c64 C64 Dreams (massive curated C64 collection)

[peejaygee]

@Zombeaver just wanted to drop you a quick note to say thanks, for all your hardwork and effort in this, I'm a C64 fanboy, since I was 14 (and I'm nearly 50) and I always like to get my nostalgia hit. I look forward to any updates you do to this. Keep up the good work.

[orac31]

just a silly thing  you have the wrong rom under daley tompsons Decathlon

you have activision decathlon

[Elwyndas]

Thanks for this effort. The collection is awesome.

I'm having some trouble using it though.

First of all, I would like to be able to run it in a window on Windows 10. That doesn't seem to be possible. I'm not sure why that is. I use emulators on the side on my machine. It's not a gaming station. In regular VICE, I switch back and forth between full screen and window via ALT + D. You seem to have eliminated this option.

Secondly, I prefer to have the original frame of the C64 visible at all times, even if nothing is in there. It just gives me the original feeling. I don't see a way to get this done.

Thirdly, I'm struggling with performance. I have VICE 3.4 running on my machine without issues, full screen or not, with ReSid etc., but on C64 Dreams, the emulation stutters. However, when I switch to a different window through ALT+TAB, the emulation runs smoothly in the background. I followed the advice to change the cfg file, but none of the changes did anything.

[Retrofrogg]

@Z3R0B4NG those boxes look amazing. Did you get anywhere with this?

I'm not sure about the area surrounding the box though. I don't think that would look good in a grid type view. Maybe something like this would look better:

Even better would be a true 3D model, which you could rotate in Launchbox. I mentioned this top Jason and he seemed keen on the idea at the time - but I don't know how high up his priority list it is currently. 

Edited April 17, 2020 by Retrofrogg

[Retrofrogg]

Yeah that makes sense. The boxes with jewel case do look good. I wonder if any work has already been done here. 

[Zombeaver]

16 hours ago, orac31 said:

just a silly thing  you have the wrong rom under daley tompsons Decathlon

you have activision decathlon

It matched the wrong game and I didn't catch it. "Decathlon" aka "The Activision Decathlon" is the correct game, it's just listed under the wrong name in LB/matched incorrectly. I'll fix it in the next one.

6 hours ago, Elwyndas said:

First of all, I would like to be able to run it in a window on Windows 10. That doesn't seem to be possible.

Just press Numpad Minus + F. If you want to make it permanently run in a window, edit C64 Dreams\C64 Dreams\Retroarch\retroarch.cfg and change video_fullscreen = "true" to video_fullscreen = "false"

6 hours ago, Elwyndas said:

Secondly, I prefer to have the original frame of the C64 visible at all times, even if nothing is in there. It just gives me the original feeling. I don't see a way to get this done.

You would have to change the vice_zoom_mode line to "none". You will have to do this in both C64 Dreams\C64 Dreams\Retroarch\retroarch-core-options.cfg and every per-game option (.opt) file in C64 Dreams\C64 Dreams\Retroarch\config\VICE x64

You could do this en masse with a find and replace in all open documents (with them all open at the same time) with something like Notepad++ but keep in mind that there are multiple values that are specified from one game to the next - they're not all set to "maximum" even though most of them are - so you'd have to do find and replaces for vice_zoom_mode = "maximum", vice_zoom_mode = "medium", and vice_zoom_mode = "small", changing them all to vice_zoom_mode = "none".

6 hours ago, Elwyndas said:

Thirdly, I'm struggling with performance. I have VICE 3.4 running on my machine without issues, full screen or not, with ReSid etc., but on C64 Dreams, the emulation stutters.

If it's stuttering with video_hard_sync = "false", video_threaded = "true", and video_frame_delay = "0" then I'm not sure what to tell you other than get a better computer. It should work well on a potato with those settings. I've got a 9 year old dual-core / 4GB of RAM / integrated video office PC that doesn't stutter with those settings.

You could try increasing the audio latency value but I'm not sure how much that's going to help you if the other settings don't make a difference. You could also disable any shaders. Beyond that there's not much else I can do to reduce hardware requirements. Retroarch itself has more overhead than standalone VICE, there's no way around that. It should still be usable on very minimal hardware though.

[Retrofrogg]

Just added v0.20. Thanks you and congratulations on this collection. 

[kaichou]

Want to thank you for all the work you're doing.  Have you thought of touching base with the eXoDOS guys to see if they could spare time to help?  Extra people to help you gather, and custom software that might be adapted to helping you setup your catalog.  I know they are probably swamped, but never hurts to ask.

[Z3R0B4NG]

2 hours ago, Retrofrogg said:

@Z3R0B4NG those boxes look amazing. Did you get anywhere with this?

I'm not sure about the area surrounding the box though. I don't think that would look good in a grid type view. Maybe something like this would look better:

Even better would be a true 3D model, which you could rotate in Launchbox. I mentioned this top Jason and he seemed keen on the idea at the time - but I don't know how high up his priority list it is currently. 

Neither of the two guys responded to me (in 4 days now)... it was a long shot to begin with as those posts were made years ago.  
Of course the background would not be part of a 3D box.
But unless one of you guys takes the .psd template he uploaded and makes a complete new set based on that i don't think this is happening.  
 

This is what i'm currently looking at:  

they will of course not ALL look like that...

-------

The workflow i came up with looks kinda like this.  

First i deleted everything in the 3D box folder, then i threw this entire set from marcoooo in there, with all the unsorted mess that it is. 
Lets say 80% or so of the covers matched out of the box, the rest i have to add manually (and while i'm doing that i'm also fiddling with the LBDB, adding generic clear logos and generic tape fronts to plug holes and whatever else comes up, fixing a lot of naming conflicts in the database and so on, but its of course still only a drop in the bucket, it should make things a little faster/easier for Zomb whenever he decides to do a complete new scrape, it should be 5% less of a mess to deal with ? ).  

I marked everything as favorite, so LaunchBox sorts it to the top, now i'm in the process of going from the top to the bottom and checking every single one that has no 3D box if i can find one in the folder anyway (a lot actually)... everything where i can't find a 3D box i remove it from favorites so it gets sorted back to the bottom. I'm still in the process of doing that and it takes a lot longer than i would have thought... but i got time to kill and am bored.  

Once i'm done with that i'll scrape only the LBDB for 3D boxes on the stuff on the bottom that has none yet, then i'll check one by one to make sure there are no missmatches and that i didn't miss anything on my HDD, the ones i'm done with get marked as favorite again and go back to the top.  
for the remaining stuff i will then scrape EmuMovies for those basic bi**h 3D boxes with the placeholder spines, they are still better than nothing.  
do another pass on those if there are no missmatches...  sort them to the top when done 
and ultimately i will look how much is left and see if there are any of those fanart 3D boxes and fanart covers from that Lassiverans set that have been missed so far.  

But this is still ALL happening on my own LaunchBox.  

THEN, i'll copy that 3D box folder back over to the actual C64 Dreams 0.20 folder (i'll do a fresh extract from the .zip just to be on the safe side)  
Do another pass over everything because a hand full of filenames will already not be matching with my own LaunchBox anymore, but that should be 20 games tops, should not take that long, another hour or 5 tops.  
Once that is done i will tell Launchbox to delete all pictures that are not currently used and that should in theory delete all the mess behind the scenes (i can't do that on my own launchbox anymore because i got so many systems with 3D box sets and stuff that i don't want to delete by accident).  
So the set will not be the 7000+ random 3D boxes that you don't need from that set, but exactly the ones for the 2000 games in C64 Dreams 0.20 and you will all be able to drop it in your folder as is and done.  

 

...and this is all taking foreeeeever because i'm not only fiddling around to polish stuff on my own end, but i also fix any problem i see in the LaunchBox Database and upload as many missing pictures as i can while i'm at it (and its a MESS! This System NEEDS me. The Nintendo and Sega stuff is sorted so well people are fighting each other over how Pokemon is being spelled (with é or with e) back and forth back and forth... so silly, yesterday i fixed 7 games for C64 who had the exact same name, SEVEN! and only one shows up in LaunchBox when that happens, now they all show up.).  

tl;dr: multiple passes of polish are being applied, which is why this takes so long.  ...and i told you i'm a bit obsessive about this stuff.  

[Zombeaver]

1 hour ago, Z3R0B4NG said:

yesterday i fixed 7 games for C64 who had the exact same name, SEVEN!

Now you understand my pain lol

That's why when you talk about doing a fresh scrape my initial reaction is "Ehhhhhhhhhhhhh  "

I appreciate the work you're doing! The LB side of things is, perhaps ironically, on the lower side of my priorities for this project to be honest. That's literally the last thing I do once everything else is done. Obviously I want it to look as good as it can from a library presentation perspective, but the games themselves are always going to take priority here; so I'm all for any assistance on cleaning up media. It's probably something I would dedicate more time to once everything else is done, but that's so far off at this point that it ends up taking a bit of a back seat.

2 hours ago, kaichou said:

Want to thank you for all the work you're doing.  Have you thought of touching base with the eXoDOS guys to see if they could spare time to help?  Extra people to help you gather, and custom software that might be adapted to helping you setup your catalog.  I know they are probably swamped, but never hurts to ask.

Honestly, I'm good on that front. I made my own automation tools for this that make the backend process about as easy as it could possibly be. Curating and setting up the games isn't something that I want any help with to be honest - I'm way too OCD about it for that. The only things that I really have any interest in getting assistance with is 1) non-1080p resolution adjustment values for the games that use custom screen settings, simply because this is something I'm not able to do and 2) media cleanup like what Z3R0B4NG is doing, simply because it's a nice addition that I don't have to spend time on and won't give me anxiety if it isn't exactly right.

[Z3R0B4NG]

1 hour ago, Zombeaver said:

Now you understand my pain lol

That's why when you talk about doing a fresh scrape my initial reaction is "Ehhhhhhhhhhhhh  "

hehe yeah, but it also shows how different things were back then.  

They had no Internet, no way of knowing if some russian on the other side of the planet made a game with the same name or whatever, and they would not have cared anyway.  
Today you get a DMCA faster than you upload your little home made fan game, if it is even loosely based on somebody else's IP or happens to have a similar name.  

[Retrofrogg]

Looking at that .psd - is there a way to swap the cover image in the cover image layer with a different one?

Edited April 18, 2020 by Retrofrogg

[Z3R0B4NG]

Don't ask me, i don't even have Photoshop... my painting Skills end with MS Paint.

[Retrofrogg]

Happy to buy the template for you and supply some media if you're able to automate the process to make the 3D boxes.

[Zombeaver]

As I said previously you don't want to use Display Borders = Off. This creates bugs in multiple games. It's the reason I didn't use it in the first place. Flickering sprites, jittering images, weird unresponsiveness... it creates problems. Not in everything, but frequently enough that I had multiple (at least a dozen) issues in the span of only about 100 games tested.

[Zombeaver]

The crop doesn't cause the bugs that disabling the border does, that's why zoom is used rather than display border = off. I don't have a list of the specific ones that it was creating problems for, but it was quite a few in my testing. One that I remember is The Spy Who Loves Me. The stats portion at the bottom jitters up and down as you're playing if display border = off but is fine without it. There were quite a few instances of things that just did not work correctly with it on, to the point that I wouldn't recommend anyone using it in its current state. If it's fixed, I'll revisit it. Obviously I'd prefer to make things as easy as possible for everyone, but that's just not a good option currently.

[Zombeaver]

And I do think a vertical + horizontal crop function would be great. I'm not sure why it doesn't work like that already.

[mallaard]

Hello, I just wanted to thank you for posting this setup, what you've done is really awesome and far exceeds my biggest wishes for a C64 emulation setup. The custom controls alone are worth the download and installation.

For some reason when I was trying to import everything into my personal LB setup I was unable to get the game paths to work, I'm assuming I'm copy/pasting the xml files wrong somehow. Right now I'm doing it the dumb caveman way and just adding one batch file at a time, so I'm curating your already curated collection. However if you have any thoughts on what I might be doing wrong with the xml's or anything I'd appreciate the heads up!

[Zombeaver]

You need to copy the C64 Dreams subfolder, in its entirety, into your root LB folder. The download comes in a folder of C64 Dreams\C64 Dreams\other folders. The bolded folder needs to be copied into your root LB folder (so Launchbox\C64 Dreams), and not renamed.

You also don't use the .bat files to start the games. They're started with the .vbs files. They start the .bats while hiding the command prompt.

[Jimiga]

Extremely happy to see you're still working on this and making your way through the alphabet! This'll be a true historian's reference guide. I also love that it's not just a 'best of the best', rather that you're making well considered choices about including curios, little-known games, hidden gems etc. Great work and very much appreciated! Best wishes from Vancouver!