Any old Commodore 64 gamers on here?

Page 2 - Love gaming? Join the PC Gamer community to share that passion with gamers all around the world!
The C64 used Atari-style joysticks, too. They had the same connector. Any Atari joystick would work with it, but you could also get 3rd party ones that were a lot better than those piece of crap Atari ones.

I had a few games where you had to push the joystick button as fast as you could to go faster. I ended up trying to cheat by buying a joystick that had a rapid auto-fire switch. Unfortunately, it was slightly slower than what I could do manually.
The Kempston joysticks had autofire and multiple triggers and fire buttons. Thing is the off brand ones my parents used to buy me probably werent the best quality and didnt really make it through too many sessions of Daley Thompsons Decathlon, or Carl Lewis Challenge. That Atari joystick was a tank and I wont hear a bad word said about it!
 

SHaines

Community Manager
Staff member
In the 80s, I cut my teeth on the Commodore 64. Spent many, many hours playing games and programming on that thing.

Anyone else a C64 aficionado on here? If so, what were some of your favorite games?

The C64 was my first computer as well. Hell, my second computer had Windows 95 on it, so that C64 was all I knew for a very long time.

I poured more hours into Zork on that thing than I care to admit, but that really defined childhood for me. I've had nothing but bad luck with emulators and the like. My favorite game of all time (I'd wager due to nostalgia alone) was Alternate Reality: The Dungeon. I've never been able to get that thing to work in an emulator, so I was really thinking of buying that refresh of the C64 linked above, but that's just not a great investment, so I've been putting it off.
 
You might be correct about Duke Nukem. I'm old and have CRS (Can't Remember "Stuff")
Well to be fair, I was only able to answer that because I Googled it. Lol. Duke Nukem 3D was a pivotal time in gaming for me. But I did play the earlier 2D ones on MS-DOS. I really was surprised to find out the old 2D Wolfenstein game was on C64. I didn't know that.

The C64 was my first computer as well. Hell, my second computer had Windows 95 on it, so that C64 was all I knew for a very long time.

I poured more hours into Zork on that thing than I care to admit, but that really defined childhood for me. I've had nothing but bad luck with emulators and the like. My favorite game of all time (I'd wager due to nostalgia alone) was Alternate Reality: The Dungeon. I've never been able to get that thing to work in an emulator, so I was really thinking of buying that refresh of the C64 linked above, but that's just not a great investment, so I've been putting it off.
Your progression is a lot like mine. I got a C64 the Christmas of my sophomore year of high school, and it lasted me a long time. In the early 90s, I was a poor college student, followed by being a poor working bachelor, and I didn't get my next computer until I got a 75MHz Packard Bell that came with a free upgrade to Windows 95 because I bought it right before Win95 released. So I used Win 3.11 for about a month or so. But after that C64 running at a robust 1.023 MHz with 64K of RAM, I thought I was in heaven with 75MHz and 8MB of RAM. And I even had SVGA with millions of colors, instead of 16 colors to choose from. :LOL:
 
Apr 26, 2021
47
159
1,720
Visit site
Never owned a C64 (before my time), but i did get obsessed not long ago with the hardware itself.
Talking like the MOS 6502 family of processors, the 6581 "SID" sound chip, etc. Then i learned that a collection of mad-lads compiled an archive of nearly all C64 music from game to modern retro-scene in machine code and I've been working on a "hardware SID player" ever since.

Got good progress on that thus far. Managed to get a high-speed micro-controller to fake memory for the old processor (it takes a 600mhz ARM to fake 1mhz memory. Emulation is expensive!). So with some luck i can have a 6502 run the music code and output it to a SID chip. Creating the ultimate C64 chip-tune jukebox!!

So... not really a C64 gamer, though if you ever wanted to know something about how the C64 worked underneath its beige shell or want to know how you can say make the PSU block less a fire-hazard. I'll yak your ears off!
 
Never owned a C64 (before my time), but i did get obsessed not long ago with the hardware itself.
Talking like the MOS 6502 family of processors, the 6581 "SID" sound chip, etc. Then i learned that a collection of mad-lads compiled an archive of nearly all C64 music from game to modern retro-scene in machine code and I've been working on a "hardware SID player" ever since.

Got good progress on that thus far. Managed to get a high-speed micro-controller to fake memory for the old processor (it takes a 600mhz ARM to fake 1mhz memory. Emulation is expensive!). So with some luck i can have a 6502 run the music code and output it to a SID chip. Creating the ultimate C64 chip-tune jukebox!!

So... not really a C64 gamer, though if you ever wanted to know something about how the C64 worked underneath its beige shell or want to know how you can say make the PSU block less a fire-hazard. I'll yak your ears off!
That's awesome, man! The SID chip was definitely one of the best available sound chips in its time.
 
Apr 26, 2021
47
159
1,720
Visit site
That's awesome, man! The SID chip was definitely one of the best available sound chips in its time.

Oh that is without a doubt. There are people still composing for that chip to this day including a good number of the original legends and the archival efforts to preserve it is obscene. The HVSCC got over 55 thousand music compositions for the system!!

I have gone a bit insane with my player though. C64 music comes in varying complexity. Many can make a player that plays Hubbard's Monty on the Run and Zoid themes, but nobody has made one that can play LMan's Hi Fi Sky and i'm hellbent on changing that. So i spent months reading the datasheets of every chip in the C64, the memory map, schematics, modifications for stereo playback via an additional sid and staring at a debugger emulator that lets me see how everything worked cycle-by-cycle. I got a bachelor in electronics and i ain't afraid to use it!!

Eventually i hope to publish my work as open source hardware.
 

TRENDING THREADS