to understand the purpose of this video. The C=16 was a re-hash of the C=116 but with a better keyboard. It wasn't made for games.

c64 killed it

It failed because there was no reason to buy it over a more powerful Commodore 64 which already existed. The vic 20 wasn't popular anyway.

Failed due to low RAM. Because of this, there were no good games for this machine. You can't write anything good in 16kbytes. Maybe it would have been more successful with 48kbytes of RAM. (Commodore 48) But in fact this machine was completely unnecessary, and in fact the Plus 4 was too. Rather, they should have thought the opposite and released earlier the C128 instead. An advanced C64 with more memory! But with more improvements than what happened, because otherwise it was also a wrong machine as it was. There should have been 6 audio channels (double SID stereo), and a real 320x200 color graphics with 16 colors. That would have been a great successor of the C64. Then the first Amiga could have been 512 kbytes, not 256. And at least 8 MHz, not 7. As it was in the Atari ST. Commodore made quite a few strategic mistakes.

It was released after the C=64 and was worse. That's why it failed. Being mildly cheaper wasn't enough. Commodore had terrible marketing as well. You don't sell a worse system 2 years later after you've already made a better system. You cost reduce the original system while you develop a better system.

Never heard of that. You made that up, didn't you?

Vic20 was even worse

Simple, it was 48 too little.

because was worse then the c64 of course

Weird way of speaking.

The spectrum was a piece of junk tbh

cos it sucked! that's why

The main reason was sales and they had a machine competeing with it upon release it only had 16k memory which was like a super atari 2600 the ted chip was an advancment upon the c64 its just that they made a million machines and never made anymore they didn't lose any money they then made the c128