Description

COMPUTE!’s Gazette — Volume 2, Issue 6 (June 2026)

“Bil Herd’s Masterpiece” — The C128 at 40: Three Machines, One Vision, and What Comes Next.

In August 1984, a self-taught, long-haired twenty-something named Bil Herd and a team that called themselves the C128 Animals had five months to build the last great 8-bit home computer. They shipped a dual-processor, triple-OS, dual-monitor machine that ran the entire C64 library on day one — and forty years later it still has no architectural peers. This month’s cover story marks the C128’s 40th anniversary with new interview material from Bil Herd, including the never-before-published story of the Z80 clock circuit that nearly killed the project, and a direct statement from Peri Fractic on whether a C128 Ultimate is in Commodore’s future. A fitting companion to our first year of bringing the magazine back.

Inside this 92-page issue:

• Bil Herd’s Masterpiece — Our cover story on the audacity of the Commodore 128: three machines in one box, the engineering hackery that made a CES deadline possible, why it both triumphed and underachieved, and Herd’s own pitch for a C128 Ultimate Developer’s Edition.
• Pixelated Sexiness: Strip Poker, Secret Disks, and the Rise of Grown-Up Gaming on the C64 — Jerry Bonner on Artworx’s notorious Strip Poker, the disks hidden in desk drawers, and what “adult” software proved about a platform that was truly alive.
• In Memoriam: Steven Carl Schnedler (1948–2026) — A tribute to the engineer and patent attorney behind Schnedler Systems and the TurboMaster CPU, the C64 accelerator that predated CMD’s SuperCPU by years.
• Soldering On: Tindie Gets an Upgrade — Joe Ochwat talks to Gongyu Su of EETree LLC about acquiring the beloved maker marketplace, the rocky transition, and what comes next for independent hardware creators.
• The Gazette Wire — David Simmons covers a wave of new development: Hydron, Double Baboon Ninja, a brand-new AGA port of Ghosts’n’Goblins, Joan of Arc: Deus Contra Machinam, Super Storm Buster for the SNES, and Tigerskunk’s Neo Geo shooter Ormanauta.
• Games / Reviews — Yeti Mountain for the C64 (boxed by Protovision), the long-awaited release of Penguin Tower, and TheGebs24 revisits Zool on the Amiga — was it ever really the hero we remember?
• Insight: ATARI — John Zielke and Jerry White on the A8PicoCart’s place in a FujiNet world, turning the Atari into a precision clock, Sliders born from a subscriber’s bug report, and the 800XL trademark filings the community is watching.
• Commodore Corner — Peri Fractic on the one-word question that grounds him, the soul of the community, and the eve of a very personal product launch.
• The GEOS Column — Bruce Thomas in praise of un-productivity: a deep dive into the surprisingly deep catalog of GEOS games.
• Dialed Back: Welcome Back, Your Last Call Was 40 Years Ago — Rob Sherman on returning to BBS culture after four decades, and why the barrier to getting back in is lower now than it was in 1986.
• Content Corner — Brian P. Cox on Advent of Computing, Sean Haas’s carefully researched journey through computing history.
• FujiNet Programming — Thomas Cherryhomes builds a network-aware sprite tool for the Coleco Adam; Dan Sanderson’s Digest concludes Robot Finds Kitten in assembly.
• Tandy Land — Ian Mavric on Tandy Assembly’s new home, FujiNet for the CoCo, and an exhaustive guide to CoCo disk drives and floppy controllers.
• Micro Missions — Two new programming challenges from The Evil Professor.
• Letters to the Editor, the Gazette Wire, type-in program listings (pages 82–89), Financial Cookbook v7, and more.

Plus the regular Editor’s Notes, news, and reader correspondence that make the Gazette what it is.

Retro computing for Commodore, Atari, Amiga, Commander X16, MEGA65, and beyond.