How to Play Commodore 64 Games Online for Free
Last month, the Internet Archive added the Commodore 64 emulator to its ever-growing library of historical software, effectively bringing the retro computer / game console into the public domain. Like the MS-DOS and Apple II program libraries on the Internet Archive, every program they archived is now available on the site and played in your browser.
To date, over 15,000 programs have been loaded into the archive, including about 9,000 games . The Commodore 64 catalog has a treasure trove of classics such as Donkey Kong , Ms. Pac-Man and Space Invaders . If you need a place to start, Archive.Org has a showcase highlighting some of the highlights.
After launching in 1982, the Commodore 64 helped popularize the personal computer. While it is technically a PC designed for all kinds of software, its legacy is particularly closely tied to the history of games as the early predecessors of modern PCs and console games.
At this point, each game has its own default display of controls, and many of them are not intuitive. Some, like Donkey Kong, launch without any assigned controls. Don’t let that scare you, though: you can easily set your own controls for any Commodore 64 game in the archive via the emulator settings. Here’s a quick rundown on how to customize your keyboard controls.
- Press F12 to bring up the emulator settings menu and the up and down arrows to highlight Machine Settings and press the right arrow to select it.
- Highlight and select Joystick Settings, then Define Keysets.
- Set the controls you want by selecting each entry in keyset 1. To set a key, press the right arrow to select the entry, then press the key you want to use. You need to choose a key for each direction and a joystick button labeled “fire”. (Note: the spacebar seems like a natural fire button, but it is used to pause some games, so I recommend something else).
- Use the left arrow key to exit the menu, then highlight and select Joystick 1, then highlight and select Keyboard 1. Press escape to exit the settings menu and you are ready to play.
If you have a gamepad connected to your PC, you can also map controls to it. Follow the above process, but set the controls using Joystick Mapping 1 instead of Defining Keysets, and set Joystick 1 Device to Joystick. You may also need to highlight and select the “Allow Joystick” option (there should be a green checkmark next to it).
Unfortunately, since you are loading the game from a browser, you will have to re-render the controls for each game each time. However, this looks like a bigger problem than it really is. Having done this a couple of times, I feel like second nature.
(H / T Fast Company)