C64 - a nostalgic page

A number of people might remember the old bread box-shaped home computer, where a blue screen did not mean death, but rather "Good morning!"

C64 Emulators

Luckily, you do not need to own an ol' bread box C64, browse flea markets or eBay shop for it: you can just run an emulator on your mid-end standard PC, and: voila! Here is a small (and by no means complete) selection of common emulators.

Shareware: CCS64 - By Per Håkan Sundell, note that there is both a DOS and a Windows version
Commercial: C64S
Linux and Un*x platforms: try the cross-platform emulator page; one pretty good and popular here is VICE.
see also Simon Goodwin's survey

Some Software I wrote in days of old

Of course, this stuff is far from state-of-the art, and more for fun than for serious use (whatever serious use might be). It has been made available here for nostalgic reasons - and for the believe that code, once written, cannot really die.
The software can be freely downloaded as C64 disc images (.d64 files) and should run with standard emulators.
There is no copy-right attached, ignore what the programs say, I did not know better these days and as the author grant you the right to copy first hand. The fabricated (and admittedly not very imaginative) name of the Software Company is "O.M.-Soft(ware)". Well, I've been 13 then.

[SHIFT-click to download]

	omsoft01.d64 : [.d64.gz]	Fritz' Schoolday (text/graphic adventure, German, aka Tinvalley II) Tinvalley (old and rather bad text adventure)
	omsoft02.d64 : [.d64.gz]	Punktum (crazy text adventure, German) Glibby (2 player action: collect colour balls) Tortoria (2 player action: shoot each other with blobs)
	omsoft03.d64 : [.d64.gz]	Cerbos (Atlantis board game adaption) Boccia Rollenspiel (mini text adventure, German) Armer Humin (breakout-variation)
	omsoft04.d64 : [.d64.gz]	Rotation Factory (construct rotating high-res graphics) Wordwrap (intelligent line-break) Sweatman (decatlon-style run & jump, intended for run-mat) Verwaltung (basic address database) Chiffrator (morse code etc.)

Cables and Connectors...

... that's where the action is in computer architecture. (attributed to various sources)
Should you wish to connect a classic C64 floppy drive (e.g., the commodore 1541) to your PC, you need some special cable. The easiest way to get it may well be to solder it yourself. I did that for a XE1541 (see link list below), and did not find it difficult. However, there are some slightly varying (if not to say contradicting) descriptions out there on what pins to connect. What worked for me was the following (but your mileage might vary):

Materials used here:

unshielded 6-wire ISDN cable (only 5 wires used), length: 1.00 m
4 Scotsky diodes SB 130 1/30, Conrad dispo.Nr.: 164828-33 (the suggested 1N5819 / BAT85 were not available from Conrad Electronic, so I used what seemed to be closest); their cathode end is marked with a small band, in the picture this is the | bar the arrow points to.
the pins 10-13 are NOT connected to pins 2-5; in the original description below they ARE: however, the cable only worked after I disconnected them.

Links for C64/PC hardware connections

Cables: meet XE 1541 and relatives
suggested software for copying C64 floppy discs to the PC: Star Commander (worked with the cable I soldered)
1541 floppy to PC and back

webmaster - Last modified: Tue Feb 17 05:24:04 2004