c64 C64 Dreams (massive curated C64 collection)

[Jimiga]

Love the curation and thought behind this project! Indeed that vast archive of C64 games is an ocean of beauty and crap all at once, so this is a very admirable goal and I admire your dedication. I'll be following! 

Thanks for your efforts! 

 

[MJF]

2 hours ago, Jimiga said:

Love the curation and thought behind this project! Indeed that vast archive of C64 games is an ocean of beauty and crap all at once, so this is a very admirable goal and I admire your dedication. I'll be following! 

Thanks for your efforts! 

 

Indeed: Beauty .... The C64 port of Gyruss.... Crap: The C64 port of Hard Drivin' LMAO

[mohanned85]

very nice thank you mate

 

[Skeemin]

i'm back again @Zombeaver - i need your dam confidence once more...what am i supposed to press to get through the River Raid trainer?  i can flip the top option from yes to no and back, but i can't move up or down to the second line or beyond.

[Zombeaver]

You use the right stick or arrow keys to move up and down the list. That's not too common, but some trainers do it.

[mohanned85]

thanks mate for amazing work

[paQ]

Amazing. Thanks for sharing this tribute. Hope one day we can make the same for Commodore Amiga without copyright problems

[an531]

@Zombeaver 

I try not to pollute forums with "thanks posts" if there is an actual "thanks button", but this has to be an exception. What a fantastic collection! I couldn't thank you enough for sharing this with us. 

The only thing that is missing from an otherwise perfect C64 setup, in my humble opinion, is a virtual keyboard. I understand that by design it is necessary to use a physical keyboard here. However, today I was battling C64 configuration myself (which is why I appreciate your share so much) and I played around with the newest Retroarch (1.8.4) and the newest Vice core for C64. When you set Retropad as an input device, then by default you get a fantastic virtual keyboard when you press Select on an Xbox controller... Since, as far as I can tell, you are effectively using Retroarch/Vice as an emulator here, would it be possible to have this feature with your setup? Would updating Retroarch and the C64 core break things?

I'm new to emulation, so sorry if I missed something.

Edited January 30, 2020 by an531

[Zombeaver]

I could probably work the virtual keyboard in in the future. There's still a small amount of wiggle room with the controller mappings.

[an531]

On 1/30/2020 at 3:03 AM, an531 said:

The only thing that is missing from an otherwise perfect C64 setup, in my humble opinion, is a virtual keyboard.

(1) In case anyone else was missing this feature, I think that I figured it out. Apparently, adding a virtual keyboard here is really easy. No need to update Retroarch or the core, since this feature is already available in the setup provided. All that needs to be done is to assign virtual keyboard to a key and then assign that key to a controller button. So, go to Quick Options -> Options. There, in the current setup, virtual keyboard should be assigned to RETROK_F11 (if not, you can assign it there). Then just associate a controller button with RETROK_F11. In the current setup, the xbox controller button Y looks free. So, select Retropad X and set it to RETROK_F11. Now, you should be able to toggle virtual keyboard using the Y button.

(2) If you want to navigate the Retroarch UI with the left analog stick, then go to Settings -> Input and turn off Unified Menu Controls. In the same place, you can swap A & B xbox buttons for the UI only by toggling Menu Swap OK & Cancel Buttons. IMO, this makes the UI more intuitive to navigate.

(3) I'm using a 1920 x 1200 monitor, so I created configuration files for that resolution. I suppose I could add 1-2 pixels on each side to the width and height, but the 2304 x 1632 parameters that I used appear to be exactly (x6) the core default resolution... or, at least, I think that the multiplier refers to the core default resolution, which in this case would be 384 x 272. I also disabled the overlays/bezels, since there is no need for them now. So, to run this setup correctly at 1920 x 1200 resolution, you just need to copy/replace a few files attached into their respective directories and after that run "1920x1200.bat" .

An unfortunate side effect of turning off overlays/bezels is that you will no longer be able to see control mappings (currently configured as Select + Start). This is because the file for control mappings is also designated as an overlay... I'm not sure how to get around this ATM. I tried deleting the bezels and only leaving the files with control mappings; substituting the bezels with a blank file; changing c64.cfg settings; but nothing worked so far. [you can now have no overlays and still see control mappings; I attached replacement .bat for other resolutions in case you later wanted to change 1920 x 1200 to another resolution that uses overlays; the new .bat simply reapply the default overlays]

(4) It seems that the game "1917" also suffers from overscan problems... The stats at the bottom are cropped off. Cool game, though.

 

C64 Dreams (1920x1200 configs).7z

Edited January 31, 2020 by an531

[Zombeaver]

4 hours ago, an531 said:

An unfortunate side effect of turning off overlays/bezels is that you will no longer be able to see control mappings (currently configured as Select + Start). This is because the file for control mappings is also designated as an overlay... I'm not sure how to get around this ATM. I tried deleting the bezels and only leaving the files with control mappings; substituting the bezels with a blank file; changing c64.cfg settings; but nothing worked so far.

Replace C64.png in C64 Dreams\C64 Dreams\Retroarch\overlays with the image below and it'll work (it's just a 1920x1080 image that's nothing but transparency). Make sure that you haven't turned off overlays.

EDIT: You do have overlays turned off in the core override you provided:

[an531]

8 hours ago, Zombeaver said:

Replace C64.png in C64 Dreams\C64 Dreams\Retroarch\overlays with the image below and it'll work (it's just a 1920x1080 image that's nothing but transparency). Make sure that you haven't turned off overlays.

Yes, this was actually the first thing I tried. However, for the empty/transparent image I used a weird-ass wikipedia blank .jpg and it didn't work. Your image works fine.

I updated my previous files with new ones. You can check the code if you want. I provided modified .bat for the other resolutions as well that basically reapply your default overlays (in case someone later wanted to switch back to a different resolution that uses bezels).

[Zombeaver]

Use the attached. It has a .bat for swapping in the blank overlays just like swapping to the other options (C64 Dreams\C64 Dreams\Utilities\Overlays).

I've also corrected the core override. You still had overlays disabled. It's not going to do anything so long as those are turned off.

1920x1200.7z

[an531]

27 minutes ago, Zombeaver said:

Use the attached. It has a .bat for swapping in the blank overlays just like swapping to the other options (C64 Dreams\C64 Dreams\Utilities\Overlays).

I've also corrected the core override. You still had overlays disabled. It's not going to do anything so long as those are turned off.

I don't know what to tell you. I downloaded my files just now and the configuration in C64 Dreams\C64 Dreams\Retroarch\config\Vice x64\1920x1200\VICE x64.cfg is as follows:

input_overlay_enable = "true"

Perhaps you are still viewing the old file (with the same name)... I created "No Overlays" folder in C64 Dreams\C64 Dreams\Retroarch\overlays in the updated version. Either way, it works on my PC  as intended.

[Zombeaver]

Might have been the previous version, I'm not sure. It does look right now.

[Zombeaver]

On 1/30/2020 at 4:21 PM, an531 said:

(1) In case anyone else was missing this feature, I think that I figured it out. Apparently, adding a virtual keyboard here is really easy. No need to update Retroarch or the core, since this feature is already available in the setup provided. All that needs to be done is to assign virtual keyboard to a key and then assign that key to a controller button. So, go to Quick Options -> Options. There, in the current setup, virtual keyboard should be assigned to RETROK_F11 (if not, you can assign it there). Then just associate a controller button with RETROK_F11. In the current setup, the xbox controller button Y looks free. So, select Retropad X and set it to RETROK_F11. Now, you should be able to toggle virtual keyboard using the Y button.

This is going to be implemented into v0.19. It should be noted however that:

1) This is not a one-and-done affair, as this function is specified (or not) not only in the central retroarch-core-options.cfg, but in every single .opt file that is created for games in special cases like when joystick port 1 needs to be used, true drive enabled, etc. These are located in C64 Dreams\C64 Dreams\Retroarch\config\VICE x64. There are over 350 of these currently. I've already changed them all on my end so they'll be updated in the next version, but any cases where these are present the field will need to be updated. The easiest way to do this is to go into that folder, sort by type, select all .opt files, drag them into Notepad++ and then do a find and replace of vice_mapper_x = "---" with vice_mapper_x = "RETROK_F11", then select "Replace All in All Opened Documents", save all, close all.

2) There will be a handful of exceptions where this won't be used, because of custom mapping that's using the button, like in the case of Fairlight: A Prelude.

[MJF]

On 3/12/2019 at 6:30 PM, Zombeaver said:

Updated 1/2/20 to version 0.18 with 300 additional games. Full details here.

Current progress: working through "G"

TLDR / What is it?

This is a huge work-in-progress collection of hand-picked C64 games (1700 currently), demoscene demos, SID music and C64 magazines. 100% of the collection has been tested, streamlined and custom-tailored to get you into the games and playing as easily and quickly as possible. It's also portable and doesn't require any front-end to function (though it does come packaged with Launchbox).

Introduction

Some of you may know that I have a website where I update older PC games to run on modern computers. While I primarily stick with DOS and Windows 3.1/95 games, I've also done a few Amiga games and even made a collection of C64 games called C64 Dreams. That was a collection of 128 of my favorite C64 games from my childhood, and it turned out relatively well. I've always been extremely picky when it came to C64 emulation. Having done my time with a real C64 as a kid, I have no desire to go back to the hassles that that entails (extremely long load times, cumbersome disk swapping, constantly swapping joystick ports from game to game, etc.) and, having been into emulation since the late 90's, I've messed around with a lot of different C64 emulators over the years. In nearly all cases there was always something that just rubbed me the wrong way; something that kept it from being exactly what I wanted. That said, CCS64 had always been my emulator of choice, because it got the closest to what I wanted. The Windows version of CCS64 has some significant... idiosyncrasies (more like bugs) however. What I ended up doing was using an admittedly rather convoluted method of setting up the DOS version of CCS64 (yes, it's that old) in DOSBox Daum which actually worked a lot better than you'd probably expect. I had custom joystick controls that allowed me to swap ports, swap disks, fast forward, have a dedicated button for up on the joystick (useful for platformers), and it had the massive boon of "Maximum 1541 Speed", an awesome auto-warp feature in CCS64. I was relatively satisfied with that collection, but knew that eventually I was going to have to expand it into a larger project. That's what I've been working on for the last 6 months.

For the first month or two I continued to do the same thing I had done with the original collection but simply expanded the library. The further I got, however, the more some things started to creep through and bother me. There were a few things that I just could not remedy no matter what I did. Fairly frequent, inescapable vsync flaws were basically the final straw for me. After literally months of work and an insane amount of testing, I finally came to the conclusion that I just needed something else. It just wasn't where I wanted it to be. I was at about 600 games completed when I decided I was just going to have to burn it all down and rework the whole thing. feelsbadman.jpg

I kindof went back to the drawing board at that point and decided to do a fresh sweep of a bunch of different emulators to see if anything would be satisfactory. I used Vice (both SDL and GTK3), Hoxs64, micro64, C64 Forever, Yace64, Frodo, and several versions of CCS64. CCS64 2.0B in DOSBox was still better than basically all of these options, which didn't exactly bode well. Finally I tried Vice in Retroarch. I love Retroarch and I've used it for years, but computer platforms isn't exactly something that it typically handles all that well, as that tends to introduce a lot of additional complications - it's just not all that conducive of an environment for it. After a fair bit of fiddling, however, I could see that there was real potential there. Something that Retroarch excels at is giving you the ability to custom-tailor your settings for individual games, which is really essential for this project. Fast forward a couple weeks and I had something working really well that was actually shaping up to be what I wanted.

Breaking down the features of my prior setup and the new one, it's a pretty clear choice. It doesn't have savestates (yet), but if that's my only complaint, I can live with that. EDIT: Savestate support is now included as of v0.18!

The Games

At this point, you're probably saying "Well that's great and all... but what about the games? What's in it and why should I care?"

Something you have to understand about the C64 is that its library is absolutely massive. There are literally around 30,000 C64 games. To put it into perspective, if you took the entire libraries of NES, SNES, Genesis, N64, Dreamcast, Playstation, and Playstation 2, combined all the games together and then multiplied them three times it still would be less games. Think you have a hard time deciding which Playstation game to play? Try diving into the C64 library some time. It's insane. My goal with this project is to bring some semblance of order to all that chaos, while providing a play experience that's as simple, streamlined, and pain-free as possible.

Gamebase64 is a collection of essentially every known C64 game. It's one release per game (often times several different cracking groups would release their own version of any given game, in some cases with 10+ groups releasing their own version of the same game), although it does include alternate regional/language versions as well. The end result is about 27,000 games in the library. It's an incredible accomplishment and an awesome resource, but it presents an obvious problem - where do you even begin with all that? For every Last Ninja or Bruce Lee there are at least 10 games that look like this.

This presents a ton of noise to have to filter out. Sure, you could find a top 50 or top 100 list of "greatest C64 games of all time" or some such and call it close (even though you honestly can't even begin to scratch the surface with that few games), but I wanted to do a genuinely deep dive. It's a platform I've loved since I was a kid, and one that I want to help more people experience, including lesser known games; the C64 is packed with hidden gems that have never had the honor of finding their way into some paltry little best of list. When I was a kid, I had the benefit of having literally boxes and boxes full of generic hand-written label C64 disks (clearly entirely legit) that I would just pore over like an absolute treasure trove, and I found all kinds of neat and weird stuff. I guess it's all come full-circle.

So how am I going about the selection process? Well, I'm literally going through the alphabetical screenshot folders in the Gamebase64 collection by hand and picking out anything that looks interesting. There are over forty two thousand images in there... I'm currently making my way through "G". To put into perspective the amount of filtering I'm doing, there are 9227 images between # and C, and I have 607 games in the collection within that range. Once I find a game that looks interesting, I don't actually pull out the Gamebase64 version (not typically anyway). I source most of the games from csdb.dk because I like to individually pick and choose which group to use (and sometimes there are newer/better versions than what's on Gamebase64, like an Easyflash version) - I sortof have a mental flow chart of group priority, which is something like Remember > Triad > Genesis Project > Hokuto Force > Laxity > Fantastic 4 Cracking Group > Nostalgia > Derbyshire Ram > Hotline > Onslaught > Ikari > whatever else. Then I set the game up and test it. In some cases there might be some issue with a particular version of a game, like it might not work with True Drive off whereas a different version would (with True Drive enabled, it emulates the original drive read speeds, which is required for some games to work, but results in significantly longer load times), so then I'll try a different version and see if I can get around that. Only 5.48% of the games currently in the collection have True Drive enabled, which means speedy load times for the vast majority of them. In some cases I've gone through 10 different versions of the same game to find the one I want. I also set each game up to use the correct joystick port (which varies from game to game) so you don't have to guess every time you load up a game whether or not you'll need to switch it - it's done for you already. In some cases I'll add in my own custom joystick controls like with Spellbound Dizzy, a game that's ordinarily keyboard input only. I've also mapped a number of handy functions to the controller, but more on that later.

I'm currently at 1700 games complete and, as I said, I have a long way to go. This is something that I will be continually working on for, very likely, several years. However, I thought this would be a good point to put out a sortof "alpha" release to get it out there for people to play around with, see what they think, and give me some feedback. The full list of all currently available games, along with game-specific notes can be found here:

>>>C64 Dreams Game Details Spreadsheet<<<

Usage

The collection can be imported into existing Launchbox libraries, but this requires a bit of additional work. I'll be providing some instructions on how to do this and will streamline a separate import-only version in the future, but the current version is just a standalone LB package. You can copy your existing license file, if you have one, into the folder and it'll function just like your normal version of LB. It's functional without that though. If you're really set on importing it into your existing library as-is, we can walk through how to do that.

I've tried to incorporate as many useful functions into the controls as possible. These will take care of the most common situations, but it should be noted that a keyboard will still be required because you'll need access to things like the F# keys on occasion as well as other specific things in one-off cases. Disk swapping works using .m3us and, as such, functions just like any other platform in Retroarch that has .m3u support, like Beetle PSX. If you want to swap from disk 1 to 2, you would use Eject/Insert Disk > Next Disk > Eject/Insert Disk. In this case that means you simply press (on a 360/XB1 controller) Back+RB > Back+Y > Back+RB and then you just keep on truckin'.

Many games have cracktros and trainers (cheats) before the game starts. Ordinarily you'll press space (or B on the controller) to bypass these. You'll often press N or Y to indicate yes or no on a trainer screen, and this can be accomplished with the left and right joystick buttons. Some games have doc screens (explanation of a game's story, controls, etc.) and will say to press "Runstop" in order to proceed - this is mapped to the start button. The C64 only had one fire button on the joystick, so it was somewhat common practice in platformers to use up on the joystick to jump - this will most likely feel pretty awkward for new players, so I've added an additional mapping to send an up input on the X button - giving you a dedicated jump button. If you need a reminder of the mappings, you can press Back+Start to display the above screen in-game, then press it again to go back to the game.

The keyboard can be used for joystick input as well.

8456 on the numpad = Up, Left, Down, Right
Left Alt = Fire
Left Ctrl = C= Key
ESC = Runstop
Numpad asterisk = swap joystick ports
Numpad minus is the combo key
Numpad minus + Numpad 0 = Eject/Insert Disk
Numpad minus + Numpad 9 = Next Disk
Numpad minus + Numpad 8 = Previous Disk
Numpad minus + Space = Fast Forward (can also hold down PgDwn to activate warp mode)
Numpad minus + Numpad plus = toggle controls/notes display
Numpad minus + ESC = Quit
Numpad minus + F2 = Save State
Numpad minus + F4 = Load State
Numpad minus + F7 = Next State
Numpad minus + F6 = Previous State

While not exactly a primary feature, it's probably worth noting here that this collection does not in any way require Launchbox or any front-end for that matter in order to function. Launchbox is and will continue to be my front-end of choice, so it's what it will be packaged with, and what I use it with personally, but this collection is setup in such a way that it can function independently of the front-end, because it's all setup with .bats. Each game, each demoscene demo, etc. has its own .bat in their folders, these .bats are setup with relative paths so all you have to do is start the .bat and it does everything else for you. As far as the front-end is concerned, these are just like starting a PC game - no emulator is specified in LB, as the .bats already take care of starting programs, directing files, etc. So if you want to use something else, go for it. It should be noted that you will actually want to use the .vbs files in each folder, not the .bats themselves - the .vbs files are visual basic scripts that run the .bat for the game but hide the command prompt window.

The Collection

The thought occurred to me while I was working on this that I could expand it beyond just games, and incorporate Demoscene demos, SID music, and even C64 magazines into the collection as well. One C64 collection to rule them all, as it were. I really liked the idea of doing this because the C64 scene is still huge, and very much alive and kicking, and there's a ton of great stuff out there outside of the games themselves. This aspect of the collection is still very much in its infancy, but there's some interesting stuff here for you to check out. There are currently 34 demoscene demos, 50 SID tracks, and 76 magazines available. The SID tracks are setup both with the disk version (default launch) as well as standalone .sid files with a built-in player (accessible via the right-click menu).

The library is broken into Games, Demoscene, SID, and Magazines, some of which are further broken out into specific playlists. There are separate playlists for Commodore Force, Commodore Format, and Zzap!64 in Magazines, for example. Games has playlists of favorites, Best Of Vol. 1 (this is the 128 games featured in the original release of C64 Dreams), and Best Of Vol. 2 (this is a new set of 128 games). I'll be creating more Best Of playlists as I continue to expand the library.

The Tools

A number of additional tools were needed to bring all this together, so I wanted to take a bit of time to go over those.

AutoHotkey: This one's kindof a given. I used it extensively in the previous version of C64 Dreams, which brought about its own set of complications. The current version pared this back significantly and at this point basically all it's used for is to 1) move the mouse cursor out of the way on launch (the mouse is always visible in Retroarch if overlays are used, so this moves it off screen) 2) to start Antimicro as well as specify the Antimicro profile to use (customized in the case of certain games like Spellbound Dizzy) 3) close Antimicro and AHK once Retroarch closes. I've converted these to .exes (via Ahk2Exe) so that you do not need AHK installed on your computer for this to work, but if you want to know what's in the scripts specifically, they're available for your perusal in the C64 Dreams > C64 Dreams > Utilities > AHK Script Compiler > Completed folder.

Antimicro: This is an open-source joystick mapper, similar to something like Xpadder. I use this to map the arrow keys to the right stick for all games as well as pipe in custom controls in one-off cases.

CDisplay Ex: This is a great comic book viewer that, in this case, I'm using to display the magazines.

BZRPlayer: This a lightweight, portable music player that supports a huge range of audio formats. I use it to play the standalone .sid files in the SID platform.

FastStone Image Viewer: This is a lightweight, portable image viewer. I use it to display the commercial game message, which is actually just an animated .gif.

Known Issues

Screen Resolution

This is designed, by default, for 1080p resolution. If you use something else, it will still work, but is going to need a bit of adjustment. I have the base resolutions covered for 1600x900, 1080p, 1440p, and 4k. You can switch between these by going to the C64 Dreams > C64 Dreams > Utilities > Screen Resolution Adjustment folder and starting 1600x900.bat, 1080p.bat, 1440p.bat, or 4k.bat (I'll be adding these to a separate "Utilities" category in LB later). Thanks to @Lordmonkus and @neil9000 for helping me get 1440p and 4k sorted, and @jophran for 1600x900. However, while this takes care of the vast majority of cases, there are a few specific games where I do some custom cropping because the games made weird use of the overscan space. The base settings cover all but those games. The games in question are as follows:

Alien Syndrome
Another World
Ballblazer
Bangkok Knights
Bear Essentials, The
Brainway
Death Bringer
Dominion
Donkey Kong (Oxyron)
Draconus
Game Over II - Part 1
Heatseaker
It's Magic
It's Magic 2
Masquerade
Mega Phoenix
No Mercy
Paperboy
Phobia
Planet Golf
Tiger Claw
Turbo Outrun
Wizball
Wolfling
Zolyx

This means that if you're on a non-1080p resolution, the cropping is going to be a bit off on these games. This is something that I want to remedy, and will be able to incorporate into the resolution change .bats, but only with the help of someone who has a 1440p/4k monitor at their disposal and is willing to help me test and fiddle with numbers. If you're using something other than 1080p, 1440p, or 4k, I can incorporate that as well but again will need your assistance in testing in order to do so.

If you're using Windows 10 and are using 1080p but most of the screen is cropped off, you may need to adjust your "high DPI settings". Go to the C64 Dreams\C64 Dreams\Retroarch folder, right-click on Retroarch.exe and select "change high DPI settings", select the checkmark "override high DPI scaling behavior performed by" and select "application". Thanks to @MacGuyver for bringing this to my attention and sorting it out.

Commercial Games

There are a number of modern C64 games in the collection (as I said, the C64 scene is still very much alive), and a few of these are still commercially available - 16 of them, to be exact. Because of this, the roms for these games are not included in this collection. The game details spreadsheet has links to where these can be purchased where relevant. Then you simply drop the .d64 file into the relevant folder, name it "Disk1.d64", then start the "Install Real Config.bat" in the folder and you'll be good to go. Until you do this, when you start those games, you'll just see the following message:

As I said though, this only accounts for 16 games in the entire collection. The specific games in question are as follows:

Argus
Darkness
Eye of the Gods
Galencia
It's Magic 2
Knight 'n' Grail
Moonspire
Organism
Pains 'n' Aches
Planet Golf
Platman Worlds
Rocky Memphis Legend of Atlantis
Sam's Journey
Space Trip 2086
Steel Ranger
Sydney Hunter

Performance

Most people shouldn't have any performance issues with C64 Dreams, but if you do, there are some quick adjustments you can make which should fix them. Go to C64 Dreams\C64 Dreams\Retroarch\config\VICE x64 and open VICE x64.cfg. There are three lines at the bottom that you should try adjusting:

The first thing you should do is adjust video_frame_delay down by 1 at a time, down to 0 if necessary, and see if that fixes it (it probably will).

If that doesn't work, try setting video_hard_sync to "false".

If that doesn't work, try setting video_threaded to "true". I really don't recommend that unless absolutely necessary though. The previous two will produce a small amount of additional input latency, but threaded video increases it more significantly. It does have the benefit of letting it work on basically a toaster, however.

Future Plans

At this point I just need to keep moving forward picking out and adding more games. That's priority number one. More music, demos, and magazines will be added as well, but that's of secondary importance. 12% of the games don't have covers, and I'm using a screenshot in lieu of one - I've been in the process of coming up with some form of generic cover that I can slot game-specific stuff into to address these, but it's not done yet. I actually really like @Lassiveran's cover project  and use those wherever available. That doesn't cover everything in here though. While I'd certainly be thrilled if he were able to take care of the missing ones, I know that's a lot to ask, so I'm not expecting that, which is why I've been trying to come up with something on my own. That's basically priority number three. Beyond that, I'm also creating video snaps for all of these. That's at the absolute bottom of the pile though and will have to remain on the backburner for a while as it's just not as important as the other stuff.

This is basically where I'm at content-wise, which I realize makes it looks like there's nothing here, but it's just that there's still a long way to go from what is already a lot of stuff.

So that's pretty much it! I'm looking forward to having some more people test it out, provide some feedback, and let me know if there are any issues that I need to get sorted out. Have fun!

Download Here
Local versions of the magazines are now in a separate module available here. These are not required as the default launch option for the magazines is setup to use web versions which viewable on archive.org.

Oh, and there are a number of people that I've either spoken to previously about this project directly or that I just know have an existing interest in C64 emulation that I thought I should shoutout here in hopes to get as many potentially interested eyeballs on this as possible

@CriticalCid @Belgarath @ALIE @dragon57 @bundangdon @vaderag @djsim101 @orac31 @Zeaede @InfinityFox @C64Crazy @alnyden @zorkiii @mothergoose729

 

True. Long loading times were always a sticker for me back in the day. Thank God for awesome loader music to get me through it though, especially those awesome Ocean loaders. However, there's new hardware developed every year for the C64, including hardware that allows SD cards to "emulate" a 1541 disk drive, but without the long load times of floppies and cassettes. There's also EasyFlash

[Zombeaver]

8 hours ago, Pixelpiper said:

First post, joined the forum specifically for this subject/thread.

Welcome!

8 hours ago, Pixelpiper said:

So the first thing I noticed as unexpected was a difference in the keys I had to press to get in/out of Retroarch/VICE. The instructions here mention "*" on the number pad along with F1, but that doesn't do anything for me and I have to press "-" and F1 instead.

Yep, that's intentional. That was changed a little while back as noted in this post because I realized after the fact that asterisk is the core's internal key for swapping joystick ports so it was causing a conflict, so I moved it.

Some of the bindings were updated in the opening post (where they're in a big list) but a few other references I guess still need to be updated fixed.

8 hours ago, Pixelpiper said:

Next are the keys to bring up controller info which was stated as "-" and "+" on the number pad - this doesn't do anything here.

Not sure what to tell you there, those are the correct keys and they're working correctly here.

8 hours ago, Pixelpiper said:

Somewhere in Retroarch there's an option that brings up an on-screen keyboard (I've opened it by accident a couple of times) - can anyone tell me how to get out of that? I've had to kill the RETROARCH process each time.

The default is F... something. I want to say F11. You just press it twice. In the upcoming update it's going to be on the Y button (on a 360/XB1 controller).

[Zombeaver]

1 hour ago, Pixelpiper said:

Do you know of a convenient way to bind a hotkey to change window dimensions?

The only way I know of to do something along these lines is via a sequence of two shader presets that are in one (separate) folder, one of which is your normal shader and the second of which is a duplicate but with altered vertical and horizontal overscan shader parameters (via the image adjustment pass), set that folder as the default shader folder in an override, and then using the "next shader" hotkey to swap between them. Kindof a big hassle and mostly overkill to be honest. Out of the 1800+ games currently, I've needed to make adjustments from my default for about 1.5% of them; and this shader sequence method wouldn't really work for them anyway because the adjusted dimensions aren't identical between them.

1 hour ago, Pixelpiper said:

How about VICE's NTSC/PAL setup on the fly?

No, changing from PAL to NTSC mode and vice versa requires a core restart (it does this automatically when you change it in the core options). That's assuming of course that you're talking about actual PAL vs NTSC mode and not just PAL vs NTSC dimensions which you could do via the method I mentioned above. One without the other wouldn't really make much sense though.

You shouldn't need to do this anyway though. The very small number of instances of games that need NTSC are setup to use NTSC already and everything else is setup for PAL. It's literally just Death Bringer and Maquerade. A major point in this project in the first place is that you don't need to do this sort of thing. You don't have to set the joystick ports either - that's already set correctly for every game (barring a handful of mistakes here and there that I correct as I find them - brought on primarily by inadvertently changing the port with the asterisk key when setting them up originally ). Same for games that require true drive. The only thing that anybody should have to do is make manual window adjustments for the 25 games specified in the opening post if using something other than 1080p (which of course you are, in this case). I would do this myself if I had additional monitors for the relevant resolutions. I want people to have to do as little as possible, as it kindof defeats the original intent. I guess maybe I could look into changing my desktop resolution for testing purposes, I don't know how well that would work... I also couldn't do 4k or 1440p anyway since I'm limited to 1080p or less currently. I have base settings for those but nobody's volunteered to make them for the special cases. jophran's handled them for 1600x900 so far, but that's the only non-1080p resolution that's covered. If you'd like to do them for 1280x1024 I would certainly welcome it, and include them in future updates.

[Zombeaver]

Looks like for 1280x1024 you'd probably want to use this as a base:

Aspect Ratio: Custom
Integer Scaling: On
Custom Aspect Ratio Width: 1536 (4x)
Custom Aspect Ratio Height: 1088 (4x)

Overlays should be turned off or the first image set to transparent (like is mentioned in this post).

You'll have black/overscan space on the top and bottom because it's narrower than the C64 (16:10). Some games are still going to need to be customized because in some weird cases, like Frogger Arcade for example, the custom dimensions I setup also center the display. A few games make very weird/unorthodox use of the overscan space.

The default settings:

Adjusted:

Not too many instances like this, of course, but some games do weird things.