Incorporating a Stream Deck for Commodore 64 games.

[DerHof2007]

Ok, so my last build was in 2013. Giant cabinet with 4 player panel, trackball, spinner and all that fun stuff... yada yada yada.

While my primary interest is old school MAME, a strong second would be the C64.
The only bad thing about the Commodore is its heavy reliance on the keyboard.
The way I got around this before was using AHK to re-assign particular buttons on my layout on a game by game basis. While this can actually work quite well it really isn't all that practical when many keys are needed. Trying to remember what's what could be almost impossible especially for games that use MANY keyboard buttons.

So I kind of got away from the machine for a few years... Flash forward 2022... Got the idea of building a pedestal to run on any TV and also changing things around that I didn't like with my last build.
So obviously the first thing to do is check out YouTube and see what people have been doing since I've pretty much been out of the hobby for awhile. I stumble on an amazing build by TheDanielSpies ... beautiful panel!!
What stood out the most for me was incorporating an LCD display in the panel which I will definitely do... although this is more of a novelty it is cool AF.
But what also stood out and is extremely practical (for me at least) was the incorporation of a Stream Deck in the build. I had never even heard of this thing until last week when I watched the video. I now have one on my desk and there it will stay and another will be acquired for the pedestal! This thing is so cool and useful just for daily computer use... although geared more for streamers as the name implies.
I think this will be perfect for using for C64 emulation. TheDanielSpies did have an inlay keyboard incorporated in his build as well but this is definitely nicer and 100x cooler!
With 32 buttons on the Stream Deck I will be able to support any game. They can be assigned to do practically everything and each button is actually a 144x144 screen that looks really sweet since you can use image files or animated GIF files. And you can actually program multiple pages to scroll through to have 100's of buttons.

So, an example would be for the game Spelunker if you are familiar... it uses 3 main buttons play (although others are required for other things)... D to use dynamite - F to launch flares and space bar to run the ghost zapper.
So instead of just putting letters or a title on the button I can have a GIF of dynamite exploding... found a cool one with a 2 second image search. Can even take it a step further and record actual footage from the game... crop to the action and create a GIF!!

Soooo, moving on to the real purpose of this post. Is there any possible way to select a C64 game and automatically have the Stream Deck give me a game specific display with just what I need for that particular game?
Either by loading a Stream Deck profile or scrolling to a particular page for each game?
Something similar to what I was doing before with AHK adjusting my buttons... but with the Stream Deck.

Any thoughts, suggestions, solutions?

[InvaderJim]

Just wanted to say that sounds like really cool idea, hope you get it working.  If I ever get the time I may try to copy it someday...

[Gildahl]

This should be doable with my arcadeEIP software.  I haven't created a profile for C64 yet, but in theory it should work.  This software integrates well with Launchbox (able to share its media files and metadata), and using its built-in support hot-strings can launch emulated games directly using Stream Deck.  Since one Stream Deck button can be multifunction, you could, for example, have it simultaneously launch the game and switch to a game-specific profile with the mapped keys displayed (I'm currently plan to do something similar with Thayer's Quest on Daphne).  But you can kind of get an idea of how this works from this video.

 

 

Edited May 6, 2022 by Gildahl

[DerHof2007]

21 hours ago, Gildahl said:

This should be doable with my arcadeEIP software.  I haven't created a profile for C64 yet, but in theory it should work.  This software integrates well with Launchbox (able to share its media files and metadata), and using its built-in support hot-strings can launch emulated games directly using Stream Deck.  Since one Stream Deck button can be multifunction, you could, for example, have it simultaneously launch the game and switch to a game-specific profile with the mapped keys displayed (I'm currently plan to do something similar with Thayer's Quest on Daphne).  But you can kind of get an idea of how this works from this video.

 

 

Hey Gildahl, this is really cool. Just might do the trick for what I'm looking for. I watched a couple of your videos and will go through the rest. It's been awhile since I did anything with my machine so I'm basically going to have to learn how to set everything up all over again. I have the 32 button Stream Deck... I'll download your software and try it out. I'll keep you posted... in the meantime if you try what I mentioned in the OP and have any more advice please let me know!
Thank you much 🙂

[Gildahl]

On 5/7/2022 at 9:12 AM, DerHof2007 said:

Hey Gildahl, this is really cool. Just might do the trick for what I'm looking for. I watched a couple of your videos and will go through the rest. It's been awhile since I did anything with my machine so I'm basically going to have to learn how to set everything up all over again. I have the 32 button Stream Deck... I'll download your software and try it out. I'll keep you posted... in the meantime if you try what I mentioned in the OP and have any more advice please let me know!
Thank you much 🙂

I just tried adding a C64 emulator as a proof-of-concept, and the first one I tried seems to work well so far (WinVICE 3.6.1).  Like me, you will probably need to use the SDL version since arcadeEIP requires emulators to support a "cooperative" windowed fullscreen mode so that the overlay menu will work properly.  The GTK3 build doesn't seem to like having the focus taken away from it, but the SDL version has no such issue, so if this is the emulator you use (or can use), I can share more info about how I set it up.  I will also be adding this information to the documentation for the next release version.

[Gildahl]

Well I now have this fully working.  As an 8-bit Atari computer enthusiast back in the day I never focused much on the C64, but have wanted to setup an emulator for it for a while, so this was just the excuse I needed to finally get this working. The C64 does have a fine collection of games.  After getting WinVICE (SDL2 version) working nicely in arcadeEIP and integrated with LaunchBox, I added a C64 profile to my Stream Deck along with a couple of game-specific profiles (Spelunker and Donkey Kong to start).  You can see this video for the results.  If this is the sort of thing you had in mind, give it a try and let me know if you run into any issues.

 

Edited May 11, 2022 by Gildahl

[DerHof2007]

On 5/11/2022 at 5:57 PM, Gildahl said:

Well I now have this fully working.  As an 8-bit Atari computer enthusiast back in the day I never focused much on the C64, but have wanted to setup an emulator for it for a while, so this was just the excuse I needed to finally get this working. The C64 does have a fine collection of games.  After getting WinVICE (SDL2 version) working nicely in arcadeEIP and integrated with LaunchBox, I added a C64 profile to my Stream Deck along with a couple of game-specific profiles (Spelunker and Donkey Kong to start).  You can see this video for the results.  If this is the sort of thing you had in mind, give it a try and let me know if you run into any issues.

 

Sorry for the delay... Got a project going on I'm trying to finish by the end of the month before I fully dive into my new build here...

Just watched this video. Dude, you're a freaking rock star! From what I can see this is exactly what I am looking for!!!
I would love to see a tutorial on this if you have time! And when I get this started I will definitely either have artwork or gif's for the buttons.
As for WinVICE... that is what I use. Not sure which version. I don't think I ever realized there were different ones.

The 'fastloader' option you had is basically just what it implies... it will load the game faster as the C64 was definitely known for some long load times. There was a cartridge made by Epyx back in the day called 'Fast Load' to make disc games load faster.

[Gildahl]

Thanks!  I just posted a major new revision of the software here (v.0.3.3.0).

As for tutorials, you're best off starting with the documentation in the zip.  In particular the readme and MAME quick-start in the root folder.  For this particular project you'll also want to read the StreamDeck.txt file in the \Docs folder.  I also added a sample configuration for C64 using WinVice SDL in there too (you must use the SDL2 version as the GTK3 version doesn't play nicely with arcadeEIP's overlay menus).  I'll definitely be doing more tutorial videos, but in the meantime I'd be happy to answer any questions here, or by pm or email (address is in the readme).

...and thanks for the fastloader info.