The newly revived Commodore International has just issued a firmware update for its C64 Ultimate home computer and has outlined why it's locking down the software at the same time.
The new update adds USB mouse support, improves the BASIC editor and adds a "music-detect" mode for the Starlight and Founders Editions, but it's the accompanying blog post – entitled "Why We're Protecting Your Commodore 64 Ultimate FPGA" – that has arguably attracted the most attention.
"The Commodore 64 Ultimate is not a static product," says Commodore's Marc Bilodeau in the post.
"There will be new hardware revisions, new components, and new capabilities! This is foundational to our roadmap and, frankly, core to the Commodore 64 Ultimate's value proposition. But it also means that firmware built for a different board may not behave safely on ours. In other words, if deployed, it could lead to hardware returns and replacements due to actions entirely out of our control. This would have significant financial implications for Commodore, a brand that we know holds a special place in your heart."
The post adds:
"We just cannot officially support patches we did not create or actively maintain. If a third-party patch causes an issue with your Commodore 64 Ultimate, that will fall outside the scope of what our support or warranty teams can help with. The author of any such patch bears full responsibility for its behavior on your hardware, and as such, they will need to provide the support."
Simply put, Commodore is locking down the firmware to prevent issues that could lead to C64 Ultimate owners unduly badgering customer service.
That might sound like a very basic way of framing it, but Commodore admits in the same post that the opposite is also true:
"Our firmware updates, optimized for the Commodore 64 Ultimate's evolving platform, could introduce incompatibilities with third-party products that haven't been updated to match. This isn't hypothetical. We've seen it already in recent community posts, after users performed updates with the wrong firmware and found their machines in a non-functioning state. Then they contacted Commodore. It's an engineering reality we need to get ahead of now, not after more units stops working."
Commodore is implementing a system which will prevent "non-Commodore FPGA-level firmware builds from being installed on the Commodore 64 Ultimate", but admits that it is "still considering alternative approaches and evaluating which path best balances user freedom with user protection," and that user feedback is welcome when it comes to shaping that decision.
"We hope this explains why we've taken the reasonable stance we did, and cannot provide support for firmware we did not build," concludes the post. "We've already received support requests from users who loaded third-party firmware onto their Commodore 64 Ultimate and encountered issues. Problems our team had no hand in creating, nor the ability to diagnose. That isn't sustainable, and it isn't fair to the users who come to us expecting help for other things."
Of course, this doesn't mean that someone, somewhere won't 'crack' the firmware – something which is common on systems made by the likes of Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft.