Just got a Commodore 64 ; Now what?

[AncillaryDrone]

Just open up the drive, get a Q-tip and some isopropyl alcohol and swab the lens a bit. Use the other end to clean up.

907914[/snapback]

 

Right, if the lens has any dirt on it you'll get read errors. Usually the dirt is from old, dirty disks. It's important to store those babies properly. Of course these floppies wont last forever no matter what you do. 20-50 years is the expected lifetime, which means time is running out. If you have c-64 stuff that's irreplacable then it's time to get it onto your PC.

[Steppenwolffan21]

Wow, I thought I was supposed to recieve emaail notifications?

[Steppenwolffan21]

Wow sweet, that made my day! Any games by any chance? Is there anything I could possibly do besides send you the $5.00? lowery1500@bellsouth.net - could I see some pics please. Thanks alot ya'll for your replies.

905561[/snapback]

 

Actually that's all they are.... are games.

 

Quite a few SSI games in there including some other rare ones. Some I'd want to play if I had a C64 that is... I'm pretty sure I have Alternate Reality as well... (unsure if it's complete with all disks) but you'll know I guess.

 

I'm not sure if you have the setup but I'm looking to get that SMB3 clone/demo on a floppy disk at some point of time for the 800... I'll shoot an email when I get home.

905567[/snapback]

 

Please get back to me on these games. I will pay shipping no problem. lowery1500@bellsouth.net

[etrader99]

Today I will be aquiring 2 C64 systems, 2 disk drives, datasette, and a commodore printer. I will be in need of some games, so if anyone has any they wish to dispose of, please let me know.

 

Another thing im wondering... why is it the majority of games on ebay are coming from the UK. And why are the majority of games there on tape while I cant seem to find any games on tape for the NTSC C64 (they are all disk).

[crunchysuperman]

The 64 had a very large following in Europe long after it had died in the states, and cassette drives were still widely used.

[Mayhem]

In the UK, Commodore pricing policy was teh suxx0r. Seriously. Way over priced for a long time, and at one point, the disk drive was more expensive than the machine itself!

 

Which partly explains the use of tapes. Even at its peak in the UK, only around 10% of owners had a disk drive. So that left 90% with tape only. Many programmers wrote to fit this, so a lot of games are single load only. And there are a lot of classic single load games out there (Mercenary, Wizball, IK+, The Sentinel, Dropzone, Thrust, Warhawk).

 

If you lived in the UK during the late 80s, the major reason to fork over for a disk drive was to play the US multiload games such as the AD&D series, Infocom adventures, Origin games etc.

 

And yes, the C64 survived in Europe long after it had "died" in the US. There were still commercial games in the shops as late as 1994 here for it.

[ApolloBoy]

Today I will be aquiring 2 C64 systems, 2 disk drives, datasette, and a commodore printer. I will be in need of some games, so if anyone has any they wish to dispose of, please let me know.

 

Another thing im wondering... why is it the majority of games on ebay are coming from the UK. And why are the majority of games there on tape while I cant seem to find any games on tape for the NTSC C64 (they are all disk).

920673[/snapback]

 

Nice find! Anyway, the reason you see so many games on tape coming from the UK is because of two reasons. One was that the C64 was very popular in Europe, and two, disk drives were expensive over in Europe while tapes were obviously cheaper. Tapes were never popular here because disk drives were plentiful and tapes take a very long time to load compared to disks (even though that's not really saying much since the 1541 drive is as slow as molasses). You're not really missing out though, programs that were made for PAL C64s don't run correctly on NTSC C64s.

[Mayhem]

programs that were made for PAL C64s don't run correctly on NTSC C64s.

 

That depends on the program. Most of the problems are due to either:

 

a) timing issues from the fast loader's copy protection being based on CPU speed (as the CPU in US C64 runs 17% faster than the UK C64)

 

b) graphical tricks utilising the extra scanlines available on PAL displays

 

I can run quite a lot of NTSC games over here fine, but most of those that don't load are due to reason A above. Most that won't work in the US will be due to reason B instead.

 

Many PAL programs have had official or hacker conversions to support NTSC so there's hope yet to play many of the classic games from Europe.

[MacbthPSW]

a) timing issues from the fast loader's copy protection being based on CPU speed (as the CPU in US C64 runs 17% faster than the UK C64)

I wish It's actually about 3.5% - PAL is around .985 Mhz and NTSC is about 1.02 Mhz.

 

You're probably thinking of the amount of processing time per video frame, in which case the PAL C64 has about 17% more time since the video is at 50hz vs. the NTSC's 60hz.

 

b) graphical tricks utilising the extra scanlines available on PAL displays

The problem isn't usually graphical tricks using the extra scanlines, it's just plain regular code using/assuming the extra 17% mentioned above.

[Bruce Tomlin]

I was curious if anyone made anything like that.  I'd expect that if such a thing were properly designed, it would be able to read disks that were of marginal quality and were no longer readable in original equipment (nowadays it should be fairly trivial to read disks data as an analog signal, and apply digital signal processing techniques following the read).  Does anyone know if the Catweasel or any other such device does this?

I got one last week. It works by returning the number of clocks (from three reference crystals) between bit transitions. At that point, software gets to decide how to interpret the result.

 

I haven't messed with Apple II or Commodore stuff yet, but I've been reading as many of my old TRS-80 disks as I can find using cw2dmk (http://www.tim-mann.org/catweasel.html), then moved on to a bunch of Atari disks. The Atari disks are total a pain in the arse because:

 

1) Atari slowed down the motor speed to get an extra sector per track, so you need to use lots of command line options

 

2) it could do flippy disks without an index hole, and modern floppy drives won't send data without an index hole, so it's a pain to read the second side. You have to hack the drive's index detect with a magnet and a reed switch or find an OLD drive... I happened to have a couple of genuine IBM-badged 360K full-height drives handy. And you have to add a couple more command line options.

 

3) some disks confuse the density detect of cw2dmk and make it flail around trying to figure out where the data is. Yup, you guessed it, another command line option. I have to use a LOT of options to read Atari disks with cw2dmk.

 

Once I get enough disks read in, I want to play around with dumping the raw transition data to a file where it can be decoded at leisure. And then I want to get it decoding GCR data, now that I've got documentation for both Apple's and Commodore's nibble formats. And then I want to get it working under OS X. (There's supposed to be an official driver someday, but I can't wait for someday.)

[Cap5750]

I thought the cable-making guys (sorry forget the website) made a version that WOULD work with XP?

[Seob]

I really love the c64. I never had one back in the days, we had a schneider CPC464,but i played a lot on them by friends.

Also in the Netherlands tapedrives where the main softwarecarriers. Maybe because the price of diskdrives was expensive, but i also think that tapes were used more because you could copy them easy. You only needed a stereo with 2 tapedrives to copy games.

When you have a tape drive you can also play games you download. U need to convert them to wav-file, play them over your speaker output and record it on a tapedrive. Or u could use a cassette adapter and a diskman.

There also games available on cartridge, although you don't see them offen.

Atari has produced some port of classic 2600 games to the c64 in cartridge format.

c64 hardware is not very hard to get in the Netherland, and often you can get it for free from people that don't use them anymore.

Since i haven't got a c64 diskdrive, i will get me one. I could hit myself because i could have one for 1 euro but didn't buy it.

[Steppenwolffan21]

Thanks for the info guys, keep it coming.