There are three ways to get C64 software for use with Power64. You can get one of the C64 software collections available on CD-ROM, visit one of the C64 archives on the Internet or copy it from your old collection of 5.25" disks.
Please be aware of the copyright problems attached to C64 games. The fact that the C64 is no longer produced, and hardly any new software is available for it, does not mean that the old commercial software has in general become public domain. Even old software, that is no longer sold, is still intellectual property of its author and protected by copyright laws. Only few authors (see below) have activly decided to release their (once commercial) work into public domain. All others have, up to now, just chosen not to take any action against copyright infringements.
In other words, the collections mentioned below consist primarily of pirated software. Use them at your own risk - You have been warned!
The following generous C64 software authors officially released their (once commercial) work into public domain:
If you want to purchase a C64 software collection on CD-ROM you can choose among the following:
ΓÇó High Voltage CD-ROMs: A set of two CD-ROMs.
Disk #1 contains 4400+ Games, 7000+ Demos and 650+ Utilities.
Disk #2 contains 4000+ Games, 850+ Demos and 650+ Tools, along with the probably most complete collection of SID-Tunes.
Each disk costs 30UK£, the set is 50UK£ cash or 55UK£ Eurocheque.
For more info see: http://www.talent.demon.co.uk/64/
ΓÇó C64 CD'96: Contains games only, probabaly more than you can ever play.
Check out: http://www.telebyte.nl/~gg/C64cd96.htm
Price: 40US$ (60 DM)
Contact address:
F. Coolen
Leyborch 33
5247 SN Rosmalen
The Netherlands
ΓÇó Fairlight Collection: All the C64 games that the Fairlight cracking group ever 'worked' on (about 70MB). Also contains lots (280MB) of Amiga stuff.
More info at: http://hem.passagen.se/bacchus/cd/index.html
Price: 170 Swedish Crowns or 25 US$ or 42 DM or 16UK£ plus shipping
Contact address:
Pontus Berg
Glädjevägen 9b
16575 Hässelby
Sweden
ΓÇó Ultimate C64 CD: More than 3000 games, 2200 SID-Tunes, 1500 Demos
More info at: http://www.aditfree.com/mmcd/c64.html
Price: 8 UK£ (incl. shipping)
Contact address:
Craig Rothwell
422 Denton Road
Denton Burn
Newcastle upon Tyre - NE15 7HB
United Kingdom
• Epic Marketing sells a wide range of CD-ROMs. Most of them are centered around the Amiga or PCs. Still there is one devoted to the C64 games (C64 games archive - 30UK£), one C64 Audio CD (C64: Back in Time - 13UK£) and one with C64 music in MP3 format (C64 Trax - 10UK£).
It's address is: http://www.epicmarketing.ltd.net/pc/directframe/
Or snail mail:
Epic Direct Ltd.
BSS House Unit 22 Area 50
Cheney Manor Trading Estate
Swindon
Wiltshire SN2 2PJ
United Kingdom
ΓÇó Brotkasten CD: A wide ranging collection of software and emulators for the C64 as well as the Atari 800, Apple2, TI99/4A, Amstrad CPC and Sinclair ZX81.
Check out: http://www.8bit.com/bkcmain.htm
ΓÇó 64'er CD: A very special case - This is the collection of all the floppy disks that came with the German 64'er magazine. A wide range of little tools, games and programming examples accompanying the courses from the magazine. Not all of them are useful without their (paper) documentation.
The 64'er CD-ROM is available from:
Pearl Agency
Am Kalischacht 4
70426 Buggingen
Germany
Tel. +49 7631 360 200
Fax +49 7631 360 444
WWW: http://www.pearl.de/
or
Performance Peripherals Europe
http://www.ppeurope.de/
ΓÇó Input64: Pearl Agency (address: see above) also published a CD with all the disks from the Input64 magazine. Price: 10 DM
ΓÇó There is also a strictly legal CD that contains only public domain software for the C64. More info is available at: http://www.8bit.com/katalog.htm
Price: 38 DM
Contact address:
Tanja Reiser
Software Versand
Bajuwarenstr. 19
85435 Alterding
Germany
ΓÇó An excellent annotated list of published CD-ROMs for various 8-bit computers is available at:
http://www.8bit.com/bkcmain.htm
3.2 Games on the Internet
If you are looking for C64 software on the internet, you might want to look at the following sites:
ΓÇó ftp://arnold.c64.org/ - One of the most complete game collections
ΓÇó ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/cbm/ - Emulators and documentation
ΓÇó ftp://utopia.hacktic.nl/pub/c64/ - Digital Dungeon
ΓÇó ftp://ftp.replay.com/pub/c64 - Digital Dungeon
ΓÇó ftp://ftp.scs-trc.com/pub/c64 - Digital Dungeon
ΓÇó ftp://kwed.org/pub/kwed/triangle - Triangle cracking group
ΓÇó ftp://ftp.cs.tu-berlin.de/pub/c64/ - Demos and Tools
ΓÇó http://stekt.oulu.fi/~mysti/the_sharks/Files/Games/Tested/ - Lots of good games
ΓÇó http://ftp.giga.or.at/pub/c64 - Emulators and demos
ΓÇó http://www.commodorezone.com/
ΓÇó http://come.to/Commodore/
ΓÇó http://home9.inet.tele.dk/jez - JEZ' page: rare games and unusual titles.
ΓÇó http://home.ptd.net/~faethor/c64class/c64class.htm - A small site with few games
ΓÇó http://www.poli.studenti.to.it/ftp/pub/c64/?en - Lots of games and SIDs
If the above is not enough for you than read the list of C64-FTP sites (Find-It-FAQ) that is posted weekly to news://comp.emulator.cbm.
The Find-It-FAQ is also available at:
ΓÇó ftp://ftp.jbrain.com/pub/cbm/faq/cbm-game-ftp-list.txt and
Here are some hints, that will seem trivial to experienced internet users and are meant to help newbies avoid the most frequent errors:
C64 games are always stored in binary, never in text (ASCII) files. If you are using a FTP program for downloading make sure it is switched to binary mode. If you are using a webbrowser such as Netscape Navigator or M$ Internet Explorer press the option key when clicking on the link of a game. Otherwise there is a good chance that you will end up with a file that looks fine at first glance but is internally corrupted and unusable.
Only few sites offer games in pure D64 or T64 format. Almost all archives offer their files in a compressed format, that saves disk space and network bandwidth. Common file extensions for compressed files are: ZIP, GZ, LHA and SIT. Power64 can use ZIP, GZ and LHA files directly - there is no need to waste hard disk space by decompressing them before use. SIT files need to be expanded before they can you can use such a game with Power64.
The easiest way to expand a compressed file is to drag and drop it on StuffIt Expander with Expansion Enhancer. Both StuffIt Expander and Dropstuff with Expansion Enhancers are available at your local info-mac archive or from Aladdin Systems at http://www.aladdinsys.com/expander/index.html.
StuffIt Expander is freeware, Dropstuff with Expansion Enhancer is shareware and together they expand all the important file formats.
Some sites also offer SFX files. These are Self Extracting LHArchives, that need to be unpacked on an (emulated) C64. The easiest way to do this probably is to mount the folder containing the SFX file as drive #9 and place a new disk image (or a disk image with sufficient free space) in drive #8. Now LOAD and RUN the SFX file, just like any other C64 program. It will ask for a drive and a device number. Answer '0' and '8' respectively and stand by as the archive is unpacked onto the floppy. When expansion is completed, you have the playable game on the disk, that can now be used like any other D64 file. The SFX file is then no longer needed.
Note that the C64 is a slow computer (in comparison to your Mac). Decompression might take quite a while. Use the Turbo Boost mode (Cmd-B), or manually increase the CPU speed in the Options/Emulator Speed Dialog, to make this a little faster.
If the expansion tool complained about a bad file structure, checksum errors or similar problems, it is most likely cause is that you made an error in downloading. Remember: All C64 games are stored in binary files! When in doubt use an specialized FTP tool for downloading. Don't (ab-)use your webbrowser for FTP sessions.
Now you hopefully successfully managed to expand the downloaded games. Still the files look dull on your Macintosh desktop and double-clicking on them does not start Power64. Please remember that there are computer systems other than the Macintosh out there. They have no idea of the Type/Creator system that the MacOS uses to keep files linked to icons and applications. Thus such information is not stored in the compressed file and can therefore not be retrieved when it is expanded.
Still Power64 is able to use such files, if you manually start Power64 and use the Device menu to attach a D64, T64 etc. to an appropriate drive. If a file does not have one of the characteristic extensions, it is most likely a CBM program file and you should mount its folder as a hard disk. After a file has been successfully loaded Power64 will adjust the Type/Creator for this file, so that it can be opened Mac style by double-clicking.
3.3 Other Internet Resources
If you do not want to search for games yourself there are also internet search engines specialized on the C64:
ΓÇó http://www.pulse.no/~mepk/cfs.html
ΓÇó http://users.iol.it/fmaida/emusearch/
ΓÇó http://www.aniston-park.de/cocos/
ΓÇó http://tomten.C64.org/hv2.html
ΓÇó http://www.c64.org/sidfind/
Lots of C64 related wisdom is accumulated in the Commodore Knowledge Base at:
ΓÇó http://calvion.ptloma.edu/~spectre/ckb
If you are stuck with a game, need a hint for an adventure or a POKE of invulnerability for an action game there are several sites, that will serve your needs:
If you are looking for paper magazines for the C64, visit
ΓÇó GO64! - a brand new German paper magazine that can be found at:
http://www.go64.c64.org
or http://www.cunet.de/go64/go64.html
There are WWW-Sites devoted to the general topic of Emulation on the Macintosh:
ΓÇó http://www.emulation.net/ excellent site for all kinds of emulators on the Mac.
ΓÇó http://web.ukonline.co.uk/madjock.m/index.htm
ΓÇó http://home2.swipnet.se/~w-28929/ gives an overview on Emulation on PCs
There are also newsgroups that are devoted to Commodore computers (news://comp.sys.cbm) and their emulation (news://comp.emulator.cbm). Read them to learn about new CD-ROMs and game-sites. Before you ask questions in these newsgroups (or any other, for that matter) please be sure to read the FAQ (Frequently Asked Question) summaries that are repeatedly posted in the newsgroups and that are also available at ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/comp.sys.cbm/ and ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/comp.emulator.cbm/ respectively.
3.4 Using original 1541 Floppy disks
If you have your own collection of documents and games that you wrote yourself, and that are not publicly available you can copy these from 5.25" disk to your Mac. Unfortunately this is not a straight forward job. Still there are several options:
ΓÇó Get a DOS PC, a 1541 disk drive, a cable to hook the 1541 to the printer port of the PC and Star Commander. The cable is a simple 5 wire affair that anyone with a soldering iron can produce for less than $20. Star Commander is a shareware program, that lets you copy files and disk images between the 1541 and the PC very easily. The Star Commander manual also explains how the cable is to be built. Once you have the files on the PC you can easily transfer them to your Mac using 3.5" disks. The file formats are the same.
Star Commander is available at: http://ludens.elte.hu/~sta/sc.html
ΓÇó There are 3.5" disk drives available that can be connected to the C64, and produce Mac compatible disks. Unfortunately I have no such drive nor do I have any experience with this method. I would welcome any reports on this topic.
ΓÇó Connect the C64 and the Mac via modem and transfer the files. Once again I have no experience with this method. I am afraid that this must be rather slow, but I am not sure about this.
More information on this topic can be found at: http://margo.student.utwente.nl/stefan/hwb/ca_NullmodemMacToC64.html
ΓÇó Use the "Big Blue Reader" a commercial package, from SOGWAP software, that runs on either a 64 or a 128, will read and write MS-DOS format 3.5" (with a 1581) and 5.25" (with a 1571) disks. Note that it does not support 1541 disk drives.
ΓÇó There is also a freeware/shareware (?) package, called "Little Red Reader" that supposedly does about the same things as the "Big Blue Reader" at less cost.
ΓÇó Check section 7 of the news://comp.sys.cbm Frequently Asked Questions.The FAQ can be obtained at:
ΓÇó Jon Fullmer (j.brain@ieee.org) attempted building an interface that will connect a 1541 to the Mac serial port. Unfortunatly I do not know how much progress he made.
