AI image generation is all the rage, and you could be forgiven for thinking with all this talk of AI PCs, NPUs and Nvidia H100s that it's only ultra-modern hardware that's up to the task. Turns out, however, that even the elderly Commodore 64 can get in on the action, thanks to some algorithm wrangling and a good dose of old-fashioned ingenuity.
That code, once run on the aged machine, created unique 8x8 images that were then expanded to 64x64 which were then displayed as an output on the screen. Nick says that it took around 20 minutes to create 94 iterations, which given the processing power here—a 1.023MHz CPU with 64KB of RAM— is really quite a speedy result.standards, and a lot of the hard work was performed on a modern machine, but the fact the little Commodore 64 was capable of being part of the process at all is impressive.
While I doubt Meta or OpenAI will be investing heavily in truckloads of relatively ancient computing power anytime soon, as they have with, this is a charming project and a great example of older hardware brought into the modern day through some creative thinking.Sign up to get the best content of the week, and great gaming deals, as picked by the editors.
Andy built his first gaming PC at the tender age of 12, when IDE cables were a thing and high resolution wasn't. After spending over 15 years in the production industry overseeing a variety of live and recorded projects, he started writing his own PC hardware blog for a year in the hope that people might send him things. Sometimes they did.