BoneSnapDeez wrote:On a whim I dug out the Commodore 64 floppy drive last night and played some games. They all still work after all these years - I think the fears of "demagnetizing" and whatnot are a bit overblown. Just store floppies in a cool dry place and treat them with tenderness.
What blows my mind is how many arcade ports are available on this machine. It probably has more than any other system ever. There's a wide spectrum represented here: Golden Age classics (Ie: Pac-Man, Congo Bongo), 8-bit era games (ie: Ghosts 'n' Goblins, Alien Syndrome) and even 16-bit era games (ie: Final Fight, Street Fighter II). Also available are a decent selection of games that were never ported to the NES/SMS, like Psycho Soldier and the original Street Fighter.
The problem here is that the C64 was released in 1982 when the Atari still reigned supreme and thus the C64 stick is much like that of the 2600. Eight directions, one button.
Agree, the floppy quite durable if stored and taken care of properly. Not near as solid as a cart or CD, but they do last if maintained in a good environment away from the attic or garage storage.
Any Commodore issues, please ask. I have a huge Commodore set of computers including the Vic20, C64, Educater 64, SX64 and 128D. Also have most the weird peripherals including Fastload, the rare System Speed Up board, 80 column board, Koala Pad, Flexidraw, and a huge assortment of utility carts 1st and 3rd party as well as tons of games.
There is a Vic20 game called Crossfire that is keyboard controlled utilizing the Twinstick style of move separate of shooting direction. I was so tempted to jumper wire the keys on two joysticks. The game also came out on the C64, if I remember right it reverted to single joystick gameplay losing the "Robotron" control.
The C64 has two joystick ports, would have been great if a controller was made back then (along with standardizing all the games to support it) to utilize both the ports for the additional buttons. At least the C64 is 2600 compatible so there is a wide range of decent sticks such as Wico and EPYX.
As Hobie mentioned a few times, do not use the Genesis controller, it will short out the joyport. Something about the paddle or lightpen matrix. Oh yeah, if you ever see a
Flexidraw Lightpen grab it! Very accurate and something you will not see in modern PCs. In honesty, drawing direct on the screen can get tiresome. Commercial lightpen companies (artists) would have the CRT mounted flush in the desk as if a desk blotter. Still, a very cool device that works well on the C64 with high resolution drawings approaching CAD.
prfsnl_gmr wrote:I had a friend with a C64 when I was younger. (He moved to the US from Australia and brought his C64 with him.) I thought it was pretty cool, and we played a lot of lode runner on it. (Great game, btw.)
Now, I just have one of these: <C64 PlugnPlay>
It is all I really need.
Oh no! I have that PlugNPlay too, but the game library on it is very limited. I suppose you could do the mod by adding a PC keyboard and 1541 floppy (or SD Card) to increase the game selection. There are soooo many great games on the C64 and not only US versions. Many games that were only released in Europe were converted to NTSC copies and play fine on the NTSC C64.
noiseredux wrote:Anyway, RE: C64 - Did you ever play Ducks Ahoy? That was a favorite of my younger self.
Speaking of, the SID chip was/is of course amazing. There's certainly a huge scene there as well outside of just homebrew games. I'd recommend the album C64 Massive curated by Lesser if you want to hear a bunch of badass SIDchip cover songs.
I have that Vic20 cart SHMUP, a fun game. I hate the crabs (worse then the dog on the NES); dropping bricks blocking the sideways movement.
Agree on the SID chip, this is where the C64 touted its power over the PC back in the day which only had a tiny beeping speaker until Adlib anhd Soundblaster came along. Quite a few SID homebrews of songs put out on floppy disks. The sound quality very well done.
