c64 C64 Dreams (massive curated C64 collection)

[Guynamedbilly]

Fantastic project  I just got it set up today.  I have a problem with the controller.

Your controller diagram shows Combo + Start = Show controls.  It also shows Combo + Start = Esc/Runstop.

So when I am playing a game and press Combo + Start, the image of the controls pops up for a second and then Retroarch closes.

What am I doing wrong?

Edited May 11, 2023 by Guynamedbilly

[Zombeaver]

9 hours ago, Guynamedbilly said:

It also shows Combo + Start = Esc/Runstop.

No it doesn't. Start, by itself, is Runstop. Show controls is combo + start. When combo is held down whatever the button you then press would normally do is disabled and the combo function is performed instead. i.e. A is normally fire but Combo + A is save state (and not fire).

9 hours ago, Guynamedbilly said:

So when I am playing a game and press Combo + Start, the image of the controls pops up for a second and then Retroarch closes.

Whatever is causing this is not related to what you're talking about. Quit is Combo + LB. So if it's quitting when you press Combo + start it's something weird happening with your controller. It could be you have something running in the background that's also reading controller inputs like say Xbox Gamebar. Steam can be setup to read them / do things as well. Both of these (and presumably other third party apps) can be configured to read inputs at all times to do things like focusing the Xbox app, focusing Steam, closing apps, etc. My suggestion would be to try disabling these one at a time and see when the issue resolves and go from there.

[Guynamedbilly]

7 hours ago, Zombeaver said:

Whatever is causing this is not related to what you're talking about.

TLDR: If you have Launchbox Premium, clear the Exit Game option Game Controller Mappings in Launchbox.  This option does not exist in the free version of Launchbox.

 

You are correct.  I was trying to diagnose it with every avenue I could think of, wondering if it was somehow reading the config of my other Retroarch folder where Select+Start is quit.  I didn't have any controller virtualization running, at least intentionally, but I turned everything else off to test and it still happened.  Well everything except Retroarch...and Launchbox.

In Launchbox options, there's a setting at the bottom of the list for game controller mappings.  You only get access to some of these functions if you have a premium Launchbox license, which I do, and I imported C64 Dreams into my existing library.  One of those functions is Exit Game which was mapped to Button 7 + Button 8.  So after clearing that mapping, it works as expected.

Thanks for the help.

 

 

[Zombeaver]

Ah yep, that would do it as well. Glad you got it sorted.

[Zombeaver]

I made a hotfix for a couple of issues. I've added a link to the opening post as well.

Download Hotfix

Place this in the base folder (next to Launchbox.exe) and extract/merge/overwrite. This makes the following changes:

-Updates the Extras plugin so that it will work with newer versions of LB; only relevant if you A) enable updates in the included version of LB or B) import into a separate newer version of LB (which doesn't exist yet)
-Fixes input mapping for players 2-4 in Frogs, Hockey Mania, and Shotgun

[DerSchlachter]

Many thanks for this wonderful C64 setup, it brings nostalgic feelings! The attention to detail is great. In particular, I think the background music for the magazines is super cool. I would like to add that to my own imported magazines as well. Is there somewhere I can read how to implement this? I am aware that under Launchbox I can run other applications before starting the actual application, but then the application is not closed when the magazine is closed. In addition to the bat file, you still have ahk scripts that control a few things.... that's how I would formulate it as an inexperienced person. Best regards!

[Zombeaver]

There's not really an easy way to do that. If there's a specific magazine that you're wanting added I'll consider it. I'm planning to at least add Commodore User and Commodore Disk User in the next version.

[grupoapunte]

Hey, did anyone tried to play Alice in wonderland? I get asked to insert side B and press spacebar... the other multidisk games did't request anything so far. Anyway I'm probably missing something but when pressing spacebar it goes to the next screen which is black and white with lines and text but nothing readable and nothing happened after several minutes.

Thanks.

[Zombeaver]

1 hour ago, grupoapunte said:

Hey, did anyone tried to play Alice in wonderland? I get asked to insert side B and press spacebar... the other multidisk games did't request anything so far. Anyway I'm probably missing something but when pressing spacebar it goes to the next screen which is black and white with lines and text but nothing readable and nothing happened after several minutes.

Thanks.

Some games do require manual disk swapping. Alice in Wonderland is such a case. The process for how to change disks is explained in the video.

[grupoapunte]

Thanks for the quick response... I honestly been looking mostly at the post and the controls but haven't seen the video. I have now successfully swapped disks but this continues to happen, the only difference is that it looks better than before.

Yes! it looked worst. I have tried other multidisk games according to your spreadsheet but didn't have any issues.

[Zombeaver]

You're probably either pressing spacebar too soon after changing them or you're not pressing insert/eject disk again after changing them, something to that effect. You have to use insert/eject > next or previous disk > insert/eject again and then continue. After the the last eject/insert you sometimes need to wait a couple seconds to make sure it reads the new disk. It definitely works. I played Alice in Wonderland in particular not that long ago.

Just tested for good measure:

[boon]

First off, amazing work Zombeaver! It has come a long way since i tried this, every console should have similar treatment.

I tried your guide to implement this into my launchbox which would've been so much less confusing if you would've named the launchbox folder "Launchbox C64 Dreams" or something to distinguish it from the subfolder. I seem to get it working but when using bigbox I missed at least one game which was the first one I looked for "Bubble Bobble", but only in bigbox mode.

When i tried out your launchbox pack in bigbox mode i could not do anything except scroll through "favorites" and "recent" looking like screenshot i uploaded. What did i miss?

[Zombeaver]

8 hours ago, boon said:

would've been so much less confusing if you would've named the launchbox folder "Launchbox C64 Dreams" or something to distinguish it from the subfolder.

C64 Dreams is designed to function as its own standalone package, so that's not going to happen.

8 hours ago, boon said:

I seem to get it working but when using bigbox I missed at least one game which was the first one I looked for "Bubble Bobble", but only in bigbox mode.

When i tried out your launchbox pack in bigbox mode i could not do anything except scroll through "favorites" and "recent" looking like screenshot i uploaded. What did i miss?

It's working fine here. You must have either not imported all the parents/playlists/platforms or something to that effect. Instructions for importing are in this post. You need to follow them.

[boon]

I cant see how the renaming one of the folders would interfere with the design of it being stand alone?

I tried to follow your instructions but must have missed something. My screenshot was from testing your package in bigbox mode. Maybe I can´t have launch box installed elsewhere before i run your version? I.e registers is messing your version up?

[Zombeaver]

3 hours ago, boon said:

I cant see how the renaming one of the folders would interfere with the design of it being stand alone?

Because the project isn't called "Launchbox C64 Dreams" so making the folder that you're presented with when unzipping it named that would be rather odd. When you install a game on Steam the folder it installs isn't called "Windows Doom Eternal" or "Steam Doom Eternal" either. C64 Dreams is what it's called, so that's what the folder is named. The C64 Dreams subfolder can function on its own regardless of Launchbox or any frontend and is portable, so it's also called C64 Dreams. It's not as complicated as you're making it out to be, you just have to read the instructions.

3 hours ago, boon said:

My screenshot was from testing your package in bigbox mode.

Then there's nothing wrong here to begin with. You just have to select the category on the left...

If you add your own license to my package this is what it will look like:

Choose the C64D category (the only option, because there are no other categories here) and it'll take you to this:

"Games" will take you to the playlists within games. You can also choose "All games" from there, etc.

You can customize the views as you see fit. If you're using a controller you can change them with R3.

[boon]

Wow.. I feel as old as i should I guess.. Apparently I never tried selecting categories 😩. Thank you for your patience. Now I´ll just try to fix my original install or maybe just reuse yours 🙂

[Zombeaver]

27 minutes ago, boon said:

Wow.. I feel as old as i should I guess.. Apparently I never tried selecting categories 😩. Thank you for your patience. Now I´ll just try to fix my original install or maybe just reuse yours 🙂

No worries! Glad to help. We all have those days haha 😅

[boon]

So i managed to fix my install (never start with these things late at night, only worked years ago ). However i really would've liked your categories to be nested under a Commodore 64 category, a sub category?, I have a slight memory i have asked this before and it couldn't be done back then. Has anything changed or would you recommend another approach?

[Zombeaver]

You can't. C64 Dreams has to be a platform category to itself because that's the only way to have enough levels to have playlists for the different categories of content.

Platform Category > Platform > Playlists

i.e.

C64 Dreams > Magazines > Zzap!64

C64 Dreams > Games > RPGs

etc.

You can't have Computer (or Commodore 64 or anything else) > C64 Dreams > Magazines > Zzap!64 because it's too many levels.

[Zombeaver]

A new hotfix is now available. This should be the last one. You can grab it here. This is a combination of the previous hotfix as well as new fixes so you only need to grab this one if you hadn't gotten the previous hotfix, and if you did install the previous one you can overwrite with this one. Like last time, this needs to be placed in the base folder next to Launchbox.exe and then extract/merge/overwrite. Make sure Launchbox isn't running when you do this.

- Corrected joystick port mapping for players 2-4 in all games that used 3+ joystick adapters (multitap). Some were correct as-is, others needed adjustments. Games corrected are below:

Frogs
Hockey Mania
Shotgun
IK+
Ivan 'Ironman' Stewart's Super Off Road
Bugbomber*
SNAFU '64
Zatacka

*the port mapping has been corrected but it needs to be noted that the joystick controls for ports 3 and 4 don't seem to entirely work - player 3 can't move up and down and player 4 can't use bombs. This has been true in every version of the game I've tested (and I've tested several). I've also tested the emulated Kingsoft adapter (which Bugbomber uses) in Joyride v1.6 and everything worked as expected there which makes me think that there is just something odd/wrong going on with this particular game.

- Slightly adjusted aspect ratio for Mega Bezel as it was just a little bit wider than it should have been previously

- Made some slight adjustments to brightness and color settings in 4k Mega Bezel presets

- Corrected all custom cropping configs so that they now maintain the correct aspect ratio when using the Mega Bezel shader (standard shaders were unaffected). There are 96 games where this is relevant.

- Changed Mega Thrusterball's auto-warp value to "Ignore Audio" to bypass load screen (which plays music)

- Corrected Barry McGuigan World Championship Boxing and Cloud Kingdoms to use Joystick Port 1

- Added missing notes overlay for Dominion

- Updates the Extras plugin so that it will work with newer versions of LB; only relevant if you A) enable updates in the included version of LB or B) import into a separate newer version of LB

I've actually been hard at work on the next version already rather than taking my typical couple-month break from it. That's probably still going to happen at some point but I figured if I can keep going and not feel burned out I should. I have to kindof shift gears mentally when I'm working on C64 Dreams versus anything else so I guess if I can still maintain focus I should. I'm actually really excited about some of the new things that'll be in the next version, but that can wait until next time 😉