Be Excellent To Each Other

I've been looking for one of these for ages. I didn't want to pay ridiculous prices on ebay, and I haven't seen anything of this kind at a car boot sale since I was ten. But now, thanks to the magic of the internet and generous people, I now have my very own...

COMMODORE 64!



An invitation to a veritable smorgasbord of cutting-edge graphics and gaming.

It was given to me by a very kind person who'd had it in their loft for over a decade, forgotten. It had been left there in a large shopping bag, more or less exposed to the horrors of time. By the time I received it, the bag and its contents were... mucky. Soiled. Disgusting, even.



To give an indication of how awful this bag was, when I went out, I was wearing a pristine white shirt. I had the bag on my lap on the train back, gazing out the window feeling pretty chuffed about finally getting a C64. When I reached my stop, I picked the bag up off my lap and the entire bottom half of my shirt was covered with a solid, dark layer of debris.



However, that's nothing a couple of coats of Jif Cif Jif can't fix.

Does it work? Of course it does! After a fashion!

Before I cleaned it, I took everything out of the bag and figured out what it was all supposed to do. With the C64, power supply, RF lead, joystick and Datasette plugged in, I turned on the power switch on the side of the C64. No power light. No BBC-esque two tones. Nothing.

Take the PSU plug apart and replace the fuse. Nothing.

Take the C64 apart, test the internal fuse. It's fine. Base board looks okay: no bulging capacitors, big scorched marks or anything. Strangely, the Datasette seems to work.

Turn around to see use the PC to see if there's anything else I can do, or if there's any other compatible PSUs I can try with it... the C64 magically turns itself on! The screen is full of noise, but the system is working! It's a miracle! I feed it some short BASIC nonsense to test the keyboard and processor and it's all good. I replace the RF lead and the noise is gone. Huzzah!

What games did you get, MrD?

I got...




And now I have to play them all. I'm like the Darien Lambert of C64 games.

What to play first? Well, I know you're all dying to see Gauntlet. Right?



I put it in to test the Datasette. I figured it would be quick to load due to being a crappy educational game, and the manual would be simple enough to show me how to start the game loading. 3D Hypermaths takes almost ten minutes to load. That is a long time.

"SHIFT [RUN,STOP]" loads games... catchy! Press the C= to skip the FOUND caption if you like, and the tape automatically stops! That's neat. Doesn't quite make up for the fact that I can't directly plug in any other audio source to load games from, as can a Speccy. (Except for my Spectrum +2A, which has a TAPE/SOUND input... THAT ISN'T CONNECTED TO ANYTHING.)



This was a mistake. It won't stop going PING at me. According to the manual, I have to control the craft with the keys and adjust my speed with the F Keys to match the solution to the maths problems. PING. 4 x 34 is 136. Easy peasy. PING. Not very easy to input, because no matter how I hold or tap the appropriate key, the value changes by about 2 every second. PING. ENOUGH WITH THE PINGS.

This was perhaps not the best game to demonstrate the C64's magic powers.

Let's try Apollo 18! Super long loading times abound. My patience is rewarded with SPEECH!

And then I get this screen.



Eeegads.

I'm getting the impression that all of these games are going to be a bit rubbish, and that's probably why their C64 was banished. Was there anything good on this thing at all?

I've got the SUPER SECRET tech necessary to play whatever (I'm looking forward to Impossible Mission), I just need to find a couple more cables and set it up.

I seem to recall enjoying supremacy on the c64

I was looking forward to "Bathtime"

Anything by Epyx is good. Uridium is wonderful. Parallax and Wizball. Mercenary. International Karate.

C64 PSU's are abit shit and generally aren't serviceable as Commodore encased them in a solid resin type material (although with earlier ones you can at least change the internal fuse IIRC). You might want to look at a replacement if it's one of the black ones as they are quite notorious.

There's also another fuse on the C64 main board depending what revision you have, again IIRC. Power problems always seemed to be endemic with C64's I'm afraid. The PSU's are nasty units that seem to believe that are mini heating systems. When they fail they send a load of extra voltage through the C64 frying the unit.

Hopefully that tech allows disk drive games and not just tape - you'll find in general some good arcade style games , and a large number of adventures

Lemon 64 would be a good place to start and here is the top 100 from their site

http://www.lemon64.com/games/votes_list.php

A lot of history on there.

It's hard to entirely separate what was good and what is good, if you have a nostalgia monkey on your shoulder (as I perhaps do, having had a C64 for much of my childhood); however, most of these are objectively still good games:

Battleships: Elite's take on the classic board game is still fun, largely due to the 'salvo' option.
Boulder Dash: Not quite as good as the Atari original, but a fun arcade game.
Buggy Boy: Cute time-attack racer, in some ways bettering the arcade original.
Crossroads/Crossroads 2: Mental shoot ’em ups.
Deflektor: Satisfying puzzle game based around deflecting a laser by using a bunch of mirrors.
Drelbs: Cute avoid ’em up/Painter-type game.
Frankie Goes To Hollywood: An adventure smashed into proto-WarioWare with a hammer.
Flip & Flop: Cute Pac-Manish game.
Forbidden Forest: Chunky, horrific shoot ’em up with lashings of atmosphere.
Gridrunner: Jeff Minter's superb take on Centipede.
Hellgate: More Minter shooting mastery.
H.E.R.O.: One of the finest Activision games, with you rescuing miners and blasting rock walls.
Ikari Warriors: Stealth-oriented take on Commando.
Jumpman: Brutal single-screen platform game, with loads of variety in its stages.
Kikstart 2: Fantastic side-on motocross game, including a level editor.
Kikstart C16: Arcade-oriented side-on bike game—very different to Kikstart 2.
Laserzone: More Minter.
Law of the West: Wild West CYOA meets fast draws. Gets repetitive fast, but worth a few plays.
Little Computer People: A man-shaped goldfish.
Matrix: Gridrunner 2.
Night Mission: First-rate retro pinball.
P.O.D.: Shaun Southern almost out-Minters Minter, with a fantastic take on Centipede.
Snare: Thoughtful dexterity puzzler with disorienting 90-degree turns.
Speedball 2: Surprisingly good conversion of the Amiga overhead future-sports game, which is more playable than the original.
Stunt Car Racer: Vector graphics drag racing on rollercoasters.
Voidrunner: Minter! Again! Still fab!
Zenji: Fab little puzzle game from Activision.
Zolyx: Qix with a twist.

Bathtime, eh?



This type of game box is very unusual. It's like a mini VHS box. I'm used to seeing cassettes in either cardboard boxes or the standard squeaky plastic oblong cases. Too bad the inlay doesn't seem to fit inside these cases, so the upper edges are all discoloured and frayed. I should get my scanner on these things, but I'm afraid the case might disintegrate in my hands. Or I might catch something from the mucky cases and my hands might disintegrate. Stuff like the the cover of 3D Hypermaths is wonderfully naff and needs to be seen. I'll work on this.

Here's what eight minutes and six seconds of loading time gets you:







Bath Time is a confusing game. I can walk... sometimes. I don't know which one I am and I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing.

Okay I'm the bottom one. The top fairy opens the taps to try and fill the bath to make the swan escape. If the swan hits the sides when the bath is full, I lose. If I open the taps to reduce the water level, the top fairy can close her taps to make the water level go down. If the water level hits the bottom, the fish dies and I lose. I have to last as long as I can. I think. The music is a sawtooth-heavy lullaby that's painful as hell.

It's not very easy. The computer fairy can activate things quickly and doesn't have to grapple with a dodgy fire button. Maybe this would be a better game playing against another person. Can you find another person willing to play Bath Time? The search for another willing player would almost certainly be more fun than playing the game!

"BATH TIME" is not a really nice program for your Commodore 64. The case LIES.

I should play through all these and write something about them. I shouldn't have to suffer alone.


Nope, it's an ancient Goodman's cassette adapter which lets you connect 3.5mm audio jack into any standard cassette deck (as long as you can find space for the wires). I call it the magic tape.


QIX! I LOVE QIX!

Mega Apocalypse!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ES_RbE6u6jg

Rob Hubbard's music and awesome shooting action in one amazing package.

Also Sanxion:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=It7yJh-N ... re=related

All the Thalamus stuff really.

Oooh and Retrograde! - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYm9s9uKJPk

The Commodore 64 was the best home computer of the 80s, and anyone who didn't think so was just too fucking poor to afford one. (We were too poor to afford one, and I envied the folks who had them terribly.)

It wasn't just the colours, it was the amazing sounds and music the SID chip could come up with (it easily kicked the arse of the later Atari ST), add in proper sprites and scrolling and all that stuff, and it was definitely the home computer of champions.

[/quote]

That's the CPC you are thinking as it was clearly the most expensive of the lot. My 6128 clocked in at £399.



Colours? All the shades of brown you can imagine!

Don't get me wrong. I love the C64 (I own 2 of them) but lets not go overboard.

I remember being genuinely awestruck by The Lost Ninja.

They did some clever stuff so the characters were in low colour but high resolution, but the rest of the gameworld was in high colour but low resolution.

And the music - pure brilliance.

Me and a mate spent a fucking week mapping the whole thing out and just sitting there listening to the music, it didn't do our school work any favours

http://youtu.be/ExftoivJ_EU?t=1m6s

Chinnys List:

Bruce Lee
IK+
The Last V8 (just for the music, the game is shit)
Buggy Boy
Wizball
Barbarian
Last Ninja

I was going to offer to dub some tapes old school but I just realised I no longer have a tape to tape deck.

Not having a tape to tape deck makes me suddenly feel like I am missing my right arm. As a kid it was a thing you coveted. I ended up with 2. I now have none. :-(

NB I might have some duplicate games that aren't shit (relatively). I'm pretty sure when I bought my last C64 stash I ended up with duplicates. I'll take a look tomorrow.

The Commodore 64's classic music tracks is a worthy topic in itself.

I mean, really, this, off an 8-bit computer with 64KB of RAM (and wasn't only about 52K of RAM usable or something?).



And then this:

Sorry dude my uncle had a 464 (the one with the tapedeck, think it was the 464?) and whilst it had some good points (a wonderful colour palette for example), it was nobbled with some shitty derivative of the Spectrum 128's AY sound chip, and also weird graphics modes that meant you either had fuck all colours and decent resolution, or lots of colours but a resolution that'd make a ZX-81 look good.

The 6128 was basically the same machine with a disc drive and more RAM.

I still had a lot of fun playing a lot of games on it, but quite frankly I'd have set fire to the thing in an instant if it could have been magically replaced with a Commodore 64.

It also has digitized speech , however you'll spend about 7 minutes loading the game and not have a clue whats happening - so yeah better the music (and speech) only



Thats a pity a lot of the larger adventure games were disk only (Maniac Mansion / Azure Bonds / Ultima ) there were cassette versions of some (like Bards Tale) but you really need a disk drive (or something to simulate one) to get the most out of it.

On tape you'll get plenty of arcade style games , and a more limited selection of the unique games (Pirates! is a must and i always preferred the tape version because it was a single load whereas the disk one loaded up a screen every time you took over a ship or sailed into a port)



It actually tells you when you turn it on



So you turn on the machine and the overhead knocks you back to around 39k


Oh and for what you could push it to look at something like Project Firestarter (came on about 5 floppies I think and my pirated one had a problem with the 2nd or 3rd disk so never finished it)

True dat. I've been hunting all around the house trying to find anything that uses tapes at all. I've got the power leads for them all, but no actual gadgets. I eventually swiped the hifi from downstairs and put it next to my telly to copy from the magic tape as if it were a real tape (to avoid problems with games that automatically stop the tape). Didn't work. All I got out of it was discolouration on the side of my TV. Doesn't help that it takes around five minutes to try anything. Took me over a dozen tries messing with the volume and such to get a tiny Pacman clone to load, when loading off the magic tape directly. ('audiotap' makes playable .wav files out of .tap files.)

Stupid datasette. RUINING EVERYTHING. It's given me no end of trouble.

When I got it, the lid was in three pieces held together by strips of electrical tape. I took off the tape and the adhesive goo beneath was foul. I cleaned it with Sticky Stuff Remover and jif and superglued it back together. Then I dropped it on the floor. Then I superglued it back together again. Then one of the hinge parts fell off, so I superglued that back on. Then one of the triangle tags that stop the lid from opening beyond a certain angle fell off. So I thought, screw it. A pessimist would say that this irreplaceable piece of electronics is permanently damaged. An optimist would say that the lid is easily removeable now!

Yesterday, I carefully, calmly put the lid down on a table and it shattered again. Never, ever use cheap superglue. It is not the same.

I sanded the pieces, washed them, dried them and glued them again with decent glue and it's holding together as a complete lid now. Probably.

Heh I'd forgotten all about that, even though I must have seen that screen a million times

It absolutely beggars belief what they squeezed into so little RAM, not just on the C64 but all the 8-bit home computers.

I'm not one of these mentalist revisionists who thinks everything was as its best in the 80s and consoles/computers have all gone downhill since then, but you do have to stand back and admire what some of those dudes did with these little boxes back in the day.

The CPC did not have the Speccy's sound chip. It was vice versa, the CPC had it first. And the AY was a perfectly capable chip. On the one hand it didn't have the warmth of the synth ability of the SID, but it could handle samples far better and was better at an overall "brighter" sound.

I hate to break it to you but the screen resolution of the CPC was exactly the same as the C64 in the 16 colour mode. Where the CPC scored was when it dropped to the higher resolution modes it did't have any attribute issues. So whereas Head Over Heels looks wonderful in the CPC's 4 colour medium resolution mode, the C64 is stuck with 2 colours only in the main play field while the CPC is not only using 4 colours but is using hardware tricks to fit multi screen rooms onto a single screen.

The upcoming remake of R-Type will be showing what the CPC is really capable of. Instead of a shonky speccy port with duff scrolling, some guys have pulled apart the original code and totally rewritten the graphics routines, It looks stunning.

Hang on are we saying we can use a aux out to tape converter to load games from online into the C64?

I've done that with a Speccy but obviously it's easier as it has a proper input. Hadn't even considered the C64.

Exactly that. Either load off the adapter directly, or realise the tape first. If you load off the magic tape directly you have to babysit the system to make sure that you're sending what the C64 would get from a tape. That means skipping FOUND captions and manually resetting the playback.

And I think... I've just got Impossible Mission to work with it.

Anathar visatar! Stayawhile. Stayfaravahhhhhhhh!

And it crashed when I went into puzzle assembly mode. Hooray!

We need more threads like this and more regularly.

Impossible mission was bloody great. See also Wizball.

Two things to remember :

1) Make sure your picking up the PAL versions of stuff , you can run a lot of NTSC ones but you might get glitches (which that could be)
2) The 'copy protection' on some games might make it 'want' the tape to keep running , or to stop , or any one of a dozen other things , I cant remember which game but i had a pirated one where the tape kept running after the game had loaded and you could only play it until the tape got to the end of the side then it would stop and the game would crash

In which case, you'll, um, 'double-love' Zolyx. Or something.


Mm. Still quite a nice game, actually, even if the rotation controls were odd and the speech was muffled.


Bleh. Horrible. Overrated at the time and a waste of space today.


I've written about some of the Thalamus stuff for Retro Gamer. It was interesting to see what stuff held up and what really didn't and, at the time, was a case of OOH, SHINY!

Sanxion: Dull at the time, terrible after a couple of months, since it missed the power-ups thing. Great music, but Warhawk was better and cheaper.
Delta: Divisive, and I always hated this, bar the wonderful soundtrack. One mistake in the entire game: DEAD.
Quedex: Also divisive at the time, but I think this dexterity test holds up brilliantly. It'd be a perfect mobile game if someone would resurrect it.
Hunter's Moon: An out-and-out shooting classic. Tough, but brilliant networks of creatures going about their business while you carve your way through their webs to find the prizes needed to complete each level. Gutted that Martin Walker won't talk about his old games.
Armalyte: Quite nice horizontal shooter, but overshadowed by what you can get on machines with better hardware.
Hawkeye: Run-of-the-mill sideways shooter. Great presentation for the time, but the game comes across as very average today.
Snare: Really nice action puzzle game, despite the turn mechanic making you feel sick.
Retrograde: I was always a bit suspicious of this at the time, and it showed up one of the Rowland Bros' major design problems: the wall. Choose the 'wrong' power up at any point and you cannot proceed and have to start again. That'd be fine if the shooting sections weren't such a grind.
Creatures: Flawed platform game. Really cute and with amusing cartoon torture screen interludes. Some duff controls though (no walking up slopes), and the same problems as Retrograde, in having a few points where you can't complete the game unless you have a specific power-up. The last few levels are also absurdly difficult.
Summer Camp: Very average platform game. God knows how this scored 80% in Zzap!64.
Heatseeker: Strange platform game by the chap who wrote Arac. Far from brilliant, but at least it showed some originality in Thalamus's output of the time.
Creatures II: Torture Trouble: Uses the torture screens as the basis of the game, but adds a few different interludes. Quite nice, but this works a lot better when you've an infinite lives/level-skip cheat active, which says a lot about the game's design.
Winter Camp: Minigame averageness!
Nobby the Aardvark: Ugh. This scored very highly, presumably because the C64 was at the end of its life by that point. It's by the guys behind CJ's Elephant Antics and is more of the same. Thing is, the budget game is more fun.


Balls. I have two sets of games here (one of which is a 'default' set in the iOS app), so missed some out. Bruce Lee is a hugely fun platform game, IK+ is still my favourite traditional fighting game, and Wizball is a slice of gaming genius. Barbarian I'm less hot on (not bad, but sluggish and the CPC version's a lot prettier) and I always thought Last Ninja was gloss over substance.


They were always shit. I used a VIC-20 tape deck with my C64, which was marginally more reliable than the C64 ones my friends had. In the end, I'd use my friend's Action Replay to save my tape games to disk, and get cracked multiload games to replace the original cassette copies I bought for the likes of California Games. Disk is the way to go, unless you've splashed out on one of those SD card readers that plug into the cartridge port.

I thought no one else but me remembered Drelbs and Flip & Flop.

There really were some excellent games in the early/mid life of the C64. Off the top of my head I'll add these (more to come if I remember more):

Jumpman Jr. (more Jumpman)
Falcon Patrol
Falcon Patrol 2
Oils Well (fantastic home version of Anteater)
Blue Max

Good work MrD! Yes, the datasette was always a bit of a 'mare. You don't really need the case though. Just keep a small screwdriver handy to adjust the head tracking.

There was a modification which was very common to assist setting the alignment - a small loudspeaker (actually a piezo sounder) which you soldered into the back of the datasette, it just squeaked away quietly while loading, but if you found the odd tape that was troublesome, you could adjust the tracking until the loading noise sounded "clear" and then it would always work perfectly.

The disk system and a freezer cartridge of some sort is invaluable though. I had my favorite games saved to disk, the cartridge used one of the F keys to quickly boot into a basic menu program also saved on the disk, and then you just chose which saved game you wanted. Two button presses, that was it.

I'm remembering Exile.. Stunt car racer.. umm.. Creatures?

Impress the Russian judge by wearing red shorts.

Good choice! Loved that game.

Wasn't Stunt CAr Racer on the Amiga/ST? Don't recall a C64 version.

One game I haven't seen mentioned is Druid. Top down Gauntlet like game where you can summon a Gollum and a second player can control it. Used to LOVE that.

Some of the better arcade conversions:

Pooyan
Zaxxon
Ms. Pacman (absolutely brilliant, this one)
Jr. Pacman (this one too)
Donkey Kong (There are two official versions, a really old one and one made somewhat later, both good)
Dig Dug
Wizard of Wor
Gyruss

Edit: Oh, and Defender was pretty good, too, although much easier than the arcade version.

Slightly off topic, but when I was young my cousins used to have a C64, although I didn't see them very often, so didn't get to play on it very much. The only game I remember is a Manic Miner style game, and the only distinguishing feature I remember is that one of the levels had one of those plunger-type things (that would squash you when you walked under them) all the way down the right hand side of the screen.
Does that mean anything to anyone?

Umm.. you've made me doubt it now. But no. Must have been on the C64. Can anyone confirm?

It was on both formats.

There was a speccy version of SCR. I remember it well.




And, yes, there was a c64 version

Here

Yes there was a C64 version. Although it probably ran at about 1 frame per year.

Psi-5 Trading Company ("Sci-fi", geddit?)
Thrust
Paradroid
Master of the Lamps
Park Patrol
The Sentinel
Sentinel (Not the same as the previous, it's a 3D shooter)
Dropzone (The very best arcade game on the C64)
Encounter
Poster Paster
Super Pipeline
Super Pipeline 2
Rock'n Bolt

Yes to everything on the lists except



No , no , NO !

Dropzone is an Atari game http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dropzone

This is on my to do list. Best thing I ever did for my Amiga was putting a compact flash in the hard drive bay followed by the extra memory and accelerator.

This has piqued my interest. Any links? Presumably it would only work with games that were originally published on cartridge, or what?

You would be incorrect.

And I don't have a link because if I did find one I'd probably buy it straight away.

thread of the day...

i always really liked helicopter explorer Eindeloos ("endless", dus game) and fort apocalypse..

I was always rather envious of the C64 version of Power Drift. It had the proper undulating courses of the arcade original and looked pretty good compared to the Spectrum version.

Action Biker was a weird one too - the C64 and Spectrum versions were completely different games. I did enjoy the Speccy one (with Clumsy Colin going house-to-house for bike parts or something.. all a bit hazy) but the C64 was a lot more fun if I remember rightly.

So, as a result of this thread I've discovered 1541 Ultimate. Oh dear. I need this in my life, I need it so very badly.

I was looking around and found this one instead

http://store.go4retro.com/products/uIEC%7B47%7DSD.html

Cheaper but not available , however looking at the background I found this thread

http://www.lemon64.com/forum/viewtopic. ... sc&start=0

Which suggests that the problem was a component that the manufacturer stopped making and the person who builds them has found a replacement so they should be available 'soon' (the website says 'today' - the thread says sometime this week)

Other alternative seems to be a custom cable and you hook it up to the parallel port of your PC (if it still has one) , run some customer software and your PC pretends to be a 1541 drive.

(Although i'd love the retro feel of this stuff i'm happy with just emulating them on a normal computer - for anyone viewing this thread and feeling a bit nostalgic grab VICE from http://www.viceteam.org and go to http://www.gamebase64.com to download virtually any C64 game).

Both would have been in Retro Gamer if we'd been able to track down the programmers. Great games. Same also for Blue Max.


It was on the 16-bit machines and better on them, but the C64 version was impressive, fast and handled really well. If you had a room with a bunch of machines, including an Amiga, there'd be no point in loading the C64 game, but if you just have a C64, it's one of the very few 3D racing games that still plays well today (another, perhaps, being Power Drift).


Monty On The Run? Dynamite Dan?

I think that if it had been on the Spectrum, then I'd have hunted it down for myself, so I'm assuming it was a C64 game only. I've looked at all the single screen platformers on Lemon64 and nothing really sticks out, it didn't help that it was hooked up to a black and white tv.

Both Miner 2049er and Bounty Bob Strikes Back have plungers which kill you but they are 'flat' bottomed rather than rounded.

I don't think so, I remember the graphics as being very 'Manic Miner' like, as opposed to the fairly chunky graphics which seem to make up most of these games. A bit of googling has turned up Blagger, but it doesn't seem very familiar (and I'm rubbish at it).