[C64 Dreams (massive curated C64 collection)]

On 2/19/2026 at 9:38 AM, UK_john said:

Just wondering if I can buy you a coffee, or make a donation for this awesome work!

Thanks! Much appreciated! 🍻

[C64 Dreams (massive curated C64 collection)]

I ended up finding some of them. Updated list of what's missing is below.

 

747 Flight Simulator

Almazz

Ball Game, The

Beatle Quest

Betrayal

Big Game Fishing

Bone Cruncher

Bounty Hunter (River Software)

Budokan - The Martial Spirit

Bugbomber

Bushido- Way of the Warrior

Champ, The

Chuck Rock

Citadel

Citadel of Corruption

Cyberdyne Warrior

Daffy Duck

Dark Sky Over Paradise, A

Deus Ex Machina

Dragon's Kingdom

Dylan Dog

Elvira II

Evil Crown

F1 GP Circuits

Faerie

Final Blow

Galaxy Force II

Grave Yardage

Hocus Focus

Ice Station Zero

Intensity

International Team Sports

Iron Lord

Katakis

MACH - Maneuverable Armed Computer Humans

Metabolis

Millenium Warriors

Mind Pursuit

Mini Golf (Magic Bytes)

Moonfall

Mystery Voyage

Neverending Story II, The

Odyssey, The

Over The Net

Powerboat USA - Offshore Superboat Racing

Purple Heart

Quann Tulla

Soldier of Fortune

Taskmaster

ThunderJaws

Tim Love's Cricket

Time Soldier

Trollbound

Warlock - The Avenger

Wings of Fury

[C64 Dreams (massive curated C64 collection)]

36 minutes ago, momaw27 said:

Hey @Zombeaver!

First off, THANK YOU for your tremendous work on this project.  Of all the thousands of games lurking on my multiple HDDs, C64 Dreams is by far the program that gets the most use, bar none.  I grew up with the C64, but only had a small selection of games as I was at the mercy of friends who's parents had more money than mine.  Your work allows me to relive my past (and share it with my children), so for that, thank you!

I noticed a few posts up that you need manual scans of quite a few games.  Are you still in need of those?

And, I'd like to offer my time to help the next version of C64 Dreams.  If you need any playtesting, testing in general, or anything else that would help the release of the next version, please don't hesitate to ask.  I know this is a passion project of yours and you may not want any outside help, of which I completely understand... but, if you do want a pair of extra objective eyes, I'm willing.

At any rate, please know your work is MUCH appreciated and the next release of C64 Dreams is highly anticipated by not only me, but quite literally thousands of people who thank you as well \m/

Beau

Thank you! That means a lot and it's greatly appreciated.

I ended up finding some of the ones that I listed, but I am still looking for quite a few. The ones I'm looking for are below. There are of course more than just these that are missing manuals, but there's quite a few homebrew titles that never had physical releases and thus never had manuals. All of these there's credible reason to believe would have physical manuals/instruction inlays available. In the event that I have something else that I'd like some help with, I'll certainly ask. Every bit of help is appreciated. I'm still working quite actively on this, even when I'm quiet in here. Just a lot of work left to do. I attack one thing then another, then another, then circle back around to something I was making my way through previously, and so on, to keep myself from going insane 😅 It's a process, but I'll get through it.

747 Flight Simulator

Almazz

Amazon Warrior

Arcana

Ball Blasta

Ball Game, The

Beatle Quest

Betrayal

Big Game Fishing

Blue Baron

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

Deliverance (The Power House)

Deus Ex Machina

Dragon's Kingdom

Droids

Dylan Dog

Elvira II

Enforcer, The

Equinox

Evil Crown

F1 GP Circuits

Faerie

Final Blow

Floyd the Droid

Galaxy Force II

Gertie Goose - The Lost Eggs

Gods & Heroes

Grave Yardage

Groovy Garden

He-Man and the Masters of the Universe

Hercules

HES Games

Hi Bouncer

Ice Station Zero

Intensity

International Team Sports

Iron Lord

Island of Dr. Destructo, The

Jet Strike Mission

Katakis

Kayak

Knight Games II

Legend of Sinbad, The

Legend of the Amazon Women, The

Little Green Man

MACH - Maneuverable Armed Computer Humans

Mandroid

Master Blaster (Zeppelin Games)

Max Torque

Mean City

Metabolis

Miami Dice

Millenium Warriors

Mind Pursuit

Mini Golf (Magic Bytes)

Moonfall

Mr. Mephisto

Mystery Voyage

Nam

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

Psi-Droid

Purple Heart

Quann Tulla

RISK - Rapid Intercept Seek and Kill

Rubicon

Samurai Warrior - The Battles of Usagi Yojimbo

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

Wings of Fury

[C64 Dreams (massive curated C64 collection)]

3 hours ago, tiret said:

OK, guys. After upgrading to Windows 11, my setup broke. Now I don't have any applications that can run VB scripts. VB script isn't even listed as an optional Windows feature. So I changed the application path in the "Edit Metadata" dialog box in LB to Game.bat and now the game runs. But something's not right. For example, pressing Combo + Start now only launches the RetroArch menu and doesn't show any controls or notes. I also made a mistake and updated all cores in RA, so I guess I messed up all the previous save states.
Anyway, I need to know how to translate the following VBS code to something that my system can run, for example Powershell?
Set WshShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell" ) 
WshShell.Run chr(34) & "Game.bat" & Chr(34), 0 
Set WshShell = Nothing 
WScript.Sleep 2000
Dim ObjShell :Set ObjShell = CreateObject("Wscript.Shell")
ObjShell.AppActivate("Retroarch VICE")

VBS scripts still work in 11, you just may need to enable them as an optional feature.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/windows-itpro-blog/vbscript-deprecation-timelines-and-next-steps/4148301

In the next version of C64 Dreams vbs scripts will be removed as I was able to replicate the functionality purely in batch scripting.

My suggestion for the time being would be to redownload v0.60 and just enable VBS in W11.

[C64 Dreams (massive curated C64 collection)]

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.

[C64 Dreams (massive curated C64 collection)]

9 hours ago, {c}Guy123 said:

@Zombeaver I don't know if this would interest you or anyone using the c64 dreams project, but I took the time to take the amazing work of the OneLoad project and integrate it into c64 dreams. So any of the games that were the same, the d64 files or tapes( if there were any) were replaced with the .crt files so games load instantly. I then updated all the .vbs or .bat files as needed. 

If there's any interest, I'll zip up the finished work and post it. 

Let me know,

- Bob

 

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.

[C64 Dreams (massive curated C64 collection)]

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

[C64 Dreams (massive curated C64 collection)]

22 hours ago, kyzumi said:

Thank you SO much for this project! I Love it! I am having one issue though: How do I access the retroarch menu after a game is loaded? none of my hotkeys respond (I even changed them before loading a core and still won't respond after game is loaded)

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.

[C64 Dreams (massive curated C64 collection)]

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.

[C64 Dreams (massive curated C64 collection)]

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

[C64 Dreams (massive curated C64 collection)]

1 hour ago, seaview59 said:

Here's that second page upscaled with topaz for comparison. To me it's slightly more readable although a bit more blurry.

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.

[C64 Dreams (massive curated C64 collection)]

3 hours ago, launchretrogirl2562 said:

my attempt at lunar leeper. (still tweaking though)

 

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.

[C64 Dreams (massive curated C64 collection)]

2 hours ago, JereBear said:

AI upscaling is not going to get you perfect results however. It's not there yet. I almost always spend quite a bit of time in Photoshop after the fact fixing shitty lines or messed up text

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.

2 hours ago, JereBear said:

You can find some extra models for Upscayl here if you wanted to see if you can get better results. https://github.com/upscayl/custom-models/blob/main/README.md

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.

41 minutes ago, seaview59 said:

topaz continues to work after 12 months, you just don't get updates to the software. It's a dumb plan. but the software is good, been using it for a few years now without updates, honestly never noticed what the updates did.

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.

[C64 Dreams (massive curated C64 collection)]

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/

[C64 Dreams (massive curated C64 collection)]

17 minutes ago, seaview59 said:

I use topazlabs.com and imgupscaler.com and with both you sometimes have to prep the image before hand in photoshop in order to get decent results. Usually the prep in photoshop is to blur the image or change the levels, if it was scanned so clearly you can see the halftone print pattern.

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. 

12 minutes ago, launchretrogirl2562 said:

Could you send me some examples of manuals or pages you would like to see upscaled. No guarantee of course, but I sure can give it a go and see what the result would be.
If it turns our to be successful I wouldn't mind to write you a how-to so you can do it yourself.

Definitely! I'll send some examples in a couple hours. Thanks for the offer!

[C64 Dreams (massive curated C64 collection)]

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.

 

[C64 Dreams (massive curated C64 collection)]

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.

[C64 Dreams (massive curated C64 collection)]

6 hours ago, stigzler said:

as long as your releases contain all files necessary rather than a 'cumulative update' where you only include new or updated files.

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.

[C64 Dreams (massive curated C64 collection)]

8 hours ago, stigzler said:

Found it. You'd forgotten to add this to 'Files To Import.txt':

Data\\Playlists\\C64 Dreams Magazines - Zzap!64.xml

Also, you'd omitted the '.xml' on the end of `Data\Playlists\C64 Dreams Magazines All Magazines`

Yep, I can confirm both of these are true. Both are corrected in the current WIP. Good catch.

8 hours ago, stigzler said:

Problem was it iterates through Files To Import.txt and uses its contents to auto copy the files therein. Errors in this spill through to the import.

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.

[C64 Dreams (massive curated C64 collection)]

So, looking at your video again, it looks like the icons for them aren't showing up which indicates a cache issue. I don't think I've ever seen that result in a completely ignored playlist before but admittedly I don't use BB a ton to begin with so maybe it's possible. You can refresh the BB cache manually via System Menu > Options > Image Cache; either that or you didn't pull the image files for them over. I assume it's the former though just based on the way it appears. This is why I said I would recommend testing in LB first. I wouldn't mess with BB at all until you've done that (note that LB needs to be set to Platform Category view to display correctly with C64 Dreams).

If that doesn't fix it then I have to assume that something has gone wrong with the import process, either something wasn't pulled over or the sections that need to be added to the parents and platforms xmls weren't added completely/correctly. You'll also want to double check that all of the playlists have been pulled over - Zzap isn't technically a platform, it's a playlist. It's C64 Dreams (Platform Category) > Magazines (Platform) > Zzap!64 (Playlist). The implication if Zzap, specifically, is missing would be that either the Zzap playlist wasn't pulled over or that the parents xml wasn't updated correctly to include it under the Magazines platform.

[C64 Dreams (massive curated C64 collection)]

It's also worth noting that based on your previous demonstration you're not actually using the XML that defaults to the local versions of the magazines because it's loading up in a browser. I'm not sure if this was intentional or not since you show the relevant folder where the local one is, but to be clear the Default Local one needs to be used if you want the default launch behavior to use the local files (which I assume you do since you downloaded them).

[C64 Dreams (massive curated C64 collection)]

They definitely work when imported into an existing collection when following my instructions.

[C64 Dreams (massive curated C64 collection)]

1 hour ago, stigzler said:

I was thinking they weren't available because not available in the Launchbox context menu, but they are totally available in BigBox!

I'm not sure what you mean by them being in Big Box. The manuals aren't integrated into LB/BB in any way (unless BB is finding them and doing something with them in the background which I'm unaware of, its unintended if so). As I said, they're toggleable in-game via the hotkeys. Numpad minus + numpad enter on keyboard or back + right thumb stick button on controller. You can navigate them via arrow keys on keyboard or right thumb stick on controller. Pressing the keyboard or controller hotkey combo again brings you back to the game. Viewing them via LB/BB is not intended. The reason for this is because, functionally, everything is frontend agnostic/non-dependent. All functionality from manual toggling to custom music for text adventures, etc. is handled via external scripts and apps that use relative pathing. From Launchbox's perspective it's essentially just Windows shortcuts. You could remove LB/BB from the equation entirely and it would still be fully functional by just starting the .vbs files in each game folder, magazine folder, demo folder, etc. This is by design so that someone could theoretically import into any frontend and it would still be functional.

I don't know what the issue is with the magazines beyond something has gone wrong with your importer since by your own demonstration they work in the normal version. I know that BB itself has its own separate cache, so that could be related. I would recommend checking in LB first.

 

[C64 Dreams (massive curated C64 collection)]

I'm not exactly sure what you're asking. If you mean in general, yes. If you mean with your importer I don't know as I haven't tested it. Manuals are toggled in-game via the keyboard/controller hotkeys. Magazines default to the web version but this can be changed if you replace with the included xml in the "Default Local" folder in the magazines subfolder.

I appreciate the contribution.

[C64 Dreams (massive curated C64 collection)]

3 hours ago, DCX918 said:

@Zombeaver First post from me, mainly to appreciate your hard work and devotion. C64 occupies a huge part of my early memories, so this is absolute gold!

 

Are you still accepting requests for the next update? If so, I'd love to see Pieces II (Protovision) and Space Station 23 (Vector 5 Games) added. They've taken up plenty of my free time recently, and would be worthy additions...

 

Thanks again!

 

 

 

Yes, I always accept requests for subsequent releases. Space Station 23 is actually already in the current WIP for the next version. I'll add Pieces II to the list as well. Glad you've enjoyed C64 Dreams!