Commodore Plus/4

The Plus/4 was the last in the 264 series of computers and was created since the others simply had too little memory and Commodore wanted to make a worthy successor to the C64 and to realise an idea where they had preinstalled applications in ROM. The Plus/4 has a word processor, a spreadsheet, a database application and a graphing package. All of these were quite buggy and was of poor quality, and since they were in ROM you could not upgrade them in any way.

The Plus/4 also lacked real sprites although it had 128 colors (16 shades of 8 colors). Compared to the tiny 16 colors that the C64 had, some people felt this was a great upgrade. It also used a new type of joystick connector and a new power connector making it incompatible with these although you could buy adaptors for the joystick. The sound chip was poor with only 2 voices with simple sound, which is reallys strange considering the success of the SID chip.

If they had fitted the Plus/4 with dual SID chips for stereo, 128kb memory and e.g. 16 hardware sprites it could have been a worthy followup to the C64. But with its current spec its a rather strange computer for Commodore to have released, as was the whole 264 series (C16, C116).

My Collection

My Plus/4 was bought on ebay in Germany and although I dont have a box for it the computer is spotless and looks absolutely unused with no yellowing whatsoever on the keyboard. Chances are that I will find a boxed one just to get hold of the box. :)

Motherboard:
Serial Number: DA 4 39411