Commodore 64 Disk Image Hoard Found

tl;dr: I found a trove of C64 disk images, so I put them on the web. Have fun playing some bad old games!

OK, here’s the story: I’ve been digging through old documents, and I found the old charts for the game I was writing when I was sixteen. Which made me wonder whether I had the disk images for the work in progress…

And the answer was yes: Two decades ago, a friend ripped all my C64 diskettes from the 80s, and I was going to go through them, but then I forgot. And then the .d64 files went missing — until two days ago, when I remembered that I had a backup of a backup disk here, and did some searching. And there they were! 170 disk images!

Now what? OK, I fired up an emulator:

Err… OK… Sure… I mean, this works (FSVO “works”), but I’ve got 170 disk images, many with dozens of files. Using this to do triage would be weeks of work. And I’m lazy.

But then I remembered that Javascript-based emulators for C64 has been a thing for a long time now… so perhaps I could just whip up a simple web site to allow me to click through all the programs quickly, and then note in a data file somewhere what’s what and what works and what doesn’t and etc.

I.e., a simple package for doing triage of a large number of images.

Now, I’m sure there are a whole bunch of these things already — the emulator community is large and mature, apparently, but a few moments of googling didn’t show anything promising. They seems mostly geared towards people actually using the emulators to play games, which is understandable, and leaves triage to be done “manually”.

So I just asked Fable to make a web site that wraps EmulatorJS, along with a script to create a manifest.json file that has all the images/programs, and allows you to edit it to add categories/hide programs/etc. $50 later, here’s the results on Microsoft Github. You’re welcome I’m sure.

(Using LLMs for stupid projects like this is so… exactly what they should be used for. But it’s striking how different things are now: In the before times, I’d have to learn to work with EmulatorJS and figure stuff out and learn stuff; becoming more knowledgeable. With an LLM, it’s so much quicker… and I’m left stupider afterwards. I haven’t learned a single thing.)

So… play Space Pilot or something?

I haven’t actually tried playing many games — I’ve just observed that they actually start. You may have to go into the EmulateJS settings menu to tweak input methods and stuff. And I guess the vast majority of these games are already available on sites like c64online, so there’s no reason to use “my” version — until I finally figure out how to start the game I was writing when I was sixteen! It’s gonna be an exclusive for sure!