> The nearly direct access to the hardware was what made the C64 so cool. This new C64 has none of that, unfortunately.
Every PC has near-direct access to the hardware. There's nothing stopping you from writing your own BIOS, bootloader, kernel, or anything else -- it's easier than it ever was before. Many people (including myself) really do this, and enjoy it.
This may be true, but the C64 booted into a BASIC interpreter with PEEK and POKE commands, making it possible to read and write to all of the system's memory, including mapped IO ports, from the command line. Plus, monthly magazines like COMPUTE'S Gazette offered in-depth tutorials on just about every sub-system, from audio to video to disk I/O. System-level programming was incredibly easy on the C64 -- I was doing it as a teenager, whereas I have yet to write a device driver for a Linux PC.
Just today I found an old issue of a magazine called "Ahoy!" that was devoted to the commodore 64. What a neat time period, it was so exciting. I remember typing in games for my TI in the early 80's. Now programming feels like work to me.
The nearly direct access to the hardware was what made the C64 so cool. This new C64 has none of that, unfortunately.