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Internet Archive Launches a Commodore 64 Emulator (hardocp.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the browser-friendly dept.

The Internet Archive has launched a free, browser-based Commodore 64 Emulator with over 10,500 programs that are "working and tested for at least booting properly." Interestingly, the emulator comes just before the launch of Commodore's own C64 Mini. "It's based off the VICE emulator version 3.2, which is a triumph of engineering," adds HardOCP.

53 of 77 comments (clear)

  1. Memories by sgtron · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I browsed through the collection and a lot of those titles certainly brought back memories. I'm 50. I'm sharing with my father who spent many hours with me as a kid teaching me how to program in basic on our humble Commodore 64.

    --
    No todo lo que es oro brilla
    1. Re:Memories by Papaspud · · Score: 1

      GO 64

      --
      Everything above is my opinion....YMMV
    2. Re:Memories by mentil · · Score: 2

      My older brother was given one by a rich relative in the late 80s; I played many a coop game with him on it (Gauntlet was probably his favorite). He got a disk drive cheap from his high school, which was replacing their C64s with newer PCs; I recall he repaired/replaced that a few times, and I think he used stock firmware because the load times were terrible. I remember he spent all day typing in arcane symbols from a magazine so that he could play Crossroads, which we enjoyed afterwards.
      I got the Vic 20 as the hand-me-down, it was my first computer.

      --
      Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
    3. Re:Memories by Plammox · · Score: 1

      *whoosh!*
      (C128 owners would know)

    4. Re:Memories by Shaitan · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I'm 37. My grandfather bought me a box of "computer stuff" at an auction in the 90's. Two C64's and two of the 5 1/4 disk drives, a TRS-80 and a commodore monitor and no other software.

      I learned to code on it... I had to, there was no other way to do anything with it. lol First basic, then dumping memory with peek and poke and discovering additional functionality, finally ASM. I remember figuring out how to use the memory chip in one of the disk drives as storage. I wrote a word processor I called word star. And I combined that convenient display output with a VCR to make and record animations. Obviously I never got to play any of these games but I did write a few. Fun times as a delinquent teenager. I got several friends into computing as well.

    5. Re:Memories by AmiMoJo · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The C64 is one of the most interesting machines ever made. The hardware was powerful but needed a lot of skill to get the most from. You can see this by comparing early and late C64 games; the difference is incredible, you wouldn't think they were the same machine.

      The sound chip, for example, could produce some amazing output but had to be programmed directly. Musicians were coders as well, and of course as well as figuring out how to make the chip produce those sounds they had to fit it all within the limited memory and CPU power available. An interesting bit of trivia, the C64 was where the iconic "fake chord" was invented, where two or three notes are played in quick succession on a single channel to make up for the lack of greater polyphony.

      The CPU was 8 bit and ran at 1MHz. But it had to share the memory bus with the video chip, so it couldn't make use of every cycle, and of course there were no caches or anything like that. It had a few tricks like the zero page, which gave it 256 fairly fast register-like bytes of RAM to play with. Compilers were expensive and almost exclusively had to run on more powerful machines for cross-compilation, so most software was written in BASIC or assembler.

      All sorts of tricks were developed to make the most of this limited CPU power. For example, "speed code" is where instead of storing data separately in RAM it's directly inserted into the machine code instructions as immediate operands.

      The video hardware was also very hackable, with all sorts of tricks possible to produce effects that were way beyond what the designers imagined. The Amiga took this to another level, but the C64 was better understood at an earlier stage. People reverse engineered it completely, understanding the internal workings of the video chip and being able to write code that made full use of every available memory access slot. That's something that didn't really happen with the Amiga until emulators started to make it easier, although some people came close.

      The C64 was probably the pinnacle of 8 bit home computers.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    6. Re:Memories by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Too bad their JavaScript emulator is a pile of shit that doesn't work. Most of the games I tried either wouldn't start, would load and then crash or load and not do anything.

    7. Re:Memories by jeremyp · · Score: 2

      it had to share the memory bus with the video chip, so it couldn't make use of every cycle

      Actually, most of the time it could. The 6502 split the 1MHz clock into two phases: in the first half of the cycle it did internal stuff and it did memory accesses in the second half of the cycle. In fact, it always did a memory access in the second half of every cycle even if it didn't need to.

      In normal operation the VIC chip accessed the memory in the first half of the clock cycle. So both the video circuitry and the CPU could access the RAM with no slow down. The only exception to this was when displaying a sprite. The video chip literally stopped the CPU chip for a few cycles while doing this so it could have exclusive access to the bus.

      --
      All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
    8. Re:Memories by shortscruffydave · · Score: 2

      An interesting bit of trivia, the C64 was where the iconic "fake chord" was invented, where two or three notes are played in quick succession on a single channel to make up for the lack of greater polyphony.

      I grew up with the VIC 20 and as far as I remember the C64 had the same (or possibly better) sound capabilities, as both machines used the SID chip.

      There were 3 voices available (registers 36874, 36875 and 36876) so you could play 3 separate notes simultaneously.

      (also from my distant memory, 36877 was a separate voice for white noise, and 36878 controlled the overall volume,

    9. Re:Memories by AmiMoJo · · Score: 2

      The CPU normally has 63 cycles per scanline available, but when the VIC-II needs to fetch colour data every 8 lines this is reduced to 23. Reason being that the VIC-II can't fetch both the bitmap data and the colour data on only the low part of the clock cycle, so has to lock the CPU out for some of the high parts too.

      During that time the CPU is frozen as it can't fetch new instructions. Sprites had a similar effect, as you note.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    10. Re:Memories by Narcocide · · Score: 1

      Insert disk 2 then press enter to continue.

    11. Re:Memories by AmiMoJo · · Score: 1

      Right, there were three voices available. However, it's not much use if you need all 3 to play a single chord, with none left over for percussion or other instruments. So the solution was to play three notes in succession on one channel.

      I'm trying to remember who invented it. I read it once but can't find it now.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    12. Re:Memories by sad_ · · Score: 1

      there is something to these 8 bit home computers, in that, as you say, programmers knew them inside out.
      this was not unique to the c64, but also amstrad cpc and zx spectrum, although the popularity of the c64 continues to even today (while the communities of other home computers are much smaller).

      --
      On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
    13. Re:Memories by mnmn · · Score: 1

      "People reverse engineered it completely"

      I'm not sure they even had to; I remember my C64 came with very detailed circuit diagrams of the whole motherboard and something like a developers guide. They were way over my head but it didn't look like one had to reverse engineer much.

      --
      "Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
    14. Re:Memories by AmiMoJo · · Score: 1

      Indeed they supplied schematics, sometimes on request, for a lot of 8 bit machines. But I'm talking about the internals of the video chip, which were only documented from the point of view of the control registers and overall operation.

      By hacking and experimenting people figured out the internal workings down to the memory access timings and sequences.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    15. Re:Memories by spudnic · · Score: 1

      Never heard of it.

      --
      load "linux",8,1
    16. Re:Memories by nitehawk214 · · Score: 1

      If the highest point in your life was a as a teenager, I hope you died young.

      --
      I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
    17. Re:Memories by mfnickster · · Score: 1

      If I had known then what I know now, I wouldn't have bothered to grow up!

      --
      "Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
    18. Re:Memories by rklrkl · · Score: 1

      The pinnacle of 8-bit home computers was actually the BBC Micro, which had a superb OS and BASIC (including a 2-pass 6502 assembler that the C64 could only dream of) and an excellent disk drive system that wasn't slower than tape (hint: the C64 disk system was a complete dog).

      There are plenty of BBC Micro emulators out there, but you might find the most convenient one to be on Android: Beebdroid.

    19. Re:Memories by AmiMoJo · · Score: 1

      That's true to some extent, it certainly was a powerful machine. In the other hand the graphics were somewhat limited for games and it was expensive.

      One thing that really impressed me about the BBC Micro and the later Archimedes was how efficient the BASIC interpreter was.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    20. Re:Memories by Desler · · Score: 1

      Cool story, incel.

    21. Re: Memories by lord_mike · · Score: 1

      You mean the movie War Games where a geeky hacker gets Ally Sheedy to fall head over heels for him wasn't a real life documentary?

    22. Re:Memories by sad_ · · Score: 1

      that's not all, you also got the schematics; you could hack away at the hardware without guesswork.

      --
      On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
    23. Re:Memories by sjames · · Score: 1

      I'll second that. Hacking on the Arduino is a lot like hacking on a C64 only it's cheap enough that you can keep a few spares around in case you let the smoke out.

  2. Arnold's archive by Aethedor · · Score: 5, Informative

    I don't know of any game that this archive doesn't have. C64 forever! :)

    --
    It doesn't have to be like this. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.
    1. Re:Arnold's archive by Hodr · · Score: 1

      Didn't have the one and only game I searched for:
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

    2. Re:Arnold's archive by Aethedor · · Score: 2

      It's there, under 'c'...

      --
      It doesn't have to be like this. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.
    3. Re:Arnold's archive by Tom · · Score: 1

      I even forgot that existed. It was actually a great game and so much fun.

      I sometimes miss these short, straightforward, sit-down-and-play games that were typical for the C64. There are a few such games for consoles, typically under the "party game" category, but even most of those require you to go and set up characters and players, enter names, watch some intro video, bla bla bla.

      --
      Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
    4. Re:Arnold's archive by Desler · · Score: 1

      Then you apparently didn't look very hard.

      ftp://arnold.c64.org/pub/games...
      ftp://arnold.c64.org/pub/games...
      ftp://arnold.c64.org/pub/games...
      ftp://arnold.c64.org/pub/games...

  3. Re:Put disk 2/2 in drive and ... by aevan · · Score: 1

    Could have each disk as an image file, and the emulator just has you change which image is 'in the drive'.

  4. What keys map to joystick? by goose-incarnated · · Score: 1

    Sitting there with river raid on screen, but nothing starts the game.

    --
    I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
    1. Re:What keys map to joystick? by mentil · · Score: 2

      Took me a while to figure that out. It's 0 key on your numpad for the fire button, numpad arrow keys for movement. Have to turn numlock off first.

      --
      Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
    2. Re:What keys map to joystick? by goose-incarnated · · Score: 1

      Took me a while to figure that out. It's 0 key on your numpad for the fire button, numpad arrow keys for movement. Have to turn numlock off first.

      That didn't work for me, however, pressing f12 brings up the emulator config, and selecting "hardware/joystick" then setting "joystick 1" to "numpad" worked for me.

      --
      I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
  5. Jeri Ellsworth by Xenna · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Didn't she create something like the C64 mini as long ago as 2004?

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

    1. Re:Jeri Ellsworth by iampiti · · Score: 2

      Been following her for a long time and she seems to be a hell of a tinkerer. She can do amazing things

  6. So very cool... by Narcocide · · Score: 1

    Oh wow. Well not so much the loading times, but still great fun.

  7. Commodore's Own? by JPeMu · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Although I do find the C64 Mini an interesting project, is it really accurate to call it "Commodore's own"? Their Indiegogo page actually seems to confirm that:

    "Disclaimer – Retro Games Ltd, THEC64(tm) are in no way associated with Commodore Holdings B.V. THEC64(tm) have not been prepared, approved, or licensed by Commodore Holdings B.V in any way and are not licensed to use the Commodore(R) name or 'Chicken Head' logo. The Commodore Roms, BIOS and THEC64(tm) form factor are officially licensed from Cloanto https://cloanto.com/"

    As far as I was aware only the software is licensed, and it's nothing to do with Commodore Holdings B.V. who own the Commodore brand name?

    1. Re:Commodore's Own? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      Commodore Holdings is pretty much an IP-troll that obtained the logo and tries to capitalize on it.
      Up front on their homepage is legal cases, not products.

    2. Re:Commodore's Own? by JPeMu · · Score: 1

      Yes indeed - it's a rather sad and grubby state of affairs for the brand that (mostly) proved to be the most formative in my computing adolescence.

      Is it fair, therefore, to say that Cloanto remains, for all intents and purposes, the primary licensee of the Commodore products (sans Brand/Logo)?

  8. Just before the launch? by fabben · · Score: 1

    The C64 Mini has been sold in stores for almost a year now.

  9. Re:Put disk 2/2 in drive and ... by mccalli · · Score: 2

    That's exactly how VICE on the desktop works. You change the image in the menus and press whatever the game is telling you to. Essential for playing Psi 5 Trading Company.

  10. Is one of them Mail Order Monsters? by h33t+l4x0r · · Score: 1

    Because that would bring me back. Otherwise I could give a flying you-know-what.

    1. Re:Is one of them Mail Order Monsters? by Tom · · Score: 1

      https://archive.org/details/d6...

      doesn't seem to work for me, though. YMMV

      --
      Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
  11. I'm waiting for the C1571 mini by jfdavis668 · · Score: 1

    Only I don't know where to buy 2 5/8" floppies.

    1. Re:I'm waiting for the C1571 mini by Wulf2k · · Score: 1

      Just find one, then use a holepunch to make it double sided.

    2. Re:I'm waiting for the C1571 mini by CWCheese · · Score: 1

      I'm sure if I search long enough in my parts bins, I can find the notcher that I used to use for making my own DSDD 5.25" disks. It is blue and makes a nice square cut very cleanly. I could never get the cut so clean with a stationery hole punch.

      --
      Have a Day!
  12. Networked C-64's and Morse Code by Toad-san · · Score: 1

    Back in '84, the first commercial programming job I did after retiring from the Army was to develop a networked C-64 send-and-receive Morse Code instruction program for the SF radiomen at Bragg. Ended up working very well indeed, but I can't find anyone at all out there now who learned from that system. (I didn't track the school or the code once it was done.)

    Army got a real deal: $5000 for an indefinite license for the whole thing! (I was new in the programming field and wanted something to put in my resume.) Took me about 3 months for the whole project.

    My favorite smart trick was to run data sorts in video RAM :-) Sure looked cool: you could see the data shuffling and falling into place :-)

  13. Lemon64.com has a C64 music player by commodore64_love · · Score: 2

    You can sit at work & listen to classic SIDtunes that used to play in videogames or demos. There are also music emulators you can download for classic Nintendo, Sega, Playstation consoles & integrate with Winamp

    .

    --
    "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
  14. No Medicine Man! :( by KlomDark · · Score: 1

    It was a little known indie game from "Magic Carpet Software", but it was really cool, some medicine man dancing for rain.

    Medicine Man

  15. Re:Why doesn't someone... by Chaset · · Score: 1

    This is cool:
    http://geoffg.net/maximite.htm...

    --
    -- "This world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel."
  16. Re:Why doesn't someone... by Chaset · · Score: 1

    replying to myself...
    There's a Japanese guy that did something similar:
    http://www.ze.em-net.ne.jp/~ke...
    His English page which talks about the video game aspect of his device:
    http://www.ze.em-net.ne.jp/~ke...

    --
    -- "This world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel."
  17. Can't seem to get the emulator to launch. by antdude · · Score: 1

    Game Metadataâoe"
    Game File Listâoe"
    Emulator Metadataâoe"
    Game File (1 of 1)âoe"

    And then stuck in my IE11 and SM2.49.4 web browsers. :(

    --
    Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
  18. "Play All" by itomato · · Score: 1

    Challenge accepted.