Commodore 64 Mini console announced.

[Bofferbrauer2]

NATO said:

Bofferbrauer2 said:

This! Yeah, most of the best games of the time are missing. And I have to add no M.U.L.E. as it was one of the best games of that era

Though to be fair, it must be pretty difficult nowadays to get all the licenses, most companies from back then don't exist anymore.

If they don't exist then they are public domain and licenses arent needed. (assuming they're not from IP's that are still held)

Unless the licenseholders officially made them freeware, the licenses all still hold up. On the other hand it's not always known who actually owns the licenses nowadays, with even the current holders in blissful ignorance. They could be called abandonware because they are, well, abandoned, but they are in no way public domain yet. And in some cases, these licenses are even split between several parties, making it even trickier to rerelease those games as all parties must agree to a same deal.

The problem with putting "abandonware" games on the console is if the console would be released with those abandoned games is that if some licenseholder would then come and prove that they belong to them the console would get pulled from the market asap and the licenseholder would want his part of the share plus X, and there's nothing commodore could do against it as they had no legal right to use them to begin with.

By the way, even freeware titles are not public domain. The main difference is that freeware titles still have a legal license holder, and at any point could they make a freeware title commercial again, which is impossible for anything in public domain. Since it takes  a staggering 70 years until something even can become public domain, No single videogame in the world has ever achieved it yet and it will still take a long while until the first computer or console games will become so.