Blast through games for the Commodore 64

No single computer model has ever sold more than the Commodore 64 and, given that it launched in 1982 and hasn’t been in production for 26 years, that’s quite some feat. The Guinness World Records says it sold as many as 17 million units. Much of that is due to a healthy library of games that not only looked great but sounded cool too, thanks to its amazing SID sound chip. Load it up

We’re using the Virtual64 emulator which has been designed for the Mac and is available for free from dirkwhoffmann.de/virtualc64/.

To use the emulator, you’re going to have to locate four system ROMS and drag and drop them into the ROMS tab of the Virtual64 app’s Preferences window.

Looking good

The Preferences window also lets you make adjustments to the colour palette and add effects such as scanlines which are loved by many retro gamers because it can make the graphics look more defined. Play around without worry: there’s a button to restore the factory settings.

Determine your inputs

Click Port 1 or Port 2 and you can tell Virtual64 which controllers you want to ‘plug in’. Choose from a couple of keysets, a mouse or a USB controller. The Devices tab in Preferences will show you how the keys are being mapped and let you add auto-fire to a joystick.

Back to BASICS

The flashing Ready prompt is an invitation to engage in a spot of coding using the programming language BASIC. Otherwise, grab some Commodore 64 game ROMS, drag them into Virtual64 and double-click their filename when prompted in order to load and play.