Unless you are lucky enough to have an old working Commodore 64, a disk drive, and a huge box of old program floppies lying around, chances are you are going to need an emulator to experience the vast variety of games that were made (and in some cases are still being made) for the C64.

There are several choices for emulators out there, and different Operating Systems that they could be used in, but to keep things simple I will focus on the one I use, VICE running on Windows Vista (which should not differ much from VICE on a Mac). 

There are really only a few things you need to know to get a game up and running (though every emulator has its own quirks and differences), but some of the concepts surrounding the physical C64 might be a bit confusing to someone who has never touched a real C64, or can't remember back that far.  I'll try to explain here without getting too detailed.

Five important things to know -

1. The C64 had had two popular drive devices - a floppy drive, and a tape drive.  It also had a slot for cartidges.  The images or "roms" as some sites say, of the floppies and tapes are generally .D64 and .T64, respectively.  Most of these image files contain only one program, but it was quite possible to have more than one program on a disk.  For now, we'll assume that the .D64 or .T64 images you are using only have a single program on each disk, and that the "AutoStart Disk Image" will be all you will need to get started with a .D64 game or program file you've downloaded from a link at a site such as GB64.COM.  "Attaching" a disk image is like inserting a physical floppy disk on a real C64.  "Starting" it means the emulator will pre-type in the command a real C64 user would have had to type.  For floppy drives it would be something like: LOAD"*",8,1 - with ',8' as the device number of the Floppy Drive.  If, for some reason, your program/game uses multiple diskettes, you might need to attach another disk image while playing the game, such as "Ultima5D2.d64" (the second disk of Ultima 5, for instance).  You would then hit the space bar in-game to signal that you have "inserted" the disk. 



2. The C64 had two Joystick ports.  To fully enjoy C64 emulation, I strongly recommend that you buy a cheap USB PC game controller (if you don't already have one) like a Logitech Precision controller - two if you want to play games with friends.  The keyboard is not forgiving at all for making diagonal jumps in platform type games, or with the hectic pace of some other popular games.  It was also common for programs (even non-games) to use the joystick as a mouse equivalent, and again, the keyboard will lack the accuracy and ease of a joypad.  The location of C64 keys also differ somewhat, further complicating casual gameplay on the keyboard.  It is important to note that game developers back in the day seemed to change the primary joystick at a whim.  So after you set up your joypad, you may need to go in on occasion and "swap joysticks" between ports.  Or, you can designate the single controller you have to use both ports -- that is if you don't have 2 joypads already.  A last option for you to go truly old school, is to find a real "joystick" you can use on your PC -- but most modern gamers are comfortable with joypads without the stick, so use what is best for you.



3. The Snapshot option in VICE is your friend.  If the game you are playing offers a save mode, by all means, use it.  But sometimes it is just simpler and easier to use the snapshot mode to jump back to wherever you were in a game, or to help with completing a difficult level.  It's a convenience real C64 users back in the 1980's never had - take advantage of it!



4. Warp Mode is great!  A real C64 would sometimes take 10 minutes or more to load a complex game.  Warp Mode allows you to fast forward that load time so it completes in seconds, sometimes immediately, instead.  A few games might not be able to handle Warp Mode, and may require real drive emulation.  Perhaps because there is no physical floppy or drive involved, even without using Warp Mode, it never seems to take half as long for the games to load as they did back in the day, which is a very good thing indeed.

5. Double the size of the emulator screen.  Unless you have very low video resolution set on your PC, the C64 viewing window is likely to come off as very small.  This is because in true pixel terms, the C64 used far less than today's PC's to fill a screen.  You can also use full-screen mode (especially if you're playing a 2-player game), but if you prefer to multitask as I do, then Double Size should do nicely.

Finally - Save your settings!  The last thing you want to do is get your custom settings in place only to find them gone the next time you use VICE.  So opt for "Save Settings on Exit".