The Commodore 65 is equipped with 2 Joystick/mouse ports, 1 serial port, 1 user port, reset button (very important and absent in the C64), RF video connector, 1 female 9-pin RGB video connector, 2 RCA audio ports (like for Amiga) and 1 RAM expansion port (Belly).

The CBM 65 screen shows the version of BASIC 10.0, the presence or absence of any memory expansion and of the floppy drive for 3½ disks.

8 years after the launch of the C64, the C65 was to be its successor. It must be said that after all these years the C64 still enjoyed a good number of sales, and a not negligible factor, we are in the middle of the Amiga era. For this reason it was designed to address that portion of users still tied to the Commodore 64 and who weren't willing to upgrade to more expensive 16-bit machines (Amiga). The project delay was the real problem. By now the Amiga was becoming the mass computer and the 8 bits (although the C65 was truly performing) were destined to become history already. This delay (and therefore the error) was also due to the fact that Commodore we wanted to continue to exploit the still high number of sales of the C64. It is clear that the release of the C65 would have led to a sharp drop in sales of its predecessor, but by now the market for 16-bit machines was taking over.

The Commodore 65 remained a prototype and was not commercially popular. The hardware features of this machine were truly remarkable for the time, making it very similar to an Amiga 500. Only in 1994, during the liquidation of Commodore Business Machines (CBM), some units were placed on the market. There is talk of about 2000 units sold at a cost of 1000 dollars. For this reason today the Commodore 65 is highly sought after from a collector's point of view, but now almost impossible to find. The value of a perfectly functional Commodore 65 today is around twenty thousand euros.