The C64 was a very popular home computer in the early 80s. Competing with the Spectrum and BBC, for it's day it had a very powerful video chips allowing for more colours than it's competitors, and some pretty nifty graphical effects. The C64 took off in the U.S. creating a massive games industry for the computer with thousands of games being produced and one of Commodore's most popular home computers being the result.
Frodo is Andreas
Dehmel's high quality port of Christian Bauer's emulator, written in C++.
It is fully multi-tasking, and configurable from the Desktop. The compatibility
is very good with most C64 programs being able to be run on it with very
few problems. As well as near perfect graphics emulation, sound emulation
is also included, and works very well indeed. Since it is a port however,
the speed leaves a little to be desired, and to enjoy Frodo, you're going
to need a StrongARM. There are two versions of Frodo supplied, FrodoSC
switches between the various emulated chips after every cycle of the processor,
which gives near perfect emulation at the expense of speed. The standard
Frodo, which is quite a bit faster only switches every few cycles, which
is good enough for most games, and is normally used the most. Frodo can
load C64 (single C64 executable files), T64 tape images, or the more common
D64 (1541 disk images for multiple-file programs).
Although Frodo can be run in 16 colour modes (and is then faster) the palette is incorrect, but you can use a palette Steve Robb sent me to get reasonable colours, as well as the speedup, if speed is your problem. This and other speed tips by Steve Robb, and a quick guide to using Frodo can be downloaded below.
Frodo v4.1
Speed Rating: ARM
3 
ARM 6
ARM 7 
StrongARM 
Frodo
v4.1 (329Kb) ZIP archive
Frodo Support (guide, speedup tips, palette file)
2Kb ZIP archive
Frodo
Homepage
For
several years, Deny's Bogatz's ARM coded C64 emulator was distributed as
a crippled demo version to encourage payment of it's shareware registration
fee. Although still shareware it is now available completely unrestricted
and provides a good alternative to Frodo. Since it is written in ARM code
it is very fast and can be used on low end machines with no problem at
all. It installs onto the icon bar so that files can easily be dragged
to it for loading, but is a single-tasking emulator which takes over the
entire screen during use, with a mouse driven menu at the top of the screen
to control the emulator. The user interface is a little cludgy, with a
mix of in game, and desktop configuration used for example, to use a joystick
you have to configure it in the WIMP menu of BreadBox and activate it by
clicking on the icon showing the keyboard in BreadBox. General compatibility
is not as good as could be hoped, some programs reset the emulator when
run (eg. International Karate), or simply hang partway through (eg. Elite),
and sometimes fail to react to keyboard or joystick presses, but most things
run ok. The sound emulation is in most cases much better than that of Frodo,
but in some rare cases you get no sound at all, eg. in "To be on Top"
only a few of the tunes in the top ten list are played, but in Frodo you
can hear them all, although not very well. Overall, although the emulation
still has a few bugs that need ironing out, the speed makes up for this
deficit and BreadBox is well worth taking a look at.
Only single-file C64 programs can be loaded into BreadBox, which aren't available on the web and need to be extracted from D64 images or elsewhere. T64 images can apparently also be loaded (though if anyone knows how I'll be impressed). Unfortunately the more advanced D64 disk images are not supported, though Andreas Dehmel's BreadPatch has been known to fix this, I say has been known, because I hear reports that it doesn't work with the latest version of BreadBox.
BreadBox64
Speed Rating:
ARM 2 ARM
250 ARM 3
BreadBox64
page
BreadBox64
Crippled Demo
BreadPatch
(22Kb) ZIP archive
V.I.C.E.
The VersatIle Commodore Emulator has been ported to the Acorn by Andreas Dehmel (whon also ported Frodo) and emulates various 8 bit Commodore computers. The Commodore 64, Commodore 128, CBM2, PET and VIC20 are all supported in this one fantastic emulator. Unfortunately as with many of the early Commodore computers, the hardware was very complex which gives the emulator an awful lot of have to contend with resulting in it needing massive amounts of memory and a fast CPU to run at anything like real speed.
Vice v0.16.1 (18/1/99)
Speed Rating: ARM
3 ARM 6
StrongARM
Andreas
Dehmel's page
Vice Homepage
D64ImageFS
D64ImageFS by Andreas Dehmel allows you to read an image filing system of a complete 1541 floppy disc (1-sided) as used in a D64 image. It can also handle DolphinDOS format (40 track single-sided) and 1571 format (70 track double-sided) formats.
Technical Information
CPU - 6510 (C64) / 6502 (Floppy Disk 1541) both running
at about 1MHz
Display - 320x200 pixels with 32 pixel border, 8 sprites
at once, 16 colours at once. Via MOS6567
Sound - 3 channel waveform generator, SID (MOS6581)
RAM - 64Kb for C64, 8Kb for the 1541
VRAM - 1Kb
ROM - 16Kb for C64
reference - Andreas Dehmel, porter of Frodo.
Software:
C64 software
from ftp.funet.fi
arnold.hiof.no
ftp://ftp.nvg.unit.no/pub/
Recommended software:
Creatures 2, Monty On The Run, Little Computer People, Impossible
Mission, Katakis/Denaris, Bubble Bobble, Thrust, Elite Wizball, Slicks,
Dizzy 3, Turrican (I, II), Delta, Armalyte, Hawkeye, David's Midnight Magic
(not much to look at, but addictive and lethal to your keyboard), the Bard's
Tale Trilogy, the SSI-roleplaying games (Pools of Radiance & Co), Nebulus
