c64 C64 Dreams (massive curated C64 collection)

[Zombeaver]

Hover Bovver is already in the collection.

[Zombeaver]

50 new games since the last batch.

Spoiler

Deadline (Infocom)
Declem
Jet Set Willy
Jet Set Willy II - The Final Frontier
Jet-Boot Jack
Jetan - Martian Chess
Jetboys
Jewel Thief
Jewels of Babylon
Jewels of Darkness
Jihad - Raid Over Baghdad
Jimbo
Jinks
Jinn-Genie
Jinxter
Job Race
Jocky Wilson's Darts Challenge
Jocky Wilson's Darts Compendium
Joe (CP Verlag)
Joe Dick - Private Investigator
John Elway's Quarterback
John Lowe's Ultimate Darts
Jolly Roger
Jonah Barrington's Squash
Jonathan
Jonny Quest in Doctor Zim's Underworld
Josh
Judge Dredd (Virgin Mastertronic)
Juice!
Juke Box
Julius Caesar
Jump Machine
Jumpin Jack
Jumpin' Jimmy
JumpJets
Jungle Drums
Jungle Jack
Jungle Patrol
Jungle Quest
Jungle Raid
Jungle Trouble
Junkyard
Junkyard Jalopies
Monopoly Deluxe
Muppet Adventure - Chaos at the Carnival
Rally Speedway II
Shamus Case II
Uchi Mata
V.I.O.S.
Zombie Party

I've also finished parsing through the "J" folder. A couple titles near the end of it didn't make this list but will be in the next one.

I've added 360 manuals now. I'm hoping for 500 by release but I don't know for sure if I'll be able to scrape together that many - pickings are starting to get more slim. It'll be 400 at least.

[Zombeaver]

Alright, final batch of 50, for a new total of 2500!

Spoiler

Aigina's Prophecy
Avoid
Balakon Raider
Book of the Dead
Chomp!
Davy - King of the Wild Frontier
Death Saw Challenge
Enchanter
Eye of Horus
Fall
Frankenstein (CRL)
Hyper-Hen
Jetsons, The
Juno First
Jupiter Mission 1999
Jupiter's Electrician
Kabura
Kacper
Kami-Kaze
Kamikaze Duck
Kangarudy
KAOS
Karamalz Cup
Karate Champ
Karate Chop
Karnov
Karting Grand Prix
Kat Trap
Katapult
Kayden Garth
Kellogg's Tour 1988
Kennedy Approach
Kentilla
Kernal's Chaos
Kettle
Key Finders
KGB Agent
KGB Superspy
Kick Box Vigilante
Knax
Moonmist
Ninja Rabbits
Pilgrim
Quest of the Space Beagle
Seastalker
Shadows of Mordor, The
Silicon Dreams
Starcross
Suspended
Wolfman

More significantly, however, is that I now have a rather eye-watering 654 manuals converted and setup. That means that 26% of the games in the collection have toggleable manuals now. That's actually higher than I would have anticipated considering the amount of obscure stuff in here. The reality is that it's never going to be 100% or even 50% because many games simply never had manuals to begin with. Games released through major publishers only represent a small portion of the overall library, and once you get outside of those it's very hit or miss, more often miss. So 26% is about as good as I could have hoped. I know that there's still some stuff out there that I haven't found yet, but I wouldn't anticipate that percentage to go up much over time (it's more likely that it'd go down).

So... what's left to do?

Well, I have about 25 games that I need to create new custom note overlays for, and I have to go back and re-create all the previous ones because the base controls overlay has changed with the new manual and music functions.

Then I have to import all of the new stuff into Launchbox and scrape for media/metadata, which is no small task in and of itself. I'm also going to try to do a bit of media/metadata cleanup to pull in new data that's been added to the db since the last version. I'm not going to go too crazy with that, but basically I'm going to try rescraping the stuff that wasn't matched/didn't exist in the db the last time, and anything that doesn't have a description or cover.

After that it's some final testing and a bit of cleanup.

I'm going to try to get this out by Christmas but I can't promise that it'll happen.

[JoJoJuJu59]

What an awesome project!  The Commodore 64 was my very favorite computer growing up.  Even today with my Intel i7 and Nvidia-based system it just doesn't capture the nostalgia I felt for my C64 (which I found in a closet, along with a 1541 disk drive,  in a half-way house in 1988 haha).

Edited December 11, 2020 by JoJoJuJu59

[Zombeaver]

Okay, all the new overlays are done and all the old ones have been remade. I also managed to scrounge up some more manuals for a new total of 714.

So at this point all that's left to do is to get everything imported into LB and do some metadata/media cleanup.

While I'm working on that, I'm going to put out a "beta" of sorts for people to test and let me know if they encounter any problems. This will not include Launchbox at all since that side of things isn't done yet. You'll just have to navigate to the Games folder, then pick a game subfolder and start the .vbs file contained within. I'm going to do a little bit more testing on a secondary computer I have here first but I'll have that out in the next day or so.

[Zombeaver]

Okay, so I've tested on three PCs now and everything seems to be working on all of them so I'm going to go ahead and put out the public testing archive. As a reminder, Launchbox is not included in this as I'm still working on that side of things, but it's completely functional without it. You just need to go into the "Games" subfolder, go into a specific game subfolder and then start the .vbs within.

A temporary version of the updated games spreadsheet can be found here. All of the new games for 0.35 are listed at the bottom, rows 2002 - 2503. Games that have manuals have it noted on the spreadsheet in the "Manual" column, as are Text Adventures. There's also a second tab that has a breakdown of the different custom tracks in use and the contents of playlists that contain multiple similarly-themed tracks.

The controls for the manuals are:

Numpad Minus + Numpad Enter on keyboard or Back + R3 on controller swaps back and forth between the game and manual
Arrow keys on keyboard or Right stick on controller to navigate the manuals; you can use the scroll wheel on a mouse as well
= and - (next to backspace) on keyboard or LB and RB on controller to zoom out and in; you can also use Ctrl + scroll wheel on a mouse

The controls for the custom music are:

Numpad Minus + Up arrow on keyboard or Back + D-pad up on controller to show info for current track
Numpad Minus + Down arrow on keyboard or Back + D-pad down on controller to hide info for current track
Numpad Minus + Right arrow on keyboard or Back + D-pad right on controller for next track in a playlist (note that not every game is setup with a playlist and are single tracks, but most are in playlists)
Numpad Minus + Left arrow on keyboard or Back + D-pad left on controller for previous track in a playlist

The controller mappings for these functions are also listed on the controller overlay (Numpad Minus + Numpad Plus on keyboard or Back + Start on controller during play).

There are a lot of new options in the Configurator as well, so feel free to play around with those. If your hardware is capable (i.e. a decent dedicated video card and a decent CPU) then I would recommend using the Esper C64 shader.

To update on the progress of the LB side of things. I've imported the first 200 new games and, of those, about 75% were recognized/correct, which isn't too bad. That's a little better than I normally expect, so hopefully me posting updates in here of what I was adding, as I was adding it, helped after all  I'd like to thank all the folks that work on that side of things as it certainly makes my job a lot easier! I've still got a fair bit of work ahead but it's getting closer.

C64 Dreams v0.35 Public Testing Download

If you run into any issues, please let me know!

[tristeele]

Ok. The C64 is my alltime favorite system and this is just AWESOME!!!!! Thank you for all the hard work! 

A quick request (or two or three): Storm, Street Surfer, Commando Libya? Even better - is there an explanation on how to add our own games to the set? I LOVE THIS!!!!

[Zombeaver]

I can add all three in but it'll have to be in the following update because all 500 spots are accounted for for v0.35.

Adding your own is easy. You just have to take your .d64/.t64/whatever, name it after the game title, and drag it onto !Automator.bat in the Utilities\Creation Tools folder. Then take the resultant folder and put it in the Games folder.

[LineOf7s]

Awww.  I wish you hadn't told us that.  Now I'm going to be busy for the next six months.

[tristeele]

1 hour ago, Zombeaver said:

I can add all three in but it'll have to be in the following update because all 500 spots are accounted for for v0.35.

Adding your own is easy. You just have to take your .d64/.t64/whatever, name it after the game title, and drag it onto !Automator.bat in the Utilities\Creation Tools folder. Then take the resultant folder and put it in the Games folder.

I'm in no hurry! I've waited 30+ years for a setup like this for C64! I have many front end setups: multiple arcade machines, cocktail cab, arcade 1up, touch screen, jukebox, mutiple HTPC setups and NONE of them have a really good working version of C64 like this. I cannot express how much I really, truly appreciate the work here. If I can help with gathering media or whatever for the games I have requested (and will) as well as other peoples requests, lmk... I run my own Managed IT company and work mostly from my home office, so I am ALWAYS on the net looking for crazy stuff!

 

Thanks again! 

[tristeele]

On 11/10/2020 at 9:59 PM, Zombeaver said:

50 more done. That puts it at 2300 currently! I've made it through all of "I" as well.

  Reveal hidden contents

3-D Skramble
Andy Capp
C64 Snail Maze
Elevator Eric
Ewe Woz 'Ere
Fallen
Indoor Soccer
Indoor Sports
Indy Heat
Inertiania - Land of Motion
Infection
Infinite Inferno
Infinity Worlds in the Space
Infodroid
Ingrid's Back
Inherits of the Throne
Inner Space
Inner Space Plant Attack
Insanity in San Francisco
Insects in Space
Inspector Gadget
Interceptor Base
Interchange
Intergalactic Cage Match
International 3D Tennis
International 5 A-Side
International Basketball
International Ninja Rabbits
International Speedway
International Sports Challenge
International Team Sports
International Truck Racing
Interview
Into the Nature
Intrigue!
Intruder - The Game
Intruder - The Space Quest
Invader
Invasion
Invasive Action
Invasor
Invert
Invest
IQ
Island of the Dragons
Iznogoud - The Grand Vizir
Run Demon Run
Snake-A-Space
Successors of the Throne, The - War for the Crown II
Survival Messenger Adventure

I've also made a new generic bezel (with a couple variations) which people might like.

I'm still making my way through and adding music to text adventures (and a few other games that just have no sound).

LOVE THIS BEZEL!

[Zombeaver]

1 hour ago, LineOf7s said:

Awww.  I wish you hadn't told us that.  Now I'm going to be busy for the next six months.

Haha

I include my automation tools to make it easy for people to add in their own stuff in the interim between updates, but if there's stuff that you specifically want added please let me know! I always want to get people's requests for each update because chances are whatever you want added someone else would want added (myself included).

1 hour ago, tristeele said:

I'm in no hurry! I've waited 30+ years for a setup like this for C64! I have many front end setups: multiple arcade machines, cocktail cab, arcade 1up, touch screen, jukebox, mutiple HTPC setups and NONE of them have a really good working version of C64 like this. I cannot express how much I really, truly appreciate the work here.

Happy to hear it! It's the culmination of about two and a half years of solid work to get it to this point (with a long way to go) so I'm glad it's appreciated.

1 hour ago, tristeele said:

If I can help with gathering media or whatever for the games I have requested (and will) as well as other peoples requests, lmk... I run my own Managed IT company and work mostly from my home office, so I am ALWAYS on the net looking for crazy stuff!

Well I'm certainly on the lookout for additional manuals at this point. I've pored over quite a few different resources to get the current ones but I know there's still more stuff out there.

The primary resources I used were:

https://www.mocagh.org/index.php - this site specifically focuses on adventure games and RPGs, but if they have a manual, it's probably the best version (and in some cases the only version) of it you'll find anywhere so anytime I was looking for something that fell into those categories that's where I would start. In some cases the listing might not specifically be for a C64 version, but in many cases the manuals are shared across multiple platforms (like C64, Amiga, Apple II, etc. all in one manual, for example). I think I've gotten pretty much everything from here that I could for the time being though.

http://69.60.118.202/commodore/games/ - this is a good all-rounder listing. It should be noted that there are separate lists both for "Games" and "Games-Casette" (which is a little bizarre but whatever). I think I've gotten just about everything here that I could at the moment though.

https://www.gamesdatabase.org/list.aspx?DM=0&system=commodore_64&manual=1&sort=Game - this is another good all-rounder once you set it to C64 + Has Manual. Again, I think I've already got pretty much everything from here though.

https://archive.org/download/Commodore64Manuals - another all-rounder. Once again, I think I've scoured this one pretty thoroughly.

https://www.c64games.de/phpseiten/spielesuche.php - okay so this one I have not completely gone through. It's got a ton of stuff, some of which I've not seen anywhere else, but the problem is that they have everything under a single listing for each game (which may or may not have manuals) which made parsing through all that pretty difficult. Then to make matters worse, sometimes what you'd get even when it says it has a manual is a simple text document (which I won't use) or sometimes it'll be a manual that's exclusively in German (multi-lingual manuals are fine as long as English is one of them).

Thankfully, @TimberlAndRE was gracious enough to write a python script earlier today that would pull that entire database into a spreadsheet so that it can be filtered down to see what actually has manuals or not. The aforementioned text/German-only is still an issue, but this at least lets you immediately see whether something even has some form of manual from the get-go rather than having to go to the listing and check (and there are links to download them directly). This is going to be very handy. As you can imagine that's going to help a whole lot when it comes to going through all of that stuff.

You can find it here:

c64games_complete.xlsx

I have about a half a dozen other sites that I checked as well like http://infodoc.plover.net/manuals/index.html , http://infocom.elsewhere.org/gallery/greybox.html , http://www.c64sets.com/boxed_sets.html , etc. but they were generally pretty niche things that I don't think have much, if anything left for the current collection.

The only real requirements that I have for manuals are:

1) They have to be some type of actual manual scan, not just a text document that someone typed up (or an image of a text document that someone typed up)
2) English has to be one of the included languages
3) It has to have some sort of pertinent data in it; this is a rare issue to have but there are some manuals I've come across - like the one for Hacker for example - that contain essentially zero information. In the case of Hacker it's literally just boot instructions (which aren't relevant to C64 Dreams end users to begin with) and then "Now you're on you're own!". That sortof makes sense within the context of the game, but I'm not going to include a manual just for its own sake if there's nothing there that would matter to anyone. It's just taking up HDD space at that point.
4) It needs to be legible. I've come across a few in my search that I honestly have no idea why the scanner bothered to upload it anywhere because the quality is so poor that it's literally unreadable. I don't need immaculate quality (though that'd certainly be nice) but I draw the line at the point that you can't read it at all.

It should also be noted that, wherever possible, I include all the relevant documents, not just the manual-proper. i.e. reference cards, extra story booklets, etc. so if you run across multiple documents for a single game, I want them all. I pack them all into a single .cbr.

I can take care of converting stuff over to .cbr format, so nobody needs to mess with that.

The temporary spreadsheet in the post for the public test has a list of which games have manuals in the "Manuals" column (noted by a "Yes").

Neither you nor anyone should feel any sort of obligation to do anything, but if you have any spare time I won't turn anyone away haha

[Zombeaver]

Okay, another progress update.

A couple of game changes from the public test:

Hawk Mission III - removed as it seems to be identical to Hawk Mission (1) other than the title screen
Hive - removed because this is actually just a freeze of the arcade  game that's playable in bars in the game Space Rogue (which is already included)

Added Slurpy and Kaiv in their place

I've added all the new games. Those are setup and good to go as far as metadata and media (at least as much as they can be at the moment anyway) and I've added all pertinent games to existing and new Best Of playlists. There's a new Best Of Vol. 5 which is full (128 games).

To Do:

I'm still going back and trying to update existing games with new metadata and media as much as I can. That is an absolute slog (because I can't just do it en masse, I basically have to do small groups at a time otherwise there's the potential for it to create a huge mess) so it's unlikely that that will be 100% complete on release but it will be better than it was in the previous release at least.

I still need to add the new Demoscene, SID, Magazines, and Diskmags but that shouldn't be too bad. After that I need to create some new clear logos for Diskmags, Magazines, Best Of Vol. 5, Commodore Force, Commodore Format, and Zzap!64.

I've submitted quite a few issues on github for the core, almost all of which have been resolved, but about 5 days ago I hooked up with sonninnos (the core maintainer) on Discord and we've been having a lot of good back and forth as I help him test updates. A few more things have been resolved through that but, because I'm OCD about this stuff, it also means I end up having to go back and retest stuff to make sure things haven't been broken. That's going to add a bit more time but it'll be worth it in the end.

I'm just gonna go ahead and call it that this is not going to be out by Christmas but I hope that it won't be too much longer. The biggest single thing is all the retroactive metadata/media cleanup which will basically take about as much or as little time as I decide I'm going to dedicate to it. For my own sanity's sake it's not going to be perfect, but I'll get through as much as I can.

[Z3R0B4NG]

On 12/16/2020 at 6:09 AM, tristeele said:

If I can help with gathering media or whatever 

The easiest way to contribute is to work on the LaunchBox Games Database and add / improve media etc. to the games that are in the collection or listed as being added with the next version. (and hopefully that will make its way into the release version at some point).  
C64 is a bit painful to work on though, lots of games with identical names so one needs to be super careful to actually have the correct game on the screen, in many cases that means firing up the game and looking what it actually looks like and that slows everything down to a crawl (also because you often get stuck playing for a few minutes while you are at it ?).  

Either way i don't see many people working on C64 when moderating in the DB (my gut feeling says there are at most 2 people working on it every now and then), so any help there is welcome (and i probably should get back into it myself).

[Zombeaver]

Pretty much, yep. That's one side of things that I really don't get involved with at all, so any contributions on that end are appreciated. I did submit a couple changes myself a few days back because of conflicts that were happening from duplicate game titles i.e. there were two entries that were literally just titled "Planetfall" and it was only showing one (the wrong one) when parsing for metadata (and you couldn't even select the correct one) so I submitted changes to indicate the publisher name in parenthesis to differentiate the two (this is common practice for C64 since there are many instances of different games with the same title) for it and a few other games that had the same issue.

As a bit of a sidenote, I really wish that whoever has uploaded all these different magazine covers for various C64 mags in which some games were released would stop adding them all as Box - Front. This is how some (many, actually) games were released and, as such, don't have a proper "cover" so I guess the rationale is that this is "your best bet", but I'll be honest - I will never, ever use any of those as a cover in C64 Dreams unless the magazine cover art is actually relevant to the game in question, which it almost never is. The DB is absolutely chock full of stuff like this:

The fact that 1000 Miler happened to be released in this particular issue of Loadstar does not suddenly make that cover, with a giant picture of a jukebox, the cover for 1000 Miler (a racing game) in my view. What's worse is that it's actually fairly common for these games to have custom fan box covers already. I don't know who in their right mind would ever want a mostly-unrelated magazine cover over those. In the case of C64 Dreams, even if that's not available and my options are one of these magazine covers or a screenshot, I will always use a screenshot. I hate to say that given that someone has clearly put in work to upload that stuff but it's not particularly helpful in my view. It's literally just something that I'm going to immediately delete.

And there are lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots (ad nauseum) of these. There are significantly better ways to improve the DB than adding all these i.e. adding more entries to begin with, adding publisher, genre, etc. info and a description. If there's an actual cover great, if not, that's okay. Maybe some kind soul will make a custom one at some point or, if not, I'll just use a screenshot.

[Z3R0B4NG]

Yeah i'm not a fan of those either, they kind of need their own category in the database so it is optional, Fanart - Box - Front wouldn't work either, reconstructed also makes no sense...  
maybe Advertisement? ...nah not really.  

Even worse are those collections with 50 or 100 games, but i guess this is what you get wíth a system that has this much Homebrew ... and it was indeed published that way.  
And you also have to take into consideration that the people who coded these little games at home were probably really proud when their little homebrew game made it onto a magazine so other people got to see it (and now we do because of it),
It is at least a noteworthy achievement of some sort and i wouldn't want to hide that. ...just maybe not as box cover in the frontend?  

[Zombeaver]

Yeah I was trying to think what those should be categorized as and I'm really not sure. Advertisement seems like about the closest thing that exists currently. I wish there was like a Misc Media category or something. Box front though definitely doesn't make sense to me. It's particularly odd in cases where games already have a nice fan box because those will typically take priority depending on people's image priorities.

On a related note I've been trying to rearrange image categories where a fanart box or a screenshot has been used as a cover from box front into fanart box front BUT exceptions are made when there's also a 3D box because while in box view (which is the default in the included version of LB) 3D Boxes take priority over fanart boxes (and there is no Fanart 3D Box category) which looks very bizarre when you have almost all 2D boxes and then a random 3D box in the mix, so in those cases they're set as a standard box front even though they're not. Image priorities are a premium feature so unfortunately those can't be used in the included LB setup.

I really wish there was a way to have like a "kiosk mode" version of LB for people like me, eXo, etc. who release sets like this where we could use all the premium features with a version of LB that we distribute but everything was locked in so changes couldn't be made (so that people wouldn't just have a free premium version). I'd use things like badges, image priorities, etc. if I could, and it'd serve as a nice advertisement for "Hey look what you can do with premium Launchbox!" You could still import the set into an existing version of LB and do whatever you want with it, of course. Alas...

[Z3R0B4NG]

A Kiosk mode like that is not the worst idea, one could even extend that to a custom skinned Big Box Mode.  
I think there is already functionality where you have like a main admin account that is password protected and a guest mode so no one else messes stuff up, but that is only in Big Box and only for a local install,
but half the work is practically done, a few more tweaks and we are almost there. At least in BigBox idk if that functionality is in LaunchBox as well.  
The question on the development end is just how to hand out Keys for this, would this be something that should be monetized etc. 

And once i throw my own license file in the folder i'm no longer in "guest" mode but can use it normally.  

Sounds like a Feature Request...

[Zombeaver]

I talk with eXo fairly regularly on Discord so I'll hit him up and see what he thinks, he may have talked to Jason already about something like this. I don't know how many other projects are out there like these but seems like it would be really beneficial for them. We can regroup with Jason once we hash out what we have in mind.

As a quick update, all the secondary platform stuff (SID, magazines, etc.) have been added and I've created clear logos for Magazines, Diskmags, and Best Of Vol. 5.

I'm... somewhat undecided on whether to make logos for each magazine. That was the original plan but truthfully that sets a bit of a precedent which becomes increasingly problematic as I add in more publications over time. It would also mean that I would likely need to make them for each Diskmag publication as well and it's just sortof opening up a bigger and bigger can of worms. So I guess not so undecided afterall...

Anyway, at this point it's basically just mooooore metadata and media cleanup and then some final testing. I found a pretty substantial bug in a recent update to the core which thankfully was a quick fix, but that's why we test.

[Z3R0B4NG]

logos for each magazine sounds a bit much OCD, and like the kind of thing that will just slow everything down without anyone really caring all that much.
mags and stuff are fine bonus content, but lets keep the focus on the games.
clear logos for categories are nice if you use BigBox but that is as far as i'd go with that.

just my 2 cents of course.