Zombeaver

Save states are less reliable than proper in-game saves. They do work, generally, but should be considered inferior to that. Existing states also periodically break/are no longer usable when the VICE core gets updated. I should know - it's quite a pain in the ass to go back and have to recreate states for the 200+ games that I have setup to auto-load a state on launch every time that happens. Savestates are fine, but actually saving the game to disk is objectively better, and significantly less prone to errors. So cases where that's an option take priority.

So one of the major changes that's taking place in the next version is that I've sortof rethought the logic a bit about what versions are used for the games, and as always this comes down to what I'm considering the "best" version of any given game. What determines that I've redefined slightly as, in the past, any game that had a version with trainers available, the best trained version was used. But now that's shifted slightly: If a game has a high score saver that's been added by the cracking group, that version is used. I consider high score saving an objective improvement that everyone would reasonably benefit from. OL64 versions do not have the ability to save scores. If the game has an in-game save function, that version is used. Keep in mind that you cannot save your games in OneLoad64 as those roms are essentially static, you can't save any data to them. There are a few exceptions to this where a game allows you to save it to a separate disk - in cases where that's true, the OL64 version is used, but otherwise if in-game saving is broken by OL64 the trained/disk version is used. If the game has a docs screen and I haven't yet located a manual for it (rare but there are a few such cases), that version is used. In the cases where these criteria aren't present and, for example, all it is is say 3 trainers available and nothing else, the OL64 version is now used. But to go one step further, now in those cases you'll actually be able to right-click on those games and choose to launch the trained version instead if you so choose. So you still have access to them / the best of both worlds. That process will encompass 800+ games in the collection once all is said and done, and I'm most of the way through that by now. But of course, as always, I have to test all this stuff. The idea is as it has always been to present the user with the best version of any given game. I've just shifted my thought process slightly on what that means, while also giving people access to what would have been used in the past since some may still prefer that.

So, just as a bit of an update, while I've been though nearly every major life event in the last year and a half, which slowed progress significantly, some of which aren't even totally resolved yet, I have been getting back into working pretty significantly on this lately. I'd already made decent progress on things beforehand so I'm getting back into the swing of it and carrying on bit by bit. I do have something that people could potentially help with if they're so inclined. Finding new and upgrading existing manuals is a neverending battle, but one that's important to me. I have a giant stack of ones that I'm working on already, but I also took some time to pinpoint some games that are likely to have manuals but I have yet to locate scans of them anywhere. If people want to help look for them and send me what they find it would be appreciated. The rationale for this list is that every one of these was reviewed in Zzap!64, which raises the likelihood that they had wider commercial distribution and, in theory, had manuals of some variety. The only real requirements that I have are that they 1) be an actual scan of original materials, not just say a text file and 2) while multi-language manuals are perfectly fine, English needs to at least be one of the included languages. If anyone locates scans of any of these, please send them in here, and I'll take a look. Any assistance is appreciated. As usual I tend to chip away at one thing until my eyes bleed and then switch to another angle and then another, until I'm back to the beginning again, and sometimes people ask me what they can do to help. I'm a bit too OCD to let most things be handled by anyone else, but this is something that certainly could be done by members of the community, and every bit helps and is appreciated. I'll have more news as things progress. Looking for: 747 Flight Simulator Almazz Amazon Warrior Arcana Ball Blasta Ball Game, The Beatle Quest Beer Belly Burt's Brew Biz Betrayal Big Game Fishing Blue Baron Bob Winner Bone Cruncher Boulder Dash II Bounty Hunter (River Software) Budokan - The Martial Spirit Bugbomber Bushido - The Way of the Warrior Captured Castle Dracula Caverns of Sillahc Champ, The Cheap Skate Chess Chiller a.k.a. Chess Game, The a.k.a. Night Walker Chuck Rock Citadel Citadel of Corruption Cleanup Service Crazy Paving Cyberdyne Warrior Daffy Duck Dante's Inferno Dark Sky Over Paradise, A Death Wake Deliverance (The Power House) Deus Ex Machina DNA Warrior Dragon's Kingdom Droids Dylan Dog Elvira II Empire Enforcer, The Equinox Evil Crown F1 GP Circuits F1 Tornado Faerie Final Blow Floyd the Droid Galaxy Force II Gerry The Germ Gertie Goose - The Lost Eggs Gods & Heroes Grave Yardage Groovy Garden He-Man and the Masters of the Universe Head Coach Herbert's Dummy Run Hercules HES Games Hi Bouncer Hocus Focus Hyper Circuit Ice Station Zero Intensity International Team Sports Iron Lord Island of Dr. Destructo, The Iwo Jima Jet Strike Mission Kamikaze Katakis Kayak Knight Games II Laurel & Hardy Legend of Sinbad, The Legend of the Amazon Women, The Lifeforce Little Green Man MACH - Maneuverable Armed Computer Humans Mandroid Master Blaster (Zeppelin Games) Masters of the Universe in Terraquake Max Torque Mean City Metabolis Miami Dice Millenium Warriors Mind Pursuit Mini Golf (Magic Bytes) Moonfall Mr. Mephisto Mystery Voyage Nam Necromancer Neverending Story II, The Ninja Commando Odysseus - Trojan Warrior Odyssey, The Orpheus in the Underworld Out on a Limb Over The Net Poker (Duckworth Home Computing) Powerboat USA - Offshore Superboat Racing PP Hammer Psi-Droid Purple Heart Quann Tulla Return of the Space Warriors RISK - Rapid Intercept Seek and Kill Rubicon Samurai Warrior - The Battles of Usagi Yojimbo Santa's Xmas Caper Saucer Attack! Software Star Soldier of Fortune Special Agent Speed Duel Starship Andromeda Stratton Stuntman Seymour Super Gran - The Adventure Taskmaster Terrafighter ThunderJaws Tim Love's Cricket Time Search Time Soldier Trollbound Tubular Bells Warlock - The Avenger Wild Streets Wings of Fury Zone Trooper

You can either press Numpad Minus + F1 or back + guide on an Xbox controller. What is it you're trying to do exactly? You should be very careful about changing anything in Retroarch as it has the potential to create problems quite easily depending on what you're doing.

Neither I nor the project are dead. Anyone who says otherwise has no idea what they're talking about and does not speak for me. Work has not stopped since the last version. It has slowed at points because of significant IRL issues which I've neither the obligation nor the inclination to share because they're frankly no one's business but my own. What I can say is that, despite that, I've continued to work on it. The reason that the next version hasn't been released yet is a combination of those issues and, more significantly, that there are major changes/improvements that will be coming in the next version that require massive amounts of time to complete. There have been significant feature additions in the past like manual swapping that caused delays and the changes in this version require multiple times more work than that. It's a process, a tedious and time consuming one, but it's a process that needs to be done. Again and again and again and again and again and again... and eventually I'll come out of the hole, blink at the sun, and be done. But I'm not there yet. And I won't compromise the quality or standards of the project for anyone, just because they want it sooner. If that's too much to ask, that's unfortunately, as they say, tough shit. I don't report to or work for anyone. I have a vision that will be maintained. I have not dedicated years of my life to this project to either throw it away or let anyone else dictate how I should use my own skills and my own efforts and my own time. Gamebase64 has been around for 20+ years. CSDb.dk has been around for 30+ years. The library itself spans 40+ years because they're still being made and released to this day. I have to take all of that, gather it all in my arms, dump it in a pile, and turn it into something manageable, into something presentable, and into something usable, while maintaining the high standards that I hold myself to. And I have to do that, essentially, by myself. There are a number of very significant contributors in this space that this project would not be what it is were it not for their efforts - that cannot be overstated - and I am immensely grateful to those people. I try to name them by name - people like StatMat, sonninnos, the Ultimate Tape Archive team, everyone at GB64 and CSDb and more - and thank them as often as I can because I know firsthand the tedium and the effort that is required for these sorts of projects. But C64 Dreams, itself, is largely a one-man show. That can of course be a disadvantage at times because it means that it takes longer because 99.7% of the work is on my shoulders, but it also means that the end result is exactly what I want it to be. And people are, thankfully, generally pretty positive about that. Even people that have no idea what all work it actually entails (which is to say, essentially everyone), often one of the first things they say is "Wow... this must have been a lot of work." That would be an accurate assessment. I've worked on a number of emulation-related projects over the years that I've released to the public (C64 Dreams of course being the most significant of these) and, in every single case, they were endeavors that I undertook, ultimately, for myself - because I wanted things to be a certain way, because I wanted the experience to be better. But I decided hey, you know what, I'm putting in all this work for things that others might also appreciate, I might as well put this out into the wild. But the other part of that statement is the fact that I've also not released things publicly numerous times over the years for no other reason than just not wanting to deal with everything that entails. When I read comments like this, I feel completely justified in that decision. Not only is it not helpful in any way, not only does it actively undermine your own stated intent of seeing faster progress given the fact that it aggravates the one person that's actually putting in that work, but it also discourages anyone else that might consider for a moment whether or not they should publicly release projects like this. Why would anyone want to deal with that? Why would anyone see this kind of entitled attitude and say to themselves "Yeah, I want to use my time, my money, my mental energy, my sleep, my skills, and the cost of not using those things over the course of years of my life for myself, my family, and my friends... for this guy." When it's done, it'll be released. Until it is, it won't be. Period.

I've had decent success with the upscaling efforts so far. You can find some examples below. You can click the drop-down to select different images to compare. https://imgsli.com/MjYxMzcx/0/1

Thank you for the comparison, that's good to see as an example. I don't think either one looks particularly great honestly. Both of them look what I would describe as "weird" on quick glance. It would be pretty obvious to me that it had gone through some kind of digital tampering in both cases. The other two less so. I wish there was a model that was specifically trained for text, but to my knowledge there isn't one.

This looks similar to the results from Nomos8kSC in Upscayl and demonstrates some of the same font weirdness. This is particularly evident in section 4 of that page. Nomos8kSC for comparison: I almost wonder if it wouldn't be beneficial to run some of these through multiple models in sequence with each at smaller integer scales.

Yeah that's fine and to be expected. I'm used to that kind of thing already. There have been some cases where something was so bad that I just completely recreated it from scratch using closely approximated fonts/colors, etc. Really good tip here! Doing some quick testing 4xHFA2k and 4xNomos8kSC seem to be yielding the best results so far. 4xHFA2k has been consistently a bit better between the two though, with less weirdness in font interpolation. That's good to know! I'm not totally opposed to dropping a one time amount of $100 on something like this if I need to. In no dimension would I ever pay $10-$30 a month until the end of time for a finite number of images per month though. That's an insane pricing structure. I appreciate the tips here from everybody! This definitely points me in the right direction. I'm liking Upscayl quite a bit so far. It's really easy to use, has a nice UI, is fast, yields pretty good results so far, and is free. Some examples of some lower quality material: 4xHFA2k: The second one here seems to be the most problematic, with a fair number of oddities in the text. A few things here and there in the Lunar Leeper one too, but overall not too bad. I probably would use the first and third one here as replacements.

Someone on my Discord just recommended Upscayle which is apparently free and open source. I'll be giving that one a shot tonight. https://www.upscayl.org/

I have Photoshop. I'd like to avoid another monthly subscription just for this so imgupscaler is probably out (and as a side note I seriously hate this pricing structure that a lot of these sites have of pay per number of images processed, that entire model would be unusable for my needs). I've heard of topaz, and looking into it a bit it looks like you can pay once and then use local software, which is much more appealing to me. I'm a little concerned about the fact that it says includes 12 months of updates though - does the software outright stop working after 12 months if you don't pay again or does it just not receive updates anymore (this is implied but I want to be sure)? I'd be leery of the former but if it's the latter that could work. Definitely! I'll send some examples in a couple hours. Thanks for the offer!

Thanks @C-Beats! Hopefully one of them will have some ideas here. I would think there's probably some option out there that would work well here. I've messed around with a few different free options online and didn't have great results, but admittedly I don't have a ton of experience with this.

So I asked this over on my Discord but I'll mention it here as well in case anyone has any ideas: Does anyone know of a good option for AI upscaling that would yield good results for manual scans (primarily text, but some art as well)? Part of the process for each update is upgrading manual scans wherever possible. A higher quality scan is obviously the preferred method for this, but because of the obscure nature of this stuff that won't always be an option. It seems to me that AI upscaling could be a good option for this but my experiments with it thus far have yielded mixed results. In some cases it's a bit of an improvement, in others it looks a bit like using one of those awful "Eagle" shaders on a SNES game (a smeary mess). It seems like with as much as this tech has advanced in the last few years that surely there has to be a decent option for this kind of thing by now. If it's free that would be preferred so that I could work on them myself, or if not and someone has access to a relevant platform and would be willing to volunteer some time to work on it I can supply the media in question. I'm open to any ideas here. I realize it's probably not going to work in every scenario, but if this is an avenue to improve some of them I'd like to do it.

This is how it works currently, yes. Each subsequent release is complete. There is no update process per-se at the moment as there's too much in flux currently from one version to the next and I don't expect this to change until at least v1.0. It requires a complete delete and replace. There have been multiple instances of significant backend changes over the course of the project (and this will be true in the next release as well) so it would be impractical to do it any other way until that's no longer the case. The relevant folders for the purposes of importing would remain the same as those I listed above though. It would be those plus the main C64 Dreams subfolder of course. If you have any questions or need help with anything please feel free to hit me up on my Discord. That's where I typically post about ongoing progress and collaborate with other developers like StatMat of the OL64 project.

Yep, I can confirm both of these are true. Both are corrected in the current WIP. Good catch. It would probably make more sense to simply pull everything from Data\Platforms and Data\Playlists as it will always be everything in both folders. The same goes for Images\C64 Dreams, Images\Platforms, Images\Platform Categories\, Images\Playlists, Music\C64 Dreams and \Plugins. It will always be everything in those folders regardless of what's specified (or not) in Files to import.txt. I will probably end up changing Files to import.txt to eventually just state that anyway just to simplify matters. The Parents and Platforms xml inserts would of course remain as they are by necessity. I appreciate the work on your app. Importing into an existing library has always been an overly fiddly process that's been more difficult than I would like for people to deal with so if this helps streamline that that's great. The next question would be is it able to deal with subsequent releases when existing (and potentially outdated) data is already present from a previous one? The process has to be repeated when a new version is released. In the case of the individual xmls for the platforms and playlists it's a simple overwrite. With images it's not quite that simple because sometimes files end up getting deleted between releases, or change filetypes (so they wouldn't be overwritten and an unneeded image is left behind if the existing folder isn't deleted beforehand). The inserted portions will change as well, usually just with new data, but sometimes with altered existing data. I'm not sure how difficult that would be to deal with - I would imagine a differential of old to new image files wouldn't be too horrendous albeit time-consuming (and it could always just outright delete the relevant folders beforehand instead, since that's the current process when doing it manually), but the Parents.xml and Platforms.xml changes I would expect to be more difficult since those would contain a lot of non-C64 Dreams data when incorporated into an existing library. Maybe it could just do a diff between the old and new insert files, then compare against the user's existing xmls and then update/add based on that? Sorry, I know this is a bit in the weeds but I just want to make sure that it wouldn't implode when someone attempts to import a new version on top of an existing one.