I haven’t played around with SD adapters but there is a common problem with compact flash cards that gives the same symptom. They won’t be bootable until you fire up DOS 6.22 and run FDISK /MBR, which is an undocumented command which gives no output but fixes the boot record. I would focus on getting the floppy drive working or buy a gotek so you can boot floppy images from USB and get into DOS that way.
It could have been another colour with an anti-glare screen/film over the top with a tint to it.
Do you mean Dune II? Emperor was the 2001 reboot. Two button RTS controls were around since at least as early as Warcraft: Orcs and Humans in 1994.
Bomb squad movie where the bombs are wired to Jenga towers.
You can buy a C64 DIN video cable that will put out s-video, composite video, and audio. From there, you will need a converter box to go from s-video or composite to HDMI. There are cheap and crappy converters and there are better expensive ones but the C64’s video output is never going to look amazing anyway.
Alternatively, you can skip the converter box and buy an old TV with s-video input instead.
I’m not interested in programming for it myself so the way I see it, its desirability very much depends on network effects and whether it gets a big enough user base and software library. I think there is a good chance of that happening but I keep seeing new projects muscling in on the same space like the Foenix computers and the Agon which makes it less likely that any one of them will be a thriving ‘platform’.
I have fond memories of Kubuntu Feisty Fawn and the whole suite of KDE apps that were around back then. It’s nice to see that Amarok got a new release recently after such a long time.