c64 C64 Dreams (massive curated C64 collection)

[Zombeaver]

Okay, so I've finished sorting through the 3D boxes for the entire collection. @edgemundo has been a real champ working on 3D boxes to fill in the gaps.

This does not account for the games that have no cover whatsoever, however, that will need a fanart box created for them. If anyone has any desire to help with those, I've attached a zip of the screenshots used as covers for the relevant games. There are 430 of them.

Temp-Screenshot.zip

At this point I'm just going to let edgemundo do his thing while I work on backend cleanup and some final testing. We're almost there!

[celestial]

Zomb -

 

I just discovered C64 Dreams and have it up and running. This is INCREDIBLE. I am blown away by your attention to detail. What a fantastic project. Thank you for your efforts and please continue the work!

[Zombeaver]

Alright, so that was a fun little rabbit hole. @edgemundo sent me a bunch of boxes (thanks again!) and I ended up making / remaking a bunch (383) myself as well. Turns out marcoooo's boxes are a modified version of Mr. Retrolust's arcade boxes so, with some fiddling, I made the modifications to the template/PSD actions/bats from there to recreate the same format that he used; and now the process from beginning to end is super quick and easy, and I can create/update the boxes as needed over time. As an added bonus, I ended up finding some better covers for some games while working on these as well.

If anyone wants to upload any of these to the LBGDB, they are welcome to do so. You can find them here:

3D Boxes.zip

I may end up creating a few more here and there if anything grabs my attention but by and large my sweep through the collection is complete.

Everything's looking nice and snazzy now. Minus the ones that are currently just a screenshot, of course, but I can live with that for the time being.

The metadata cleanup is complete (or at least as complete as it's going to be for the time being). Everything that I could match I have, any incorrect matches that I've found have been fixed, anything that was already matched but had additional metadata on the db but not in the collection has been updated (that I found), and every game has, at the very least, a genre tag.

The last thing I'm doing is auditing to see what needs to have screenshots added and adding them as much as I can (this is basically only remaining for games that have no db entry at all and need screenshots added manually). I may or may not finish that, it just depends on whether or not I get too tired of it haha

After that, all I need to do is make two versions of the Magazines xml for import (one for default launch with web versions and one for default launch with local versions) per @mordroc's request a while back [edit: done], update the Import and XML insert text files [edit: done], do a bit of testing with importing the collection into my main LB setup, and then some backend tidying.

[Z3R0B4NG]

That reminds me i collected a bunch of C64 covers a few months back... the mega account should still be up.  
MEGA 

they should for the most part be Cassette covers with front, spine and back, i put a few days into that and it didn't go anywhere, maybe you can do something useful with it if you are now screwing around with 3D boxes yourself.  

Edited January 14, 2021 by Z3R0B4NG

[Zombeaver]

I'd be interested in taking a look but that link doesn't seem to be working for me. That's just taking me to my own Mega account page when I click on it.

Filling in missing screenshots is actually going quicker than I thought. I'm about 75% of the way through those.

[Z3R0B4NG]

oops... try this one MEGA  

[Zombeaver]

There's some good stuff in there @Z3R0B4NG!

I don't suppose the source for those also had scans for the reverse sides of any of those? The reason I ask is it was common - as demonstrated by those images - for games released on tape to include the manual on the tape cover itself. Sometimes this spanned onto the flip side of the cover, sometimes it didn't. I've gotten several new manuals out of what's there already, so that's awesome. I break them up into separate pages, combine them into a .cbr, and we're good to go.

They're missing the inside scans for some of them though - Code Masters did this quite a bit. I've found some of them on Mobygames and combined them together (since the existing elements from your set are generally higher quality). If your source for these has scans of the inside covers, I would be very interested in getting them.

[edgemundo]

You've probably found these already, but the sites has a few manual/inside cover scans

https://www.c64tapes.com/

http://c64sets.com/boxed_sets.html

https://retrocollector.org/index.php?page=1&system=1&media=123456789AZ&type=0123&col=1234&publisher=-1&title=&region=-1&box=-1&sort=0&release=8370

[Zombeaver]

I'm familiar with c64sets (which has nice scans but a pretty limited selection) and retrocollector; the latter of which, in rather cancerous fashion, puts a nice big watermark on everything, so I refuse to use them. To add insult to injury they have some extremely rare media there that I haven't seen anywhere else, yet have the audacity to hamfistedly slap their shit on it like a video rental store out of the 90s. The preservation of tangential media like covers and manuals, while not quite as important as the preservation of the games themselves, is still important; and behavior like that actively damages that effort. /rant

I haven't seen c64tapes before though, and it looks like they have some nice scans of some of those inside covers that I mentioned, so thanks! That should help.

[edgemundo]

Also this site has a few:https://retro-video-gaming.com/commodore-64-collection/

[Zombeaver]

Not familiar with that one either, I'll take a look.

For reference, the primary sites that I used for manuals were:

https://www.mocagh.org/loadpage.php?thelist=2
http://69.60.118.202/commodore/games/
https://archive.org/download/Commodore64Manuals
https://www.gamesdatabase.org/list.aspx?DM=0&system=commodore_64&manual=1&sort=Game
https://www.c64games.de/phpseiten/spielesuche.php
http://www.c64sets.com/boxed_sets.html
http://infodoc.plover.net/manuals/index.html
http://infocom.elsewhere.org/gallery/greybox.html

These generally weren't great for tape manuals though. http://69.60.118.202/commodore/games/ has a decent selection in the tapes subcategory, but generally these sites focused more on separate manuals, i.e. not ones that were included as part of the tape cover.

The other thing to keep in mind is that oftentimes manuals for 8-bit PCs were cross-platform, and are oftentimes sites only have them listed under one (that isn't C64). The most common crossover is between ZX Spectrum and C64, but in some cases you might see Spectrum, C64, Amstrad, and Atari 8-bit all sharing one manual, and have it only listed under one of those platforms on the site they're uploaded to, so that complicates matters.

[Zombeaver]

For anyone interested @Z3R0B4NG sent me this link which contains the files in question, and do indeed include the inside scans. It's uh... pretty eye-watering. Gonna have to dive deep into this over the weekend. What a treasure trove.

https://ia801709.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/18/items/Ultimate_Tape_Archive_V2.0/Ultimate_Tape_Archive_V2.0.zip

[Zombeaver]

Just to provide a quick update, I've finished pulling out and processing media from the tape archive for 60% of the collection. I've gotten 238 covers (the archive already includes separate images for the covers, but a lot of times they aren't cropped all that well so I usually end up having to crop them from the original complete inlay anyway) and 203 back covers, compared those against the ones that were already in the collection and replaced where it was an upgrade (which is most of the time), and made 3D boxes for many of those. The current count of 3D boxes that I've made is 556.

In addition to that I've created manuals from the inlays for about 230 games, about 70 of which were entirely new and the rest were upgrades/replacements of existing manuals. The current total manual count is 983, and I anticipate this will surpass 1000 by the time it's all done.

The process is slowed down by the fact that many of the manuals are in a format that's really not ideal for viewing in the manual viewer by default.

For example:

So what ends up happening is I have to cut these up into separate images for easier viewing:
You can, of course, always zoom in on any of these, but I want to have them formatted in such a way that by default that isn't really necessary. Any given page should be relatively easy to read as-is without doing anything (other than changing from one page to the next). Sometimes it's a relatively straightforward change like the above, other times not as much.

Original:

Edited:
Original:
Edited (editing the image so that the language order matches the first page):

...all this crap ends up taking time. But, as I said, I'm 60% through at this point so that's pretty good progress for a week I think. Just gotta keep on trudging through it.

[maschine]

Thank you for keeping us posted on your progress @zombeaver !

I would really love to see the game Bristles in the collection. Thanks for considering.

 

Edited January 25, 2021 by maschine

[Zombeaver]

13 hours ago, maschine said:

I would really love to see the game Bristles in the collection. Thanks for considering.

All the slots are taken for the upcoming update but I'll add it to the to-do list for the one after that.

Another quick update: 84% of the tape archive complete - 366 covers / 309 back covers / 642 3D boxes created / 1033 total manual count

[Madhead]

Do all of these have video snaps as well? Thats crazy if so.

[Zombeaver]

They do not. Video snaps aren't usable with the free version of Launchbox so they're not a high priority. That said, the plan is eventually create those as well once everything else is essentially done. I recorded about a hundred very early on but as I said it's not a priority currently.

Emumovies does have video snaps for C64 but generally they're low quality and seemingly all in the wrong aspect ratio; and game coverage is sporadic.

[Z3R0B4NG]

Not to mention, sharing videos from Emu Movies is a no no, they don't like that.

[Zombeaver]

Finished "S". 92% through the collection.

412 front covers / 349 back covers / 668 3D Boxes created / 1053 total manual count

Almost there.

[EthanFox]

This project is so great - thanks for all your effort on this.

Quick question - the only issue I have is that I've imported everything into a previous LB setup; my LB has the controller's start/stop buttons mapped to exit the emulator.  Your configuration has the same combo mapped to display the controller map png file.  So, I'm unable to view the file without exiting the emulator.  I'm super novice when it comes to RetroArch - how can I remap your project's controller buttons to remedy this?  I was hoping to change select/LB to show the png file and eliminating the start/stop combo so the LB mapping won't interfere.  Can't quite figure it out, didn't see the combo in the retroarch.cfg file.