Back from the Grave: Commodore VIC-20 (Part 3: blank, dark screen)

The Commodore VIC-20 - the "Friendly Computer".  Friendly perhaps to everyone except those who wanted to make it do anything significant.  The default RAM configuration meant it only had enough free RAM to hold a single page of 11-point text, making it perfectly adequate for documents which would fit but utterly dreadful for those that wouldn't.  Its 16 colour palette completely lacked any greys, and only 2 of the 4 colours in multicolour mode could even access the second 8.  Even its sound was limited by virtue of each of the three melody channels only having minor overlap in their range.

Yet, despite all this, it was a hit.  Even to this day people are still forcing it to do things never even dreamed of at the time of its creation.  In 2013, even Doom was ported to it - it didn't have all the levels, all the enemies, all the guns or all the music, and ran in a reduced size while requiring 32KB of RAM (all bar 1 expansion), but it is still there, playable, and relatively faithful to the original.  As yet the same cannot be said of the C64, which currently uses a co-processor to do the same (a 65c816, similar to that of a Super Nintendo/Famicom, running at 20MHz with 16MB of its own RAM) and still isn't nearly as complete (eg It has no sound).