Commodore 64 Resources & Emulation

I remember the day I got my Commodore 64, it cost a whopping $149.25 at the PX on Keesler Air Force Base in Mississippi. It was December 20th 1984 and I had saved forever to get it. No floppy drive, that was next year for $223.53 and the local Sears in the mall. Man how I was jealous of those people who could play games without waiting for up to 30 minutes to load from tape. The machine a full 64K, graphics and sound that only the Atari could match and the IBM of the day could only dream of- it also had the slowest disk drive known to man. Just loading Raid on Bungeling Bay usually involved me going to dinner first before we could even play.
If you are really young and have no idea what a Commodore 64 is, I once again suggest using wikipedia- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64.


In the early 1990's I beta tested an emulator for my 286 (yes...286) that allowed me to run some very limited programs on the PC. Nowadays the state of C64 emulation is much improved over those first steps so you can pretty much run anything execpt some stuff from the demo scene.




My Favorites:

• Ultima III: Damm you Richard Garriot! my brother and I wasted an awful lot of time because of this awesome game.
• Raid on Bungeling Bay: Just bomb the factories, avoid planes missles and anti-aircraft fire attacking, defend your carrier and destroy the enemy battleship. Eash huh?
• Archon and Archon II: Like chess with an action phase, these two were about as close to chess as we got at the time.
• Spy vs. Spy I&II: Great fun almost every day before school for about two years. What else bonds brothers like blowing each other up with coconuts.
• LodeRunner: This game alone has gotta be one of the top 50 of all time- right up there with tetris and Super Mario Land for originality and really using the limited resourses available to the programmer.
• Choplifter: Fly the chopper, avoid the enemy planes and tanks and rescue people from burning housess, the only disturbing thing I found about this game is that you often have to bomb the house first to set it on fire to rescue the people. I am not sure what kind of lesson that taught us , but they never found the bodies anyway.

Commodore Stuff on Ebay:

Magazines & Books from Amazon:




Magazines/Books Atricles Online:

There exist out there a number of online resources for old printed C64 related to stroke that nostalgic memory we have for the beloved Commie.

• Nice top ten Commodore 64 games list with links to .d64 images... I wish I had M.U.L.E. back in the day... http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Park/5715/top10/
• Full text from about 98 issues of Compute! Magazine http://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/
• COMPUTE!'s Gazette Type-In Articles and Disks all scanned in for you.
• disC=overy programming magazine ran 1996-1997 (4 issues)
• This site is just a clearinghouse for C64 elated docs, programming, reference books, program documentation, articles - this site has it all. http://project64.c64.org/index.htm
• http://elitegroup.demo.org/~doj/c64/book.html OK, so the C64 stuff here is German, but they do have the commodore 128 programmers reference guide in pdf and ocr'ed.
• Anybody else remember the magazine called the 'Transactor' this was for the uber C64 hacker with some pretty advanced hardware articles. Well now now they are available online here
  Transactor Magazine Online
• ZZapp!64 Was a nice British magazine started in 1985 and published for six years or so. The site has lots of history and presents a new perspective for my American C64 experience.
• Commodore Format Mag. http://www.commodoreformat.co.uk/ the site doesn't appear to be updated often, but they have a TrueType FONT like on the original C64!!
• C= Hacking Magazine This electronic magazine was still around in 2002 and covered all sorts of advanced assembly language and whatnot.
• This is from MAKE Magazine- Some guy took one of those joystick games you plug into the tv and turned it into a C64 laptop. http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2007/01/teeny_tiny_comm.html

Links to Emulators/Utilities/Software for your C64

• Need instant gratification, play C64 stuff online now in your java enabled browser. http://www.dreamfabric.com/c64/
• Play offline, Sourceforge site for the java based Ja64 listed above is at: http://sourceforge.net/projects/jac64/
• How about a Flash 9 based player? http://osflash.org/fc64 GPL'ed
• CCS64 Is a really nice Windows Emulator that has lots of nice features not found elsewhere like these listed on the site. Paddle joystick and mouse support. Support for 4 emulated 1541 drives. Cartridge support. http://www.computerbrains.com/ccs64/
• Zophar's domain has a reasonably up to date list of various emulators available http://www.zophar.net/c64.html
• COCOS Searchable sitelist with everything from gaming to emulators to hardware. If you don't like looking through lots of junk hits in a search engine, look here.
• C64.Com 3000+ Games to download and read about.
• Lemon64 A great site with info on over 2000 games inc. covers and screenshots.
• Arnold One of THE main sources of C64 software, including scanned magazines.
• C64 Game Guide Contains info and screenshots from over 4000 C64 games, there's also info on C64 companies, GFX artists and musicians.
• Star Commander Allows you to connect a C64 to a PC for transfer, or slave an old PC as a harddrive! Cool!

Cool Commercials:

64k! How the hell can I fill that up?

Straight up propaganda..

OK it's not a C64, but rather a VIC-20, but I swear I'll give Shatner all the damm airtime he deserves.

This one is from Australia where they have the joysticks, cassette player and 4 tapes for only $499 Australian, sounds like an awful lot but I believe that is around $37.50 American.