Who would win in a fight between the Speccy and C64?

In 2025, an old rivalry has been inadvertently invoked

There was always a rivalry between the Commodore C64 and Sinclair ZX Spectrum, or certainly so in the UK and likely Ireland, propagated by some of the magazines of the day from writers who used to secretly own both machines, most likely. It's part of our collective history and culture now, and surely we're all grown up and stuff. No one would be so petty as to reignite this conflict, surely?

Well no. And yes. Or, if I may adumbrate my point further: it'll be interesting to see what happens with the modern-day iterations of both mainstay 8-bit computers; the "Super Spectrum" in the form of the Sinclair-branded ZX Spectrum Next [Speccy Next], and the Ultimate 64 in the form of the Commodore-branded Commodore 64 Ultimate [C64 Ultimate]. Both platforms have been kicking around for a while now, with the latter being a rebadged Ultimate 64 II by Gideon's Logic.

To some extent, because things have clearly moved on since the 1980s, and the flame wars of the late 1990s and early 2000s have largely been forgotten, these two machines are now competing with each other for the same market space, crowded by the same consumers, and I'd wager that the C64 Ultimate has a slight advantage, being announced just before the Speccy Next Kickstarter [KS] v3 started.

I don't imagine that everyone could afford both, especially given the time-sensitive nature of a KS campaign - you can either afford to back it, or not. It's that simple. Whereas, Commodore.net's offering isn't so time limited, giving people a chance to save some money. You may also buy with Klarna, meaning that potential customers may pay it over three months. I project that the C64 Ultimate will be a slight winner here (lest we forget that these units are also sold by Gideon's Logic independently from Commodore.net).

I therefore do wonder why the Next team decided again upon the KS route. As Gideon's Logic has proven, if you get the business model right in the first instance, you don't need to crowd fund your product beyond its first iteration. Clearly people want a Sinclair-branded Speccy Next, but some people will miss out because the timing of the KS doesn't fit their budget up to 7 days after the campaign ends.

There are Speccy Next boards available, which are more affordable, but many of us prefer something out of the box, instead of messing about building a system out of spare or replacement parts. But the good news is that this makes XBerry Pi Speccy Next clone looks reasonable value by comparison, and these seem to be available at your convenience, rather than just for a few weeks, and every few years.

Commodore.net's timing is interesting; those people who were considering the Next because of the C64 core (and poor user experience with the keyboard, no doubt) will more likely now be drawn to the C64 Ultimate. I don't buy this new idea that the Sinclair-branded Speccy Next needs to do everything, as there are other FPGA solutions already in this market. And nearly every PC from the last 10 years can already emeulate nearly everything that you want, and many things that you don't.

Owning a U64 Elite tells me of a much better and more complete user experience over the Speccy Next, and most of the features on the U64 platform aren't just nice to have afterthoughts, or some crazy suggestion from some guy on the Internet. Each feature on the U64 has a real-world use case, from playing Sonic the Hedgehog by utilising the built-in RAM Expansion Unit [REU] capabilities, or making the GEOS experience way better by utilising the virtual 1581 disk drive, said REU, and ramping up the MHz to 48, from ~1MHz of a stock C64. And then of course, out of the box, you can have stereo SID without very much effort. And then double up again by adding two more SID chips if you want to.

In any case, the next KS3 campaign is off to an exceptional start. It doing well when it's all done and dusted would mean around 10,000 backers in my view, but it's already knocking on the door of the number of backers for the second campaign (around 6,000 from memory). Lots of stretch goals have been announced, but some of them seem superfluous to me. I won't get into that here. I only hope that one of the stretch goals is something sensible, like offering complete boxed units after the campaign (as well as the board replacements/upgrades), even if those units are offered at a slight premium. There must be a sustainable business model in there somewhere, or has that ship already sailed as Retro Games Ltd is dominating the market for perfectly usable The Spectrum.

A post script would be that the Commodore C64 clearly has a much broader international appeal than Sinclair machines do, so maybe this is part of the issue for the Speccy Next team? And of course, the consumer base in countries where the Speccy was and is popular is being drained, thanks to issues such as lack of job security, decreasing prosperity, high inflation, and other stress factors. Leave the mass market to RGL, and focus on a niche product that appeals to a small subset of it. That seems to be the thinking from the Next team.