Getting Started with Commodore Emulators and COMPUTE!'s Gazette

For those who wish to play along with the home version...

I'm using the great emulator VICE... this is the first time I've used it on OSX, but before then I was using it for a long time on Windows.  I downloaded the binary here. Opening up the dmg I couldn't just double click on "x64.app", I had to right click and select open, but after that my system knew that the ".d64" and ".t64" files belonged to it.

I got the pile of disk images here... archive.org is great! I also used them to get PDFs of the print version of the magazine.

Double clicking on a .d64 image and VICE will mount it and even do the classic
LOAD "*",8,1
(Unfortunately, that doesn't run the main menu until late 1984, so you may have to run
LOAD "MENU",8
for earlier issues.)

You might notice that you don't always get a quote mark with your keyboard's quote mark key... you might have to hit shift-2.

Also Commodores were inconsistent about if you had to or even could load a program ,8,1 rather than just ,8 (the ,8 means "disk" vs tape, the ,1 means 'load it into place in memory')

Other notes: on Macbooks the function keys are actually labeled on top of the computer, and correctly mapped, but you have to hold down the "fn" button to activate them. Also, cmd-w activates
"warp mode" which can shorten "disk loading" times and the like.

You should consider getting a USB joystick, or even a Atari-stick-to-USB adapter like I describe here. (Most emulators have some kind of "use keyboard as joystick" mode, but that's not too much fun, is it?)

UPDATE: games that I rate as 4 or 5 stars get added to the blog's accompanying game archive. Each is a simple one-game-per-disk-image that should boot with no problem.