Continuing with that nostalgic 8-bit GUI fun, largely thanks to some helpful soul on Reddit? I do now have mouse (really touchpad) passthrough working in there. And I now know what the Commodore key is even mapped to!
Does this mean that I have figured out how to launch what little there currently is using the icons yet? Nope! Single click selects, a double click doesn't work, and neither does hitting enter with it selected.
But, here's a short demonstration that the mouse DOES sorta work, and what the main menu options are. It's progress.
And now I'm tired enough of fooling with this that I'm about to escape into Green Hell for a while.
Ah, the joys of C64 gaming! This time, in an emulator that I'm still getting used to.
On a modern display, so we'll all just have to imagine the experience on my usual (B&W) monitor, back in the day.
At any rate, tonight's little delight is a 1988 abandonware title that I didn't know existed, but had to download when I saw it:
It was released on multiple platforms, and you can apparently also play it through a browser on archive.org.
The soundtrack is based on a Devo album, and Timothy Leary was involved in the project.
As for the video here? This was the second time I loaded the game.
The loading delays definitely hearken back to the good old days, even when you're not relying on one slow floppy drive (or, gods forbid, a cassette drive) and physical disk swaps. This particular game evidently came as 5 disk sides for the C64, so we're no doubt in for a lot more virtual swaps later!
(Is the screen supposed to look like that, or is it just crashing while loading???! Guess we'll have to wait and see!)
I have no idea if it's the emulation, or if the title screen music was that messed up on the original hardware. The rest of the sound so far isn't as blatantly wrong, so it's even harder to tell. May have to look for some videos to find out.
Also very reminiscent of trying to play games way back when: what are the controls? We just don't know! In the absence of a paper manual like everything came with then, let's just poke at a bunch of random keys to see if they do anything!
(Though, when I went looking, I did see that the C64 Wiki has us covered, along with some other gameplay info. Better keep that tab open for reference, or possibly print out the control info to make my own pseudo-manual cheat sheet.)
There appears to be a pointer, which could presumably be moved around if you did have a physical joystick connected? I do not, and the keys that I do have configured to stand in for the joystick do not appear to be working. Again, no idea if that's a configuration issue, an emulator issue, or what. Hopefully get something figured out.
Almost a shame that even if I did still have the crappy Atari 2600 joystick that I used to use with the C64, this laptop doesn't have any compatible ports to connect the thing.
I am also not sure if the "Exit" option which I stumbled upon while I was jabbing at random keys not actually doing anything is an emulator thing, or original behavior. ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯
Anyway, looking forward to hopefully getting further into the game once I do get a better idea of the controls.
Does this tricky platformer rock us like a hurricane or is it just a disappointing drizzle?
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