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Amazon says hello.

Classic gaming, at least from a hardware perspective, is a pretty big business. If you can't find an adapter for your controller, you can almost always find somebody who built one in an afternoon from ten dollars worth of parts.

As far as special keys on emulated systems, it's very rare that they aren't provided for. This specifically talks about the Commodore 64 emulators available and how they provide for special Commodore keys.

The lesson here? For every one of us that has two pieces of old hardware sitting in a crate in the corner, there's some crazy guy still writing software for it, another crazy guy building hardware for it, and a third writing an emulator or driver for a modern system/OS.

You don't know the system very well.

You'd have to modify the a program for the 6502 processor that runs the drive.

What? You were going to write it for the C64 as a basic program or assembler? Both will eat up valuable memory space and be very slow. A cartridge may help some but it will still be slow.

Yes I've written machine code in 6502 for the 1541 though I used a hack to get it into ram and executed properly. I implemented a no knock routine that would load off a floppy at power on based on clues from the reference guide.

Someone decompiled and documented the rom which may allow such a scheme to be implemented. I grant there's almost no wiggle room in a 1541 so it may require some code in the C65 as well via a cartridge or a hardware mod or both to both.
http://www.flavioweb.it/c64/docs/AsmDocs/1541-diss.html and you need an adapter to use burnable roms http://ist.uwaterloo.ca/~schepers/roms.html

What is this? http://www.h64.de/ could be a useful modification. I must find out!
It uses an AT29C010A flash chip a static ram chip some gal chips and discrete logic.

C64 Geeking see the above links and:
http://www.c64.com/
http://ist.uwaterloo.ca/~schepers/personal.html
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=98

For more google can help.

sudo apt-get install vice

Download your favorite games from c64.com or thegamearchives.com.

Paradroid rocks!

Load it with a:

C:\CCS64\CCS.exe C:\CCS64\Paradroid.d64 -window -autorun

I just copy the CCS.exe and paste it as a shortcut on the desektop then edit the target to the desired game as above.

...can we get hold of that machine emulator thingy separately and install it on our home box?

In the old C64 game Nemesis the Warlock you had to pile up corpses to make platforms to reach high parts of the levels. In some levels this was the only way to reach the exit.

• C64 1985 commercial
• Bunch of C64 links, photos, and videos (For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price.)

Does it run on the Commodore 64?

You know it strikes me that probably 90% of the Internet audience these days would have no clue what ASCII is, much less how to telnet into the server.

On one hand, that's slightly sad - I remember being able to type faster on a C-64 than the modem could transmit - on the other it's amazing how far technology has come in only a decade.

My other thought is to ask the likelihood that FIFA will shut them down as an infringing activity.

Ah yes, Wasteland is probably the greatest game ever for the Commodore. I still play it occasionally using VICE. You can get game images at C64.com.

I cut my computing teeth on a Commodore C=64 back in 1985. I was 5 years old, and didn't have the slightest clue what anything was.

The machine was 2nd-hand, had an Altai tape deck instead of the Commodore one, and (more unusually - none of my friends with C=64's ever had one) also included a Commodore 1541 5.25" floppy disk drive.

I learned how to write some BASIC programs on the built-in copy of Commodore BASIC; nothing fancy, but enough to get a head start. I'm still not any good at programming, really...

The machine really was awesome for gaming; some of my favourite games are still C=64-only releases and have had no modern-day equivelants - classics such as Street Beat, where you play a Rastafarian with a ghetto blaster, and you have to find songs for your record label, and show how popular the songs are by making people dance. All the while, people are trying to kill you, break your ghettoblaster, steal your tapes, and what's worse, sometimes your record label won't like the songs you bring them! True classic.

Then there was the wonderful text/graphic adventure game, "Twin Kingdom Valley". I spent many hours trying to beat that one (never did). Also, "Knight Games", where you participate in medieval sporting events - sword fights, pike fights, crossbow and archery competitions... beautiful graphics, wonderfully detailled, and lots of fun to play.

Other favourites :-

- Way of the Exploding Fist
- Fist II
- IK+
- Ace of Aces
- The Dambusters
- Ranarama
- Archon
- Elite
- Parallax
- Rescue on Fractalus
- Paperboy
- Desert Fox
- Skyfox
- Zaxxon
- Super Zaxxon
- Tapper
- Spy Hunter
- Up 'n' Down

Think of all the major game franchises these days that have their roots in the C=64 - the "Microsoft Flight Simulator" series started life as Sublogic's "Flight Simulator", which was a C=64 release. "The Sims" is a far more advanced version of "Little Computer People" (a.k.a. "House-On-A-Disk"). There will be many others.

For all you C=64 lovers, whose C=64's have sadly gone to Silicon Heaven, download the CCS64 emulator (http://www.computerbrains.com/ccs64/), and find a whole bunch of C=64 games and applications over at http://www.c64.com/

My C=64 was quietly retired after we got an Amiga A500 for Christmas in 1990 - the A500 gave similar computing joy for a long time thereafter, but that's another story (we're not being asked about our 2nd computers, after all).

Already got it, the emulator works OK, but is a great pain to work with.

Go here: http://www.viceteam.org/

Then here: http://www.c64.com/

Actually, I wonder if any kids ever died while trying to leap out of trees using bedsheets as a shuba, like in the old game Below the Root. Now that would be ironic. One of the best non-violent video games of all time, getting blammed for causing kids to kill themselves.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, download the Vice C64 emulator right now and cruise on over to c64.com to download the game. Its worth a week of your time. I always wish someone would do a remake.

I have a Commodore 64 emulator running on my phone (Nokia 6630). Pretty cool to show people Jumpman! Get a bluetooth keyboard for it, and the old games are quite playable. I keep a keyboard in the car in case I need to do remote support (using s2putty), so whilst waiting at the airport to pick someone up, I fire up the Commodore 64, and play LodeRunner :)

Frodo is the emulator for Symbian phones.

http://e32frodo.sourceforge.net/

And here is pretty much any C64 game you can think of.

http://www.c64.com/

Simulator available here.

I wonder how long it'll take them to sue all the emulator writers, both entire machine and SID players? Will they take action against folks who enjoy the offerings of the HVSC and game archives?

A 24 second wait is a throwback to game design 20 years ago . So what gives?

Sony wants you to throw more money at the problem. Let me explain.

When you format a Memory Stick with the PSP itself, you'll not only find it empty afterwards, there are some interesting directories on it. The existence of a games directory strongly suggests that Sony plans to enable users playing games directly off the Memory Stick.

So it would appear that the memory stick will be used for caching content, so the disk drive won't be needed as much. This makes sense since the PSP doesn't seem to have much RAM for a game system that can play with a more than a GB of data on a disk.

- UMD Transfer rate (read): 11Mbps
- Memory Stick Pro Transfer rate (read/write): up to 80 Mbps

So this will work? Yep, if you have a 512MB (or larger) memory stick on hand.
Seeing as how you (and developers) would like to cache as much of a game as possible, the prices on memory sticks are less than encouraging.

Combine that with an external battery pack, and you have a solid and expensive solution to making this thing usable. :(

Yes, there are some good games recently, but then for every good game you have about 20 companies making basically a copy of the idea. And there aren't very many original ideas out there.

When you go back and look at c64 games there were a great number of highly original ideas. A lot of them where not about blasting things, which I think is a big challenge.

Now, it's all about having the best graphics. Sure, it was back then too to some extent, but I think people enjoyed games for the gameplay more.

As a C64 Doom Clone! :)

It is German for W*nk...

Yep. That's why, for example, back in the 80's the 8-bit game Vixen was renamed to "She-Fox" in Germany. I wonder if Microsoft cares, though.

With its advanced SID chip for making sounds and music, the Commodore 64 was an incredible machine for video game music. It's nearly criminal that it was left out.

Today even the smallest children doesn't seem to be so fascinated by computer games. They have seen it all before, and they are used to the high quality so they demand so much more.

I miss the Commodore 64...

How about an updated version of How to be a Complete Bastard?

128K? Wow, what a luxury. I'm still running on 64K.

not to forget... www.C64.com for the pre-PC gamers... :)

A search for 'paradroid' came up empty. Perhaps the game / company / person is not in our database, or perhaps there was a typo in the search. The quick search only searches on exact word matching and only searches game titles, company names and people names. Perhaps you should try different search terms, or use the more exhaustive site search page.

Clearly, there is still work to be done.

PS- If you've never heard of or played Paradroid, do yourself a favour and click on that link and then fire up a Commodore 64 emulator. It will take you a few minutes to get the hang of the game and then, well, the sun will come up or you'll be asked to clear our your cubicle.

People are still making games for C64 too...

... but the old game is avalable in a lot of places, like this.
Combined with vice, you can relive your childhood... :)

"I guess this depends on your definition of "3D" in games. I was under the impression that true 3D meant that passages and rooms could exist on top of each other, creating true multi-layer scenarios. This is something that Doom could not do, but that Bungie's Marathon did. By that definition, Marathon should get the honor of being the "first true 3D" game."

You are right that Quake wasn't the first true 3D-game, or even the first true 3D-Shooter. If true 3D means objects and world made of filled polygons, games like Driller would surely qualify. It might even qualify as the first FPS.

Marathon, however, used a technique called Raycasting for the environment, and sprites for the characters/objects, and this is also the case for Doom, Wolf3D, Duke3D etc. Raycasting works by having a two dimensional map(or several maps above eachother, as done in Marathon and Duke3D to create rooms above rooms), and then scan what is within the players field of view from his current position/direction.

A Very simplyfied explanation:
Imagine a chessboard where all the black squares exept a small rectangle in the middle of the board are replaced with white squares. You are in one of the corners, and are facing the oposite corner. The engine scans what you can see within your 90 degrees field of vision , and whenever it "hits" a black square or the walls of the chessboard, it stops and put a wall-texture there. White squares are ignored. What you would see from your position in the corner is a square room with a small stonehengeish rectangle in the middle of the room. Ofcourse, the Marathon engine is far more advanced, but the Wolf3D engine actually used squares with either an CLOSED(wall) or OPEN-state.

I'm not sure, but I think I have read somewhere that John Carmack was the first to use this technique in the game Hovertank (minus textured walls) that was released in May 1991.

I wish my english was better... This page has working code for a raycasting engine, and explains the consept far deeper than I am able to. :)

"Catacomb Abyss Released: Dec 1991 The first FPS."

Not really. The game Dark Side for the Commodore 64 was a fully polygonal, first person shooter, that was released in 1988, i think. The only problem was that it had a framerate of about 3 or 4 fps. ;)

On a sidenote, the engine Catacomb Abyss used was written by John Carmack, and share alot of code with the younger Wolf3D. :)

I'm fond of the C64 version, myself. Actually, "addicted" would be a more accurate word. :-)

There was once an attempt to port it to DOS, but it was squashed by the copyright holder. You can probably still search for "Mule 386".

Get your C64 games, Spectrum games, Amiga games and Atari ST games.

Go On www.c64.com. Tons of games and emulators. I suggest Frodo, works nicely on X11 and also includes the ROMs (without any legal problems attached to them).