By Bart Ziegler Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal NEW YORK -- The pioneering computers of Commodore Electronics Ltd., whose production was halted last year after the company's long, sorry decline, came back from the dead with the help of a German computer retailer. Escom AG, which operates about 1,500 computer stores in Europe, paid $10 million for the rights to the Commodore name, its patents and intellectual property in a bankruptcy-court auction. Escom yesterday said it plans to resume production of Commodore personal computers, including its famed Amiga model, in China and to distribute them world-wide. The news cheered longtime Commodore users, a small but fanatically loyal group who had watched in dismay as the sale of Commodore's assets dragged out for a year. "I'm glad it's finally over," said Jason Compton, a Northwestern University student who publishes the Amiga Report on the Internet. But he said he worries about Escom's long-term commitment to the Amiga, a proprietary computer that is neither fish nor fowl in a PC market divided between computers adhering to the International Business Machines Corp. standard and those that operate on Apple Computer Inc.'s Macintosh software. Escom, Mr. Compton says, may find it too expensive to develop a much-needed follow-on model to the current Amiga, a design first introduced in 1985, and may quietly let the model die while continuing to use the Commodore name on IBM-standard PCs, which it currently sells under the Escom name. But Escom said it has big plans for the Amiga. In addition to resuming production of the entire product line, it says it will integrate Amiga technology into the MS-DOS software format, used on 80% of the world's PCs. It also plans to develop TV set-top control boxes, used for interactive TV, based on the Amiga design. Commodore derived about 80% of its sales in Europe, said Petro Tyschtschenko, Escom's general manager of production. A particularly attractive market for the retailer may be "the kids who bought them when they were 10 or 12 years old" and now are looking for a new model, said Mr. Tyschtschenko, who worked for Commodore until recently. Commodore sold about five million Amigas, which incorporated such multimedia features as color video and stereo sound years before most other PCs. The auction, overseen by the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in New York, attracted a last-minute, $15 million bid from Dell Computer Corp., which didn't plan to restart production but was interested in Commodore's patents. But Dell attached certain conditions to its bid, which tipped the scales in favor of Escom, according to lawyers for the German concern and the courtappointed liquidators. Escom said it has signed a pact for a joint venture with Tianjin Family-Issu- ed Multimedia Co. in China to make the Commodore line. Escom has no plans to use any of the former production facilities or offices of Commodore, which was based in West Chester, Pa. (END) DOW JONES NEWS 05-04-95 6 00 AM