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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.

16 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 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.
    2. 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.

    3. 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
    4. 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
    5. 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,

    6. 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
  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 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. 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

  4. 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.
  5. 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.

  6. 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.

  7. 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