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Anyone running C64 emulator with a front end?

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JayB:

Thinking about adding it to my machine (first computer I owned). Curious to see who's running what and if there were any issues that arrise.

I've got the Blast collection and also have Gamebase64 V8 games. 

vanrose72:


--- Quote from: JayB on July 06, 2012, 07:31:25 am ---Thinking about adding it to my machine (first computer I owned). Curious to see who's running what and if there were any issues that arrise.

--- End quote ---

The C64 was my first computer as well, so it holds a special place for me.

I have no trouble at all running Maximus Arcade with a relatively recent version of VICE. The only annoying part is the menu options at the top of the screen in full screen mode, which I believe is a known issue.




JayB:

Same, used to spend hours as a kid with friends playing on the commodore. Had actually thought of picking one up, really just for nostalgia sakes but the reality is I'm going to hate the loading times  :lol  I wish I had never sold mine all those years ago as I had hundreds of games plus the printer and disc drive too   :banghead:

I think I'll either be running Hyperspin or Mala, undecided as yet. Can I ask, did you use one of the game packs I have downloaded or have you used something different on yours? Just trying to get my head around this as setting up mame, seems, more straight forward. Also, do you use a keyboard or you're finding it ok on a cab?



vanrose72:


--- Quote from: JayB on July 06, 2012, 11:23:54 am ---I think I'll either be running Hyperspin or Mala, undecided as yet. Can I ask, did you use one of the game packs I have downloaded or have you used something different on yours? Just trying to get my head around this as setting up mame, seems, more straight forward. Also, do you use a keyboard or you're finding it ok on a cab?

--- End quote ---

I don't imagine other frontends would have any trouble with C64 emulation either. However, I can't speak for Hyperspin or Mala because I don't have experience with them.

I haven't used games from the Blast Collection with my cab because I find it easier to use the individual d64 files. You can select the game from the game list and go directly to it without dealing with the Blast menu of five games. That's not to say you can't use Blast; you just have to either assign buttons to the 1-5 input or use the keyboard, that's all.

And speaking of assigning buttons, VICE is much like MAME in that you can edit the default keyset file. That way, you don't have to use a keyboard for F1 through F8 or any other keys. I can share my settings with you if you need it.

Vigo:

I have c64 running in Mala on my SNES machine and I love it. It is by far one of the trickiest emulators to set up. It is a really long process, but I love C64 too much to give up on it. I recommend having no more than 50 games for c64 if you really want to work over each game to play seamlessly in the way that I did. Here are the barriers I had to work through:

1) load time: No more LOAD"*",8,1 for me. I do not load the disk files from mala. Even in emulators there is load time, and often a lot of crack intros that I don't want to look at. What I had to do is initially load the game, wait until I get to the game's title screen. Save a snapshot file in vice (not a quicksnapshot), and set mala to load the snapshot files instead of the disk files (In Mala, set game file type to ".VSF" instead of any .D64, .t64, etc.) . Make a snapshot file for each game. Then when i start the game in mala, it starts the snapshot file and I am instantly loaded on the main screen of my game.

2) Non-standardized controls. This is the big one. If you remember back in the day, half of the c64 games used control port 2 instead of 1, and most of them also utilized a keyboard. Some games only used keyboard. To work with this, most people simply have a keyboard docked in their cab, and used player 2 when needed. Since I didn't have a keyboard installed on my project, and didn't want to swap controller ports, I used joy2key to make custom controls for each game. For example, a game of Castle Wolfenstein uses the joystick for aim and move, then the keyboard for functions like search, fire, throw grenade, etc. I set up joy2key to translate button 2 to be fire(left arrow), button 3 to be search(space bar), button 4 to be grenade (Q). Then I instructed Mala to set-up that joy2key configuration on that specific game start. I had to create a configuration for almost every game, and had to create a batch file for mala to start each configuration up. It takes time, which is why I say no more than 50 games. Also, the downside to not having a keyboard is there are a some games that you need a ton of keyboard keys, and those games usually are not playable.

3) Disk swapping. Bigger games like Maniac mansion where you used both sides of the disk are a problem. I just didn't bother with disk swap games. You either need to have the ability to access the the menu to swap disk files, or create a hot swap. I don't remember how to do it, but it was basically setting the game boot to load both disks into Vice at once. Then you have a hotkey that flips between the two disk files. Then there are huge games with like 3 or 4 disk files (I want to say some of the last ninja games, TMNT), I don't know if a hot swap can be easily made for those. It might just be best to have a way to manually load in disk files if you want to have multi disk games.


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