Internet Archive is adding in-browser emulation support for Commodore 64

https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1048017789884067840

by mariuz • 8 years ago

117 16 8 years ago

krylon• 8 years ago

I am already feeling nostalgic! Can't wait to play Turrican again!

sillyquiet• 8 years ago

Man do I get nostalgic for Alternate Reality: The Dungeon and Zork (not exclusive to C64 owners I know). And making Basic sprites flutter across the screen... copying programs out of the thick user manual that came with it.

jerf• 8 years ago

If you want to go the legal route, you can still buy Zork: https://www.gog.com/game/the_zork_anthology Usually with infocom collections you can find the Zork game file pretty easily and run it on any Z-machine interpreter you like, meaning it's incredibly cross-platform nowadays.

If you want to go the, ah, "less legal" route, it's pretty easy to find copies of the game file if you search properly.

In some ways, the text adventure games of that era have survived better than anything else. You can get a modern interpreter and play it on a modern display, with the computer responding as quickly as you can type, with nice modern fonts, on any system you like (mac windows linux android ios random assortment of other platforms), and at the same time, there's basically no compromise of the original experience. (Unless you absolutely insist that it's vital that you have to wait a second or two for the computer to respond to your input, and sluggishly stream the text out.) It's not a "remastering" or a reimplementation, it's still the original thing, just brought forward in time.

crooked-v• 8 years ago

Also, for other IF games, see this page for a list of interpreters - http://inform7.com/if/interpreters/ - and the IFDB for various freely available games - http://ifdb.tads.org

I particularly like Lost Pig, a short but clever game that runs with the conceit that the reason the parser is limited is that your character is a dumb-as-bricks orc looking for (obviously) a lost pig. http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=mohwfk47yjzii14w

Retroity• 8 years ago

The Internet Archive has been doing great work lately, between backing up arcade machines, to Winamp skins, and now this in addition to all the other cultural works they've backed up. I highly encourage donating if you have the extra cash.

sp332• 8 years ago

If you want a specific project to donate to, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17641600#17645168 They digitized a huge pile of product flyers and ads for tech products that have been sent to Ted Nelson over the decades. The project is complete and it's about $440 in the red as of this afternoon. https://twitter.com/KevinSavetz/status/1048253063775977472

tombert• 8 years ago

Maybe someone with better legal chops can explain this to me; how is the Internet Archive's internet arcade MAME stuff not considered piracy? I'm not saying I don't support it (I think data preservation is important, even if it involves "piracy"), but it seems like a huge legal headache to a lay-man.

ISV_Damocles• 8 years ago

From the Internet Archive FAQ: [0]

The Internet Archive (Archive.org) is a nonprofit library that preserves digital cultural artifacts, and provides online access to over a million users a day with the goal of universal access to all knowledge.

Since it's a library, it has special copyright exceptions that make their emulation efforts legal, as Section 108 was updated to allow libraries to circulate digital copies of material online and off-premises. [1]

So it would have been a huge legal headache if they hadn't been given the explicit exception to do this.

Edit: oh, caveat that IANAL, but this was what was explained to me on another forum thread a couple of years ago when they first started their emulation efforts.

[0] https://archive.org/about/faqs.php

[1] https://crln.acrl.org/index.php/crlnews/article/view/8932/96...

comex• 8 years ago

Judging by [1], I'm pretty sure updating section 108 is still a proposal.

In this case, my impression is that the Internet Archive is basically ignoring copyright law and hoping nobody complains, relying on the lack of commercial value in such obsolete software, and to a small extent the moral high ground our society assigns to libraries.

pkaye• 8 years ago

California declared it a library so it has rights to do this data preservation.

sehugg• 8 years ago

I note that the existing JSMESS emulator supports C64; for what reasons was VICE chosen?

LocalH2• 8 years ago

Likely accuracy, as VICE is one of the most accurate C64 emulators.

textfiles• 8 years ago

Hey, it's Jason.

The VICE emulator is slightly faster than the MAME implementation. We actually got C64 emulation in MAME working at the Archive, but they're continually doing improvements and it tends to run at "only" 200% of native speed, which means that with the javascript/webassembly overhead it dips down below 100% in anything but the most beefy machines/browsers.

MAME is ALWAYS our go-to. But VICE is a particularly unique case, what with the quarter-century of development and the intensity of C64-only considerations they've brought in.

th0ma5• 8 years ago

It is a little janky on my Pixel 2 XL but my 7 year old self would kick my butt for complaining. The native emulators work great of course. This is absolutely astounding that Jason and team are diving head first into these software collections like this. I think this, while being widely renowned, is still being undervalued somehow by us all.

sys_64738• 8 years ago

?SYNTAX ERROR

Internet Archive is adding in-browser emulation support for Commodore 64

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