OMG – C64 SID to MP3 project!!

Posted Saturday, 26th September 2009 under Video game music
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So I was listening to the most recent podcast from C64 Take-away on the way home from work this week, and found out about an amazing project that’s been happening for the last couple of years – Stone Oakvalley’s Authentic SID Collection (SOASC=), a project where some very talented C64 fans have converted all the songs from The High Voltage SID Collection into MP3 for easy, portable listening!!! According to the SOASC= website (http://www.6581-8580.com/), that’s 154473 files of music recorded from real C64s (encompassing the various chipset revisions 6581R2, 6581R4 & 8580R5). Every song from the HVSC has been recorded on all three of those revisions to ensure nobody misses out on the nostalgia trip…

This is crazy awesome news, as I’ve been doing some SID – MP3 conversion on and off, but only through PC emulator stuff. So the prospect of having so much awesome available for throwing into my iPod playlist is supremely awesome.

The only bummer is that it’s currently offline, though a note on their download page promises there might be an update on this at the end of the month. I can assure you I’ll be there 🙂

C64 ECP gaming session!

Posted Wednesday, 23rd September 2009 under Gaming sessions
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So I had an hour to kill the other night and thought I’d get out the C64 and the 1541 and have a proper crack at the ECP games pack I got when I snagged the C64 earlier on this year.

I started out by giving Black Knight a whirl (I died lots :P), then moved onto Road Duels (awesome fun!), flipped the disk and fired up Metron (I forgot how to blow up the pac-man space ship thingies :P), changed disks and gave Alien Kill a whirl (the aliens look like bugs :P), didn’t have much luck with the other two games on Side A of that disk, so I flipped it and jumped onto P.R.O.B.E (couldn’t get past the second screen :P) and finished up with Not More Martians!

Since I was on a roll, I also fired up GeOS to see if any of it was familiar, as I remember messing around with the word processor on it and watching my older brother use it for school work and stuff (we had a dot-matrix printer that attached to the C64 — I remember we had heaps of trouble getting the thing to print to it, but on the up-side, it had a standard LPT port so it continued to live on when we migrated to our 386DX-40 many years later). Anywho, booted it up, and it resembled the interface from Windows 3.1, and I reckon I remember seeing an early Mac OS years and years ago and it looked similar to that too! Either that or I’m going crazy 😛 Having a pretty good understanding of how modern OS’ work from a user point of view, it’s interesting to go back and see how the C64 could be operated with a GUI, despite the fact I only used to use it from the command line. Oh, and geoPaint was cool 🙂

Once all that was up, I figured I needed to end the session on a much more fun note, so I grabbed the tape drive and fired up International Karate for a quick round.

Was another awesome trip down memory lane 🙂 For those enjoying the C64 stuff, I’ve still got a couple of posts to finish up before I move on to some other stuff 😀 I’ve been listening to some C64-related podcasts of late I want to link back to (I’m secretly hoping there’s an awesome repository of awesome SID-related podcasts I’ve yet to uncover besides the great C64 Takeaway and… a few other ones I can’t remember – they’re in my iTunes somewhere :P), probably some other random stuff too 😉

Oh yeah, images:

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C64 serial cable arrived!

Posted Monday, 14th September 2009 under Hardware
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Awesome news, the new serial cable I ordered from Chaoticjelly Games a few weeks ago arrived in the post last week, and unlike the serial cable I built myself about a month ago, this one actually worked 🙂

So, to take a stroll down memory lane, out came the ECP pack again!

So I plonked it in, gave it a whirl, and got a reaction from the Excelerator Plus 1541 clone drive:

I didn’t spend too much time gaming as I was giving it a quick go before being a responsible husband and started cooking dinner for Wifey and I. However, I did get the chance to give Alien Kill 2 and Robotech a whirl – see below for the full story in image format! As always, click any of the thumbnails for the full version and random commentary.

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Sorted! :)

Posted Tuesday, 8th September 2009 under System stuff
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Cool, I’ve sorted out most of the stuff I wanted to get online before I launched this blog – I’ve still got a couple of retrospective posts to cover a recent playthrough of Shining the Holy Ark on the Saturn (hint: it’s still awesome) and I’ve started playing through Secret of Evermore on the SNES and I’m just over half way through it, so I want to post some ramblings on that, too 😀

Oh, and some arcade stuff too probably wouldn’t hurt – I’ve got enough content there for an awesome changelog of useful tweaks, stupid DIY (it involved electricity :P) and general stuff too!

Ah well, plenty of time to cover all that 🙂

C64 haul

Posted Tuesday, 8th September 2009 under Collections
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Found an ad in the paper from someone looking at offloading their C64 complete with all sorts of stuff a while back – luckily I got in at the time it was advertised, drove up to their place and came away with a stack of gear! Plenty of edutainment cassettes, some disks, software, original C64 tape drive (never had one of those for our C64 when we were kids, we only had the 1541 Commodore-brand disk drive) and a 3rd party 1541 clone disk drive (the kind that speeds up disk reading and stuff). The only bummer is that there wasn’t a cable for the disk drive, so I’ve finally (as of last week) ordered a replacement one off eBay in the UK. Can’t wait 😀