More old-skoo video gaming at the Berglund household. The Atari 2600-in-a-joystick I wrote about a few weeks ago ended up breaking on the first night, Circuit City didn’t have a replacement in stock that week, and I haven’t been back since to replace it. However, it was only the beginning.

You see, lately I have been listening to a CD that combines Handel’s Water Music and Royal Fireworks Music. Our wedding recessional was taken from the Water Music, which itself was used as the soundtrack in a certain game I played a lot of as a teenager: Pirates! by Sid Meier and Microprose. The music, combined with the recent exposure to old video games, got me thinking about how I might go about playing some more of that game today, absent the physical presence of the Commodore 128 of my adolescence.

Of course, you are thinking, a 1 MHz 6502 shouldn’t be a problem to emulate on today’s 1GHZ+ superscalar, RISC-like Pentium-class processors. And it turns out you’d be right.

The only Commodore emulator you’ll ever need can be found here. It’s a slight pain to set up, but it works like a champ, and can emulate a C64 at about 15x normal speed on my 1GHz Athlon. (This is bad for most game play, and can be ratcheted down to 100% or 200% speed as desired.) All of the C64 games you’ll ever need are found here. You are now, as they say, weapons free.

A quick note on the ethics of downloading these games: there is no indication that they have been released explicitly to the public domain, but to my knowledge they are all truly abandoned, and no one is trying to make money off of them anymore. I imagine a brash download site like this one would receive some attention if anyone actually cared. Sid Meier, call your office. Or, you know, don’t.

Every so often I get an opportunity to discuss copyright issues with the boy: a friend offers to copy a game for us, another friend runs a Game Boy Advance emulator on his PC with oodles of downloaded ROMs (so much cheaper than actually buying them!), a family member offers to rip a CD for us–so it’s not like we never get the chance to pinch any electronic media. But we have an understanding under this roof that property has owners, even digital property, and theft is bad. When it comes to these C64 games, you can set your own copyright comfort level, but I had a hard time believing any of the owners actually cared anymore. Their market is gone, their money is made, and now they can bask in the glow of a retro-computing nostalgia and the venue for father-son bonding their legacy can provide.

So go get your C64 on. Play Pirates. Lode Runner. Exploding Fist. Enjoy.

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• Posted by Tim on Wednesday, July 9, 2003 at 7:43:40 am PDT
• Category: Miscellany
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