3. Getting more C64 Games for Power64

There are three ways to get C64 software for use with Power64. You can get one of the C64 software collections available on CD-ROM, visit one of the C64 archives on the Internet or copy it from your old collection of 5.25" disks. 

Please be aware of the copyright problems attached to C64 games. The fact that the C64 is no longer produced, and hardly any new software is available for it, does not mean that the old commercial software has in general become public domain. Even old software, that is no longer sold, is still intellectual property of its author and protected by copyright laws. Only few authors have activly decided to release their (once commercial) work into public domain. All others have, up to now, just chosen not to take any action against copyright infringements.
In other words, the collections mentioned below consist primarily of pirated software. Use them at your own risk - You have been warned!

3.1 Games on CD-ROM

If you want to purchase a C64 software collection on CD-ROM you can choose among the following:
• High Voltage CD-ROMs: A set of two CD-ROMs.
   Disk #1 contains 4400+ Games, 7000+ Demos and 650+ Utilities.
   Disk #2 contains 4000+ Games, 850+ Demos and 650+ Tools, along with the probably most complete collection of SID-Tunes.
   Each disk costs 30UK£, the set is 50UK£ cash or 55UK£ Eurocheque.
   For more info see: http://www.talent.demon.co.uk/64/
• C64 CD'96: Contains games only, probabaly more than you can ever play.
   Check out: http://www.telebyte.nl/~gg/
   Price: 40US$
   Contact address:
     F. Coolen
     Leyborch 33
     5247 SN Rosmalen
     The Netherlands
• Fairlight Collection: All the C64 games that the Fairlight cracking group ever 'worked' on (about 70MB). Also contains lots  (280MB) of Amiga stuff.
   More info at: http://hem.passagen.se/bacchus/cd/index.html
   Price: 170 Swedish Crowns or 25 US$ or 42 DM or 16UK£ plus shipping
   Contact address:
     Pontus Berg
     Nordmarksvägen 5,3 tr
     123 72 Farsta
     Sweden
• Epic Marketing sells a wide range of CD-ROMs. Most of them are centered around the Amiga or PCs. Still there is one devoted to the C64.
   It's address is: http://www.valivue.demon.co.uk/epic/ 
Or snail mail:
    Epic Marketing      or          Epic Marketing 
  Epic House                         36 Forest Road 
    43 Akers Way                     Heathcote
    Swindon                             NewSouthWales 
    Wiltshire                             2233 Australia
    SN2 2NF 
    United Kingdom 
• Brotkasten CD: A wide ranging collection of software and emulators for the C64 as well as the Atari 800, Apple2, TI99/4A, Amstrad CPC and Sinclair ZX81. 
 Check out: http://www.8bit.com/bkcmain.htm
• 64'er CD: A very special case - This is the collection of all the floppy disks that came with the German 64'er magazine. A wide range of little tools, games and programming examples accompanying the courses from the magazine. Not all of them are useful without their (paper) documentation.
   More info on the 64'er magazine at: http://www.magnamedia.de/64er
The 64'er CD-ROM is available from:
    Pearl Agency
    Am Kalischacht 4
    70426 Buggingen
    Germany
    Tel. +49 7631 360 200
    Fax +49 7631 360 444
    WWW: http://www.pearl.de/
or
    Performance Peripherals Europe
    http://www.ppeurope.de/
• An annotated list of published CD-ROMs for various 8-bit computers is available at:
   http://www.8bit.com/bkcmain.htm 

3.2 Games on the Internet

If you are looking for C64 software on the internet, you might want to look at the following sites:
• ftp://arnold.hiof.no:6502/ - One of the most complete game collections
• ftp://ftp.fix.no/pub/mirror/c64 - A mirror of Arnold
• http://www-wjp.cs.uni-sb.de/chaos/ftp64/ - A mirror of Arnold
• http://hobbes.cs.uni-sb.de/pub/c64/ - A mirror of Arnold
• ftp://frodo.hiof.no/pub/c64 - Emulators and SID-tunes
• ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/CBM/ - Emulators and documentation
• http://ftp.giga.or.at/pub/c64 - Emulators and demos
• http://www.poli.studenti.to.it/ftp/pub/c64/?en - Lots of games and SIDs
• http://debra.rau.ac.za/C64/ - Emulators and games
• ftp://ccgna.uwaterloo.ca - Once a reference site for games, now only rarely reachable 
• ftp://ftp.jbrain.com/pub/cbm - A successor of ftp://ccgna.uwaterloo.ca
• http://stekt.oulu.fi/~mysti/the_sharks/Files/Games/Tested/ - Lots of good games
• ftp://ftp.inf.bme.hu/pub/c64 - Demos, Tools, Magazines
• ftp://utopia.hacktic.nl/pub/c64/ - C64 CD Online - Tons of games! Currently has severe space problems, many files are offline. Still has some tools and music online.
• http://www.algonet.se/~btbrose/c64/htm-text/emulator.htm - Some games some emulators
• ftp://ftp.cs.tu-berlin.de/pub/c64/ - Demos and Tools
• http://home.ptd.net/~faethor/c64class/c64class.htm - A small site with few games
• http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Vista/3468/c64index.htm - Not much in itself but nice collection of links

3.2.1 Downloading and Unpacking Hints
 
Here are some hints, that will see trivial to experienced internet users and are meant to help newbies avoid the most frequent errors:

C64 games are always stored in binary, never in text (ASCII) files. If you are using a FTP program for downloading make sure it is switched to binary mode. If you are using a webbrowser such as Netscape Navigator or M$ Internet Explorer press the option key when clicking on the link of a game. Otherwise there is a good chance that you will end up with a file that looks fine at first glance but is internally corrupted and unusable.
 
Only few sites offer games in pure D64 or T64 format. Almost all archives offer their files in a compressed format, that saves disk space and network bandwidth. Common file extensions for compressed files are: ZIP, GZ, LHA and SIT. Before you can use such a game with Power64 you will need to expand (decompress) this file.

The easiest way to expand a compressed file is to drag and drop it on StuffIt Expander with Expansion Enhancer. Both StuffIt Expander and Dropstuff with Expansion Enhancers are available at your local info-mac archive or from Aladdin Systems at http://www.aladdinsys.com/expander/index.html.
StuffIt Expander is freeware, Dropstuff with Expansion Enhancer is shareware and together they expand all the important file formats. Note that LHA support was only added in version 4.5 of Dropstuff. If you are still using an earlier version you can either upgrade to 4.5 or greater or get one of two specialized LHA programs: MacLHA by Kazuaki Ischizaki or the LHA-Expander by Masanori Sekino. Both are available as freeware from your local info-mac site.

Some sites also offer SFX files. These are Self Extracting LHArchives, that need to be unpacked on an (emulated) C64. The easiest way to do this probably is to mount the folder containing the SFX file as drive #9 and place a new disk image (or a disk image with sufficient free space) in drive #8. Now LOAD and RUN the SFX file, just like any other C64 program. It will ask for a drive and a device number. Answer '0' and '8' respectivly and stand by as the archive is unpacked onto the floppy. When expansion is completed, you have the playable game on the disk, that can now be used like any other D64 file. The SFX file is then no longer needed.
Note that the C64 is a slow computer (in comparison to your Mac). Decompression might take quite a while. Try increasing the CPU speed in the Options/Emulator Speed Dialog to make this a little faster.

If the expansion tool complained about a bad file structure, checksum errors or similar problems, it is most likely cause is that you made an error in downloading. Remember: All C64 games are stored in binary files! When in doubt use an specialized FTP tool for downloading. Don't (ab-)use your webbrowser for FTP sessions.

Now you hopefully successfully managed to expand the downloaded games. Still the files look dull on your Macintosh desktop and double-clicking on them does not start Power64. Please remember that there are computer systems other than the Macintosh out there. They have no idea of the Type/Creator system that the MacOS uses to keep files linked to icons and applications. Thus such information is not stored in the compressed file and can therefore not be retrieved when it is expanded. 
Still Power64 is able to use such files, if you manually start Power64 and use the Device menu to attach a D64, T64 etc. to an appropriate drive. If a file does not have one of the characteristic extensions, it is most likely a CBM program file and you should mount its folder as a hard disk. After a file has been sucessfully loaded Power64 will adjust the Type/Creator for this file, so that it can be opened Mac style by double-clicking. 

3.3 Other Internet Resources

If you do not want to search for games yourself there are also internet search engines specialised on the C64:
• http://www.ts.umu.se/~yak/cccc/cbmsearch/
• http://users.iol.it/fmaida/emusearch/

If you are looking for paper magazines for the C64, visit
• GO64! - a brand new German paper magazine can be found at:
    http://www.go64.c64.org 
 or http://www.i-node.at/go64/go64.html
• 64'er - What is left of the once most popular German paper C64 magazine:
    http://www.magnamedia.de/64er

There are WWW-Sites devoted to the general topic of Emulation on the Macintosh:
• http://www.emulation.net/ excellent site for all kinds of emulators on the Mac.
• http://web3.ukonline.co.uk/paul.mcgunnigle/index.htm
• http://www.macworld.com/software/emulation.html MacWorld has compiled a list of emulators for the Mac
• http://home2.swipnet.se/~w-28929/ gives an overview on Emulation on PCs

There are also newsgroups that are devoted to Commodore computers (news://comp.sys.cbm) and their emulation (news://comp.emulator.cbm). Read them to learn about new CD-ROMs and game-sites.

3.4 Using original 1541 Floppy disks

If you have your own collection of documents and games that you wrote yourself, and that are not publicly available you can copy these from 5.25" disk to your Mac. Unfortunately this is not a straight forward job. Still there are several options:
• Get a DOS PC, a 1541 disk drive, a cable to hook the 1541 to the printer port of the PC and Star Commander. The cable is a simple 5 wire affair that anyone with a soldering iron can produce for less than $20. Star Commander is a shareware program, that lets you copy files and disk images between the 1541 and the PC very easily. The Star Commander manual also explains how the cable is to be built. Once you have the files on the PC you can easily transfer them to your Mac using 3.5" disks. The file formats are the same.
Star Commander is available at: http://ludens.elte.hu/~sta/sc.html
• There are 3.5" disk drives available that can be connected to the C64, and produce Mac compatible disks. Unfortunately I have no such drive nor do I have any experience with this method. I would welcome any reports on this topic.
• Connect the C64 and the Mac via modem and transfer the files. Once again I have no experience with this method. I am afraid that this must be rather  slow, but I am not sure about this.
More information on this topic can be found at: http://stekt.oulu.fi/~jopi/electronics/cbm/C64_to_mac
or
http://margo.student.utwente.nl/stefan/hwb/ca_NullmodemMacToC64.html
• Use the "Big Blue Reader" a commercial package, from SOGWAP software, that runs on either a 64 or a 128, will read and write MS-DOS format 3.5" (with a 1581)  and 5.25" (with a 1571) disks. Note that it does not support 1541 disk drives.
• Check section 7 of the news://comp.sys.cbm Frequently Asked Questions.The FAQ can be obtained at:
     ftp://ccnga.uwaterloo.ca/pub/cbm/comp.sys.cbm/cbm-main-faq.3.1
   ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/cbm/faq/cbm-main-faq.3.1.gz
   ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/comp.sys.cbm/main-faq/part*