A neat Windows player has emerged from the same Cloanto folks that brought us Amiga Forever — this time for the Commodore 8-bit line of computers, with the strength of its focus naturally on the world reknown C64 model. Consequently, it is dubbed C64 Forever.
I purchased the boxed version, but also received a 2-week timed secure link to download the product. It installed flawlessly on my Vista64 workstation and it was up and running in seconds. It comes with 100+ games and another 100+ demos — some of which really showcase what the VIC-II graphic and SID sound chips could really do, easily outshining Apple Macintosh and Microsoft DOS computers of the day. As a matter of fact, the C64 was Commodore’s own biggest competition for nearly three years until the successful Amiga 500 and Amiga 2000 were launched to replace the world’s first multimedia personal computer in Amiga 1000.
I am pleased to say that my Commodore archive is usable with this integrated player/emulator — it will not only launch a title from a simple double-click of the binary file, but it attempts to parse and recognize title, manufacturer, and year published while it adds an italicized row in the player selection list. I have not attempted this feature yet, but there is this import to a newer RP2 format that allows for multi-disk games to be managed as a single compressed archive — managed by a hot-key within the emulator for the swap disk operations.
There are also a couple of media files included, two of which are scanned PDF copies of old magazines featuring hardware reviews of the Commodore 64. The article layouts, the accompanying advertisements, the technical writing style — wow, what to say except that things have certainly changed from those early electronics days.
Today, I received my ebay purchase in a Commodore luggable version of its C64 — the SX-64 Executive. Even with all this wonderful PC emulation technology available to me, there is nothing like using and playing it on the real thing, baby!! I am excited to say that it arrived safely and is operating in very good condition. The seller provided a few software titles on 5-1/4″ floppy — it was fun watching an old favorite in Activision’s Fireworks Construction Set blasting away on the tiny color screen and speakers.
