Is it worth starting a C64 collection?

How is C64 emulation on a pi?

I've never tried it filthy, i've got a pi3 myself, it should be able to handle the C64, speccy and beeb with ease i'd have thought, as long as there's tidy emu's out for it.

Takumaji said:

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Really enjoyed that video.

And LOL at 18:54, I can only assume amstrad hit him with some kind of copyright claim or something.

Edit: got time on video wrong

My all-time favorite Kim Justice video:

Rastan and Renegade were great on that system. Simpsons arcade - not so much.

GregN said:

Rastan and Renegade were great on that system. Simpsons arcade - not so much.

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I quite liked Bart vs The Space Mutants, tho. Nice platformer with good gameplay and visuals.

The Simpsons thing casts a light on the later years of the system. During the first years ('83 to about '85), games were mostly unique affairs and often made by just one person or a small team of two or three. It was the time of the bedroom coders who programmed games in their spare time and came up with some legendary titles in the process. Some of them became famous like Braben and Bell (of Elite fame), Jeff Minter (Voidrunner, Mama Llama, Revenge Of The Mutant Camels, etc.), Andrew Braybrook and Steve Turner (Alleykat, Uridium, Paradroid, Morpheus, etc.), Anthony Crowther (Bombuzal, Blagger, Wanted: Monty Mole, Fernandez Must Die, etc.) or Stavros Fasoulas (Sanxion, Delta, Quedex, etc.) and many people keen of getting into programming wanted to be like them.

None of these small-time companies had the money to pay for licenses at first. This changed from '85/'86 onwards when they had grown bigger and already had made lotsa money with their hit games. From then on, arcade ports, movie tie-ins and other licensed games were the big thing. A lot of brilliant ports were released at that time but also reams and reams of unplayable crap that was made to cash in on clueless buyers who were lured in by big names. The former bedroom coders were still around but the industry had changed from the creative early days to a streamlined money-making machine so they no longer could let their inspiration run wild like in the old days.

Takumaji said:

Yeah, subscribed to his/her channel quite a while ago,

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lol I thought you meant duo presenters on the channel. As in two people.

But I had a look, yeah, looks like some quality vids there.

Even with an SD card drive emulator, I highly recommend a fastloader cart as well, it's surprising how much they cut down the loading times.

fluxcore said:

Even with an SD card drive emulator, I highly recommend a fastloader cart as well, it's surprising how much they cut down the loading times.

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The 1541 Ultimate can emulate various cartridges, including the Retro Replay, which includes a fast loader. I've been using it without a hitch for years.

Still have some of my old carts, the Power Cartridge and Final Cartridge 2... also have an old Isepic Freeze Frame lying around. Floppy load times are no prob for me, many cracks of multiload games come with fastloaders anyway. The group Remember released a ton of very clean and feature-packed cracks with trainers, fastloaders where applicable, hiscore savers, docs, etc., look out for their stuff when downloading tape or disk images/ROMs. There's lots of crap out there as well... sometimes it takes a while to find a good version, even if you've been into the whole Commie thing since 30+ years now...

There are no nes classic-like machines based on classic computers yet are there? A keyboard C64 rombox (or Amiga\Atari st) would be so bloody good

DevilRedeemed said:

There are no nes classic-like machines based on classic computers yet are there? A keyboard C64 rombox (or Amiga\Atari st) would be so bloody good

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There are several clones like that, including the usual n-games-in-a-stick things but most of them have shortcomings in emulation accuracy. Contrary to what some people think, 8bit computer emulation is not easy to get right, even on a very powerful modern machine. Even the best PC/Mac emu Vice is not perfect.

IMO, getting a real machine + some SD cart thing is the way to go if you want to play the games the way they were meant to be.

Takumaji said:

There are several clones like that, including the usual n-games-in-a-stick things but most of them have shortcomings in emulation accuracy. Contrary to what some people think, 8bit computer emulation is not easy to get right, even on a very powerful modern machine. Even the best PC/Mac emu Vice is not perfect.

IMO, getting a real machine + some SD cart thing is the way to go if you want to play the games the way they were meant to be.

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I'll have to look into it definitely. Thanks for the data

This C64 thread reminded me of that C64 laptop of quite a few years ago.





http://www.benheck.com/commodore-64-original-hardware-laptop/

Thierry Henry said:

This C64 thread reminded me of that C64 laptop of quite a few years ago.

http://www.benheck.com/commodore-64-original-hardware-laptop/

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Heh, not bad!

That's how a portable Commie should have looked like back then, too bad LCD screens already were available in the early 80s but very expensive so Commodore put a 5" CRT screen into their SX-64, the "luggable" C64. The small screen reminds me of Clive Sinclair's portable Smart TV with an even smaller CRT screen that wasn't very successful either, people could not or did not want to cope with it so it followed the SX into the void of quickly abandoned hardware. Once again, Sir Clive failed with selling technology that was way ahead of its time, maybe too far ahead, but that's a story for another thread.

A teacher of mine had a SX-64 and once brought it to class. I was excited about the machine at first but when I had tried it out in person, I realized that it wasn't all that great, it was heavy (23lbs), the screen had contrast problems and the system cost a fortune compared to standard C64s that were already dropping in price at that time. It had no batteries either so it wasn't really fully portable. Still, the idea of having an all-in-one Commie that you could easily (well, more or less) take with you on those boring visits of relatives on Sundays was quite charming for me...

Speaking of failed hardware, here's another Commodore failure for you - The C64GS:



The NES and SMS started to become a threat to home computing so Commodore thought it could be worth it to release a consolized C64 and came up with the C64GS (GS = Games System). At that time, the cartridge format all of a sudden got back into the spotlight, mostly due to the rampant piracy in the C64 scene. Carts couldn't be copied as easily as tapes or discs, at least not by your average schoolyard pirate, and there was no loading whatsoever.

However, quite a few C64 games relied on both joystick and keyboard commands which of course was a problem on a keyboard-less console so the number of games that could be directly transferred to cart was limited. There had been a surge of cart releases before the GS and they were compatible to it in principle but couldn't be played on it due to the lack of keyboard, like Terminator 2 which required the user to press a key to start the game. Again, the idea wasn't bad but implementation turned out to be a problem so the GS had a very short life.

EDIT: By the way, the joystick you see in the pic above is a Cheetah Annihilator, probably the worst stick ever made. It was made entirely of cheap plastic, including the shaft, and had simple foil contacts instead of micro switches. I had one that lasted only a couple of weeks, first one of the firebuttons stopped working, then the shaft broke during a heated Ikari Warriors session and that was that. Brought it back to the shop and got a new one which went bust after a month. The third and final one lasted about a year or so, then the shaft broke again. The only good point of the Annihilator was its second independend firebutton which was supported by some games. Overall, it was one of the crappiest pieces of kit I ever had.

pva said:

The 1541 Ultimate can emulate various cartridges, including the Retro Replay, which includes a fast loader. I've been using it without a hitch for years.

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Interesting, I didn't know about that, will have to have a look.

Thierry Henry said:

Black Jewel - C64 styled game





Could get ported to the C64.

http://www.lemon64.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=65997

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Yes! I love barbarian sidescrollers! I have a need to play this!

Its funny i fire up my c64 once in a while to play pacman or gorf, even my son loves it! He loves radar rat race and odell lake.

Takumaji said:

By the way, the joystick you see in the pic above is a Cheetah Annihilator, probably the worst stick ever made.

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In my book, the worst joystick ever is the Danish-made The Terminator, a bloody abomination of a controller. The stick/micropenis part is only about an inch long, so you have to grab it with your thumb and forefinger, and the lever that acts as the fire button has absolutely no feel whatsoever.



Looked cool, though.

pva said:

In my book, the worst joystick ever is the Danish-made The Terminator, a bloody abomination of a controller. The stick/micropenis part is only about an inch long, so you have to grab it with your thumb and forefinger, and the lever that acts as the fire button has absolutely no feel whatsoever.

Looked cool, though.

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Heh, I've seen ads for it back then in various magazines, Zzap printed a review about it, they basically rated it as silly novelty. I still refuse to believe that it was of worse build quality than the Cheetah Annihilator, never seen a stick built so cheap in my life.

On another note, this was easily the best joystick:

Looks awesome, never had one. I mostly used Competition Pro sticks, the last one from the old days broke a few weeks ago, tho. Now I'm using a Multi-Function 2002 I also bought in the 80s but never really used a lot, the technical design of the base of the stick is not very clever, sometimes it hangs on down and generally feels stiff and notchy. Has micro switches, good firebuttons and some extra functions like paddles and auto fire, this is how it looks like:



Another prob as you can see is the wrong setup of the stick, always takes me a bit of getting used to playing with the stick on the right and the buttons on the left.

Takumaji said:

Another prob as you can see is the wrong setup of the stick, always takes me a bit of getting used to playing with the stick on the right and the buttons on the left.

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Reminds me of that Master System Control Stick, with the stick being on the right side. Could never really get used to it.

Takumaji said:

Another prob as you can see is the wrong setup of the stick, always takes me a bit of getting used to playing with the stick on the right and the buttons on the left.

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I like the design but that stick is on the wrong side.

Thierry Henry said:

Reminds me of that Master System Control Stick, with the stick being on the right side. Could never really get used to it.

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I see older arcade CPs with the buttons-on-both-sides setup, and I think, "who plays games that way?"

JoeAwesome said:

I see older arcade CPs with the buttons-on-both-sides setup, and I think, "who plays games that way?"

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Left-handers