Source: https://cmaiolino.wordpress.com/

You gave away your Commodore64? No emotion is as strong as regret, tell me. 😭 So if you wanna get back into the game (literally), there are plenty of options. You can buy yourself a used one and have it polished and re-cap’ed. Go for it. Best option.

But you can also buy a brand new machine based on an emulator. Some of those are pretty cool and resemble the Commodore feeling quite nicely. Of course you can also just download and run an emulator on your shiny Gigahertz box and be happy with it.

But there is another option. Check out the latest release of Combian 64. That is a Linux distro for the Raspberry PI with the VICE emulator preinstalled. And since it works properly with the cheap Raspberry 400 you can build yourself a still emulated but hardware based C64 replacement, which works quite accurately.

Carmelo Maiolino the developer and maintainer releases new versions of Combian once in a while. The latest release is version 3.5.3 and Steven Combs aka retrocombs gives you a full rundown of the installation process in his video.

Quite an option. Happy tinkering.