The Commodore 64 Box Art Controversy: Misleading Marketing or Technical Oversight?

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In a recent episode of Commodore History, the focus shifts to an often-overlooked detail: the box art of the earliest Commodore 64 units. Specifically, why did some of these boxes feature a Commodore 64 connected to what appears to be a PET disk drive? It’s not just about artistic choices; the image doesn’t show power cords, video cables, or even the necessary parallel cables. Was this misleading or just a product of its time?

The video compares two Commodore 64 boxes: one from the 450th unit ever sold and another from a later production run. While nearly identical, there’s one key difference. The early box features a PET-series disk drive (possibly a 2040, 4040, or 8050), while the later version showcases a 1540 disk drive. Here’s where it gets interesting: the 1540 wasn’t fully compatible with the C64 without a ROM update—it was originally designed for the VIC-20.

So, would these configurations have worked as depicted? And why advertise a setup that required additional modifications?

Adding to the confusion, early C64 boxes touted a CPM option. But the CPM cartridge wasn’t available until nearly a year after these boxes hit the shelves in mid-1982. This discrepancy was significant enough that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission intervened, ordering Commodore to halt advertising the CPM option until it was actually available.

Technically, yes—with some extra hardware. Commodore never designed the C64 to work directly with PET disk drives because they used different connectors: PET drives relied on IEEE-488 (GPIB), while the C64 used a serial interface. However, companies like Batteries Included (based in Toronto) produced bus cards that acted as a bridge between these devices. Commodore even had its own version.

Using a bus card, you could connect a PET drive like the 2040 to a C64, but it wasn’t a simple plug-and-play solution. It required additional installation steps, such as clipping a connector to a resistor on the board. Once set up, though, basic file operations like formatting disks, saving, and loading programs worked surprisingly well.

While simple data storage was functional, commercial software was a different story. Games like On Track Racing (without copy protection) ran fine. But titles with robust copy protection, such as Epyx Winter Games, failed to load. This failure wasn’t just due to physical hardware differences; it was about how the C64 communicated with disk drives.

Copy-protected games often bypassed standard disk I/O routines, directly manipulating the C64’s hardware to achieve faster load times. Since PET drives weren’t designed with these protocols in mind, they simply couldn’t handle the custom fast loaders used by many C64 games.

Yes and no. Technically, the setups shown on early C64 boxes were achievable—but not without extra hardware and compatibility headaches. The CPM option was more clearly misleading since it wasn’t even available at launch. As for the disk drives, it might have been less about deception and more about marketing simplicity. Show the shiny new computer with a familiar Commodore peripheral, even if the real-world setup was more complicated.

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mike

reminds me of the pic showing a guy carrying a Commodore 128 under his arm at college. Ya OK. Where’s the power BRICK (which weighed like three)?

I assume the early boxes were probably printed up before they fully realized what the end-result of the design, capabilities and limitations of the system was going to be. Reading “The Commodore Years”, those guys were really flying by the seat of their pants with unbelievable deadlines and barriers, with many of the desires of what it could be placed on a shelf for another day (like CPM).