[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!

[C64 Dreams (massive curated C64 collection)]

Mega Bezel is already included. I have a couple different options for screens and bezels that can be used in the Configurator (C64 Dreams\C64 Dreams\Configurator.exe). You will need to use one of the listed options as the aspect ratio will be incorrect otherwise.

[C64 Dreams (massive curated C64 collection)]

9 hours ago, paulitix said:

Should we be updating the Launchbox or leaving it at 13.3 b4 ?

It should be okay to update. Just make sure that you've also using the hotfix for C64 Dreams from 6/5/23 as it fixes one of the included plugins so that it will work with newer versions of Launchbox.

[C64 Dreams (massive curated C64 collection)]

Then there's something even more dramatically wrong with your system or files. I don't know if you've moved something you shouldn't have, didn't extract the entire archive, have a corrupted archive, have antivirus software that's interfering, have some other unknown software that's interfering. You've given me very little information so there isn't much I can tell you. You download the 7z, extract it wherever you want, start Launchbox.exe. That's literally the entire "setup" process. If that doesn't work, there's a problem with the archive that you downloaded, your system, the software that you're running, or some combination thereof. But again, the extent of the instructions to simply use this as intended is 1) download C64 Dreams v0.60.7z 2) extract it wherever you want (except for Program Files) 3) go into the extracted folder and start Launchbox.exe. That's it.

[C64 Dreams (massive curated C64 collection)]

Launchbox is included in the archive. You just extract the 7z anywhere you want and then start Launchbox.exe in the base folder.

C64 Dreams is designed to function as its own standalone collection (with Launchbox included) by default, just like eXoDOS.

[C64 Dreams (massive curated C64 collection)]

Again, all I can tell you is that something you've done during that process is wrong. I can't tell you what that is because I don't know what you have or haven't done.

Many users import the collection into their own libraries without issue using those same instructions. You could always use it in the standalone library as provided.

[C64 Dreams (massive curated C64 collection)]

Based on your screenshot you've imported this into your own separate library. You've done something wrong but I couldn't tell you what as I don't know what you did or didn't do during that process. What I can tell is that if you follow the instructions in this post that it will work.

[C64 Dreams (massive curated C64 collection)]

Whatever is happening is an issue with your system. There's something seriously wrong with your system if 1) it's not restoring the native resolution when exiting and frankly if 2) you need to reduce the resolution to 1920x1080 to begin with. It sounds like your CPU isn't really up to par, as that's what audio problems generally indicate. You could try changing video_threaded to "true" which reduces hardware demands but increases input latency. All the other included settings that are relevant (hard sync, vrr runloop, and frame delay) are defaulted to their least-demanding values unless you've changed them. Beyond that the only thing I could suggest is to try changing the video driver setting to vulkan. If you do that though none of the shaders included in the configurator will work other than the Mega Bezel ones - which you absolutely should not use if you're having performance problems even without them - this means that you wouldn't have access to even the color-corrections shader, so everything would look a bit off, so I wouldn't exactly recommend that.

Try video_threaded = "true" and stop messing with the resolution settings. Start there.

...and in the long term get a better CPU.

[C64 Dreams (massive curated C64 collection)]

18 hours ago, Mateloaf said:

Hi, first off can i just say thank you this is an amazing collection. Being a bit of a noob though have one odd problem. When i load any game the sound is horribly distorted, if i set the output resolution in retro-arch to 1920x1080 60hz, this fixes this issue, however every time i leave a game it resets everything and i have to change it every time. i changed my resolution in Windows to 1920x1080 and this doesn't help, any ideas what i could be doing wrong (if i try to save configuration it says its failed to save, i have tried changing it by just loading retroarch in the C64 Dreams folder and this hasn't saved the setting when loading launchbox) my resolution at present on my monitor is 3840x2160 if that helps. Any advice is much appreciated!

You would need to go to C64 Dreams\C64 Dreams and start Configurator.exe. Then double-click on Config Editor at the bottom. Paste this below the other parameters:

video_fullscreen_x = "1920"
video_fullscreen_y = "1080"

Then change video_windowed_fullscreen to "false"

The refresh rate is already set to 60 by default.

Go to File > Save and then close and you should be set.