Commodore 16 and Plus/4
A machine whose reputation depends on which magazine you read
The C16 and Plus/4 are remembered as Commodore's failures. Measured across eighteen magazines in ten territories, their prominence relative to the C64 ranges from 2% to 60% — and the widest gap between contemporaries is not between countries but between two British magazines, where a general Commodore monthly gives them more than ten times the attention a games magazine does.
The Commodore 16 and Plus/4 are remembered as the machines Commodore got wrong — the 264 series, incompatible with the C64, discontinued quickly. This Vault can test how that reputation varies, because it holds eighteen magazines across ten territories that all wrote about Commodore machines.
Counting mentions of the C16 and Plus/4 as a proportion of mentions of the C64 in the same pages:
| Magazine | Country | C16 + Plus/4 vs C64 |
|---|---|---|
| Mikroszámítógép Magazin | Hungary | 60% |
| Commodore Computer Club | Italy | 47% |
| Your Commodore | Britain | 45% |
| Drean Commodore | Argentina | 23% |
| Mikrobáze | Czechoslovakia | 21% |
| Bajtek | Poland | 15% |
| CRASH | Britain | 10% |
| ZZAP!64 | Britain | 4% |
| Mikroklan | Poland | 2% |
How this was counted
Counted over the OCR’d text of every issue held of each title, case-insensitively,
as total mentions rather than pages containing a mention — the two differ by
up to seventeen points on the same magazine, so the unit is part of the result.
C16 and Plus/4: commodore 16, c16, c-16, plus/4, plus 4. C64:
commodore 64, c64, c-64, cbm 64. Re-derived 2026-08-31 against an index
of 1,350,695 pages.
264 is deliberately not a search term. It matches 6,891 pages, most of them
H.264 video compression, table-of-contents page numbers and BASIC DATA
statements; including it moves the table by an average of 51 points. The C116 is
excluded too, being a separate machine rather than a C16 — though “the 264
series” remains the right name for the family.
CRASH is counted across its complete run, issues 1 to 98. The library held it under two shelf names until August 2026 — the second holding nine issues that were exactly the gaps in the first, among them the 1984–85 numbers that matter most for a machine launched in 1984. Counting only the larger shelf would have returned 10.7% rather than 9.8%. The shelves are now one.
The gap is not between countries
The obvious reading — a machine that flopped in Britain and found a home in Eastern Europe — does not survive the table. Hungary is highest at 60%, but Britain’s Your Commodore is third at 45%, ahead of every non-British title except two.
The widest gap between two titles that ran through the machines’ own years is inside Britain: Your Commodore at 45% against ZZAP!64 at 4%. Eleven times the attention, same country, overlapping years. And the two Polish titles sit at 15% and 2%.
Hungary’s pair is wider still — Mikroszámítógép Magazin at 60% against 576 KByte at 2% — but the two are not comparable in the way the British pair is: 576 KByte began after the 264 series was over, so its 2% measures a magazine that arrived too late rather than one that chose games. The British pair overlaps in time, which is what makes the difference between them editorial.
What separates them is what the magazine was for. Your Commodore covered Commodore’s range; ZZAP!64 covered C64 games. A budget machine with a small games library is invisible to one and unavoidable for the other.
This is the same result this Vault keeps arriving at from different directions: the institution and audience of a magazine predict its contents better than its country does.
What survives the caveat
Two things do look territorial rather than editorial.
Hungary at 60% is the highest figure in the set, and the Hungarian press covers the 264 series more heavily than any British general Commodore magazine. Hungary is one of the few markets where the C16 is remembered as genuinely common.
Argentina had the C16 without the Plus/4. Drean Commodore mentions the C16 194 times and the Plus/4 four times. Drean built Commodore machines under licence, and its magazine suggests the cheap member of the pair crossed and the expensive one did not.
⚠ Mention counts measure editorial attention, not sales, and a ratio against the C64 measures attention relative to the flagship rather than absolute interest. A magazine may discuss a machine because it is popular or because its readers need help with it.
⚠ The magazines cover different year spans, and the 264 series was current only from 1984. Titles running mostly after 1987 — 576 KByte at 2%, Amiga Joker at 4% — are low partly because they started too late to care.
What the machine actually was
The reputation is easier to test than the hardware, so this entry has led with the reputation. But the 264 series was not a cut-down C64; it was a different design, and the chip at its centre is unusually ambitious.
TED — the MOS 7360 — does nearly everything. Commodore’s specification lists “dynamic RAM refresh, sound generation, programmable video time standards”, and elsewhere on the same page adds “system timing, dynamic RAM control, ROM control, and keyboard scanning”, across 34 control registers. Video, audio, memory refresh, timing and the keyboard, in one part. The C64 needs a VIC-II, a SID and two CIAs to cover the same ground.
The consequence for the processor is the reverse of the usual arrangement. On the C64 or the Atari 8-bit, the display steals cycles from a CPU running at its normal rate. Here the CPU’s normal rate is the fast one: TED “outputs double clock” and drops to single clock only in the horizontal window where it is “doing processor handshaking, character fetches, and dynamic RAM refresh”. Blanking the screen recovers most of it — with the specification noting that “double clock is enabled at all times except refresh”, because the RAM must still be refreshed whether or not anyone is looking at it.
Even Commodore could not agree how many colours it had
The TED’s palette is a hue-and-luminance grid rather than a fixed list, and Commodore’s own publications give two different totals for it:
| Document | Figure |
|---|---|
| C16 service manual | “121 Colors (15 colors; 8 luminance levels and Black)” |
| Plus/4 service manual | “128 Colors (16 colors; 8 luminance levels)” |
| Plus/4 Programmer’s Reference Guide | “can produce 121 different colors” |
Both are defensible and the reference guide explains why. The register encoding
takes “the 16 colors and 8 luminances”, computed as luminance*16+color-1 —
128 combinations. But one of those sixteen is black, and black at eight
different luminances is black eight times, so the count of distinct colours is
15 × 8 + 1 = 121. The Plus/4 service manual counted the encoding; the other
two counted what you can see.
A machine dismissed as an afterthought had a palette its manufacturer described three ways in three documents — and 121 colours against the C64’s 16.