Meshtastic 64 cartridges begin shipping, bringing mesh messaging to Commodore 64s

The first Meshtastic 64 cartridges finally started leaving BIT Zeal’s bench, a meaningful step for a project that had lived for months as build logs and proof-of-concept demos. The shipping push began with the first batch going out during the week of April 14 through April 20, and orders were being fulfilled mostly by order date, so early buyers were the first to see the retro-mesh experiment turn into a finished product.

That matters because Meshtastic 64 is not just another board in a cartridge shell. It brings Meshtastic messaging to real Commodore 64 hardware through the user port, which gives the project a very specific place in both the mesh radio world and the vintage computing scene. By April 30, the hardware work was already well past the rough prototype stage. Most of the electronics had been assembled, the cartridge cases had been cut and machined, and the team had moved into final assembly, programming and testing.

The package being shipped looked finished in the way retro gear should look finished. Manuals were updated and test printed, while disks and SD cards were labeled and prepared for packaging. That points to a complete old-school computing experience, not just a bare PCB tossed into a shell. For collectors and tinkerers, that kind of presentation matters almost as much as the circuitry inside it.

The software side is where the project gets genuinely strange in the best way. Version 1.1 of the GitHub software connects a Commodore 64 to a Meshtastic peer-to-peer network, and the BASIC program opens the user port at 600 baud. It also converts between ASCII and PETSCII, which lets the machine receive, view, edit and send PETSCII art across the mesh. LED activity indicators and SID sound notifications for new messages give it the right amount of vintage personality without turning it into a gimmick.

Meshtastic has spent most of its life on modern ESP32 builds, Raspberry Pi setups and handheld radios. Meshtastic 64 stretches that footprint backward in time, into 8-bit hardware with real utility, and that is exactly why the first shipping batch feels bigger than a simple fulfillment update. It shows the ecosystem can still surprise people, even on a machine that first shipped decades ago.