To those of a certain age, the Commodore 64 is synonymous with 80s gaming – whether being at its pinnacle or, for ZX Spectrum owners in the United Kingdom, being the po-faced rival to their system of choice. (The Speccy was better, though, fact fans.) Either way, it's a hallowed icon in the cathedral of 8-bit gaming.
Lego, on the other hand, is a little-known children's toy from the southern reaches of Scandinavia. It's far less dubious than it may sound when I describe it as a near-infinite array of "bricks," "studs" and "smooths" of all colors that slot together in more or less any way you see fit.
Meanwhile, and perhaps inevitably, someone has thought to marry the twin realms of the Commodore 64 and Lego, resulting in the winsome offspring that is The Brixty Four – and what elevates it out of the spheres of hobbyist tinkering is that it's available to order online for US$299, though that only gets you the Lego case, not the C64 itself. Boo. Boooooooo.
The case can house original C64 insides, emulation hardware, or, for those with more nostalgia for the hardware aesthetic than the inevitable disappointment of retro-gaming, you can have a decorative Lego interior modeled on the C64's circuit board, complete with a (non-functioning) Lego keyboard to go on top – which is where keyboards tended to go.
Let's not forget that the design includes a working power LED, which is apparently the sort of hardware detail that retro purists get in a tizz about.
As you might expect with Lego, the cases come in a variety of colors – chiefly in grayscale, though lemon yellow and ruby red are available too – as are custom color requests. Prices vary based on cost and availability. There's even a black and white "Stormputer" edition based on Star Wars.
I should add that case orders come with the necessary badges and cables needed, as well as the mounting kits needed to sit either a real C64 chassis or one of the popular boards used for emulation. If you're going with the latter option, I'd recommend getting in touch to make sure your planned hardware setup is supported.
Alternatively, the case "recipe" is available for free should you wish to order the necessary parts yourself, though no support is available for this option. Here be dragons etc.
The project comes courtesy of Youtuber Perifractic whose channel Perifractic's Retro Recipes boasts some 27,000 subscribers, so he must be doing something right with all this retro gubbins. All power to him.
In future he intends to add a working Lego keyboard to replace the standard C64 one which will bring a similar all-Lego aesthetic to the working model as is available with the decorative, um, all-Lego one.
So now at least as you hurl your C64 across the room in frustration you can put it back together if it breaks. BECAUSE IT'S MADE OF LEGO.
Source: Perifractic