XCxcv123·Nov 15, 2023
It is open source:
https://github.com/randyrossi/bmc64
No Linux kernel there
https://github.com/randyrossi/bmc64/blob/master/kernel.cpp
In Bare Metal Emulation on the Raspberry Pi – Commodore 64randyrossi
bmc64
C2020–2023
randyrossi / bmc64
bmc64
A bare metal Commodore 64 emulator for the Raspberry Pi 1/2/3 with true 50hz/60hz smooth scrolling, low input latency and better audio/video sync.
5Distinct people
5Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
606GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
A bare metal Commodore 64 emulator for the Raspberry Pi 1/2/3 with true 50hz/60hz smooth scrolling, low input latency and better audio/video sync.
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year5 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2020-07-17 22:12:05 UTC to 2023-11-15 20:39:04 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
What Hacker News says
5 sourcesLast time I wanted to fiddle with a C64, I just went and flashed bmc64 (https://github.com/randyrossi/bmc64) to an SD card. Even an original Raspberry Pi 1 does a decent job of emulating it.
In J-CIA64 – Modern spare part for Commodore 64, Commodore 128, SX-64Latency.
It doesn't matter how fast your emulator is, throughput-wise. Your operating system (and other stuff) sits between it and output and input devices. And usually adds multiple frames worth of latency. There's ways to improve this, certainly, but you won't get that experience "out of the box."
Now, it's also possible to accomplish this by running emulators "bare metal" or "close to the metal" like my friend Randy did with his BMC64 project: https://github.com/randyrossi/bmc64
In MiSTer FPGA: Recreate classic computers using modern hardwareYou could boot BMC64 on the Pi: https://github.com/randyrossi/bmc64
In Commander X16In addition to the Interim Lisp system I mentioned in another comment, there are a number of bare-metal applications for the Raspberry on github (mostly ports of games).
I especially like this Commodore 64 emulator (also based on circle):
https://github.com/randyrossi/bmc64
In Bare metal Smalltalk-80 port to the Raspberry Pi