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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.

5 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 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
  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.
  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/...

  4. 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?