A high-school dropout computer designer who builds retro machines has put a Commodore 64 on a chip. Only in America.

I was uber l337 when I was kid, I had a Commodore 128. Younger still a childhood friend of mine had a Vic 20 that used audio cassettes for storage media. It also supported these very long cartridges that snapped into the backside and we'd play Lunar Lander all day long.

You can download old arcade games and emulators with programs like mame. Ther are also commodore, coleco and atari emulators. You can easily google them up. And the old rom images and disk images too.

We once loaded up a Commodore 64 emulator on to a co-worker's pc that was about to be surplused the day before it was to be replaced (with the complicit assistance of the IT dept) and left it running overnight so he would get the garish orangish/light blue boot screen greeting him when he arrived in the morning. We told him this was his new pc.

Processor architectures are now available in Intellectual Property format from several companies. That otherwise would have been the hardest part of this project.

Reducing the rest of a computer to a chip is nothing new. I have in my collection a parallel printer interface card from a PDP8, with dozens of chips on it, which does less than a 6522 or 8255 chip and a couple of buffers and decoders was doing 25 years ago. The Timex Sinclair replaced all the logic of a ZX81 (I knew what every gate and shift register in that thing did at one time with a single custom chip.

Close parentheses after "at one time".