Commodore 64 noob

beaker · Newbie Joined: 03 Jul 2012 Posts: 0

Hi, I am new to the Commodore 64 having started with an Acorn Electron and then as all my mates had an Amstrad CPC or Spectrum I moved onto the Amstrad CPC. No one I knew had a Commodore 64 so I figured after reading some of the Retro Gamers Spectrum/Commodore magazine I'd keep my eye out for one.

I bought a Commodore 64 (bread bin) with datasette off ebay last month that someone had painted gold (and probably paid over the odds which I put down to the jet lag after spending a month in Australia).

So far I've bought a S-video cable (and scart cable which looked terrible on my Pioneer plasma) and some games:

While the Amstrad will probably always be my favourite 8-bit as it's the one I remember most growing up, I have to admit I've been impressed with certain things on C64, especially the SID chip. Also Wizball; I never knew how much better it was on the C64 until recently...

What I could really do with is a list of things I should get for the Commodore 64 other than paint stripper? I bought a HxC floppy emulator for the Amstrad so I could load games off a SD card but they're still testing it with Commodore 64 hardware(?) so what's the next best thing? Also, my datasette seems very temperamental and I need to keep playing with the azimuth after loaded a couple of games which doesn't seem quite right, or are they all a bit like that? I figure something is a little loose? The only other thing is when someone painted it gold they removed all the decals/stickers from the case - is there anywhere I buy some more?

I am currently located in Ireland.

Thanks in advance,

Beaker

plbyrd · Posted: Thu Jul 05, 2012 1:38 pm Post subject:

First thing to do is get either a real 1541 disk drive or a 1541Ultimate (I or II) which is an SD-card based 1541 emulator (in addition to a bunch of other cool stuff). Next thing to do is get a SD2IEC device such as the uIEC (micro-IEC) from Jim Brain (USA) or someone in Europe. With these two devices you'll be able to play any disk-based game as well as mass file storage.

From a software side you'll need disk management software and for that I recommend CBM-Command from http://cbmcommand.codeplex.com . Not just because I wrote it, but because it does practically everything you'd need and want to do with a combination of 1541 and SD2IEC device (the SD2IEC devices were the driving force behind CBM-Command).