Getting started

If you've downloaded CCS64 from the URL mentioned above and started it up without having read any form of documentation, it may at first appear somewhat confusing. All you see before you is a blue screen, with some text, and a... cursor? Well, don't worry! You don't need to know the Commodore 64 command syntax in order to run the games. All the emulator functions are made available by pressing F9. You navigate the menu screens by using your arrow keys (even left and right are sometimes used to toggle settings) and Enter to select. Esc skips back one step to the previous level.

Now, one piece of advice -- the first time you run CCS64, I strongly recommend that you take a moment to redefine the keys for the joystick controls. When attempting to play a new game that you have no idea what it does or how it works, it makes things a whole lot less confusing if you at least know what buttons do what.

To redefine keys, hit F9 if you haven't done so already, and then scroll down and select Options... and then Input.... Here, leave Control Port 1 and 2 set to "Joystick", but change the Mode option for these to Key-Set 1 and 2 instead of the default PC Gameport. Scroll down to Redefine Joystick Keyset..., select it, and define the keys to be the way you want them. You probably want to leave the combo directions (UpRight, DownLeft etc) Undefined since they're achieved by combining two keys anyway.

When that's all taken care of, hit Esc a few times to back out to the main menu, and from there select 1541 Device 8.... This brings you to a directory tree of your local drive(s). Simply move to where you saved your downloaded ROM files, and select a .D64 disk image. This opens up a list of files on the "disk", and it's worth mentioning that it's usually not the first one that actually starts the game, but more commonly the second one. In many cases it's the file ending with .PRG.

That should hopefully be enough to get you started with CCS64. For a HUGE archive of more C64 game ROMs, you might want to check out http://www.c64.com/