Welcome back to the 8-Bit Guy.
I received yet another one of these C64 Mini consoles the other day.
I already reviewed this product a while back, but this is the North American version and
so there are some differences.
I wanted to show you unboxing it because I have never unboxed anything quite like this
before.
Upon opening the box it played a little tune for me.
And they’ve attached pop rocks to the back.
And it says available October 9th.
But, I am pretty sure I didn’t receive this until well after the 9th.
So instead of packing peanuts, it was packed in confetti.
And also I found this little scroll in there.
And it seems to be just an advertisement for the product.
OK, so here’s the original version I reviewed, and here’s the new one.
Now, it appears the color of the case may be different.
Or it could just be a difference in how the box is made.
So, let’s open then up and compare in person.
I actually do think the color is different.
Yes!
Yes, it is.
In fact, this is very interesting because when I first did the video on this model,
I mentioned that the color didn’t match the real C64.
A lot of people criticized me for that saying perhaps my C64 had been too heavily retrobrited
or something like that.
But, I’d actually never retrobrited that particular model, that one was actually from
the factory, so I’m not sure exactly what the deal is, but they obviously have changed
the color and maybe the North American C64 had a slightly different color from the European
one, I’m not entirely sure.
But one way or another, it clearly matches the real C64.
And another thing I noticed is that the width of the real C64 is EXACTLY twice as wide as
these two units, I mean perfectly.
The only other obvious difference is on the underside, where the old one has a sticker
and the new one just has embossed plastic.
Now, let’s talk about the built-in games.
This is the original list that came on the European version.
Now, when I did the review on this, I had complained that I only recognized these games,
and that I had really only ever played these 3 games before.
OK, I got a lot of flack and hate-mail about saying that before.
But since we’re talking about this again, I wanted to point out a couple of things.
First of all, if you look at like the NES classic, for example, I think they did a really
good job with this one in the fact that there’s 30 built in games and all of these games were
like the most popular games on the NES platform.
These are the games that essentially defined the NES.
Now, I’ve also made similar complaints before.
For example, when I talked about the Atari flashback, I gave it the same criticism that
I gave the C64 mini.
In that it has like a hundred games on here but there’s only like 5 games that I considered
were defining games for the culture of this platform.
So, how can I judge the C64 mini from a more objective way?
Well, if you look at Lemon64.com, they have a top-40 list where people vote on the best
ever Commodore 64 games.
So, you’d think that most of these games would be included on the C64 mini, right?
Yet, only 5 of the games here are actually on that top-40 list.
So, I don’t think it’s my imagination or some sort of bias when I say these games
aren’t really representative of the C64 culture of the 80s.
However, I noticed the games on the North American version are somewhat different.
All of the games here in green are the same on both systems.
However, some of the names have changed to reflect the way they were marketed in North
America.
For example, Nebulus is now Tower Toppler, Trailblazer II is now Cosmic Causeway, and
Thing Bounces Back is now Coil Cop.
OK, so what games were removed?
Well, these all went away.
Maybe they were never popular in the USA, I don’t know.
Personally, I’ve never heard of any of these.
And they have now been replaced with these games.
Now, I can at least say I’m familiar with over half of these.
So, that’s something.
Regardless, much of what I just went over is probably moot because I’m told the new
version has a much better firmware for allowing you to load your own games.
And we’ll try that out here in just a minute.
So, one of the first things I wanted to find out is if it would work with my living room
TV.
In the first review I did, my TV wouldn’t display anything and I had to borrow one from
somebody else.
A lot of people tried to say that I did something wrong or that my TV was broken.
Yet, interestingly enough, this one works just fine.
So, again, this may boil down to some sort of difference in American vs. European TVs
and this one is clearly designed for the North American market.
Regardless the reason, the good news is, it works now!
OK, so the next thing I wanted to do is test the delay time.
Now, again, I got a lot of flack and hate mail about that.
People were saying that I didn’t do the test right, or that the fault was my TV because
I didn’t put it into game mode, which I actually showed putting it in game mode in
the video, some people said, oh the joystick is the reason for the lag.
But, that’s kind of irrelevant because I was actually testing with a keyboard.
But, I’ve also done the same test with the joystick and found the same result.
So, let’s see if the new firmware improves the lag time any.
Just as a reminder of how I did this, I wrote a little program that just flashes the screen
and makes a beep when you press the space bar.
You can see that on a real C64, there is an instant reaction.
And on the first mini I tested, there was a noticeable lag.
So, I performed the same test on this one and found that it definitely had a noticeable
lag still, but was it any shorter?
I took the two recordings into audacity.
The top recording is the one I made a few months ago, the bottom is the new recording.
This section here is the sound of me hitting the space bar.
This little section here is actually the sound of the space bar springing back up.
And over here is the little ding sound from my program.
And here’s what it sounds like.
Now, looking down here, you can clearly see the delay is shorter.
But is it even enough to hear the difference?
Well, actually yes.
I sounds almost like an echo.
OK, so the audio delay has been improved some.
I’m not sure it’s enough to brag about, but it is better!
Ok, so let’s check the video lag.
The way I do this is just to go frame by frame in final cut pro.
Iooking at the original footage, I can see the precise frame where the space bar was
fully depressed, and then I can count exactly 4 frames before I see any change in the screen.
So, let’s go over to the new footage I took and try it there.
And, interestingly enough, I only count 3 frames this time.
I also ran the test on my living room TV to see if the results match.
And yes, it is in game mode if you were thinking of asking.
With the living room TV I also count exactly 3 frames.
So, that’s good news.
So, let’s put this into something more visual.
The video lag is reduced by a whole frame, so that’s about a 25% improvement.
The audio lag is improved by around the same amount, but it’s a smaller percentage overall
since the audio lag was so bad to begin with.
So, yeah, there is a scientifically measurable improvement here, there’s no denying that.
But, overall, the lag is still a lot and will be noticeable on most action games.
Alright, so now I want to tell you about the absolute biggest improvement with the new
firmware.
And that is how it handles USB drives.
Now I can just plug in a USB drive into my computer and copy over a bunch of disk images
of various different games.
Then I can just plug this into the extra USB port on the C64 mini and you’ll notice a
new icon pop up on the bottom there.
I can use the joystick to select that, and then there is the list of all of the games
I copied over.
Now I can just pick the one I want to play, and go to town.
This feature almost nullifies the problem I mentioned earlier about the selection of
built-in games.
Many games like MULE work fine.
Also Master of the Lamps seems to work fine.
However, there are some considerations here.
For example, let’s load Spelunker.
Now, this game has been cracked and in order to start the game you need a keyboard because
you have to press run/stop.
So I’ll have to use the virtual keyboard to select the run/stop key.
But, it doesn’t end there because they have several more questions they’re going to
ask that all require keyboard input.
I mean, when these games were designed and even when they were cracked like this, nobody
ever thought that there would be a scenario where somebody would be playing these games
without a keyboard in front of them.
And, even though the game itself is more or less playable with the joystick, there are
a few problems.
For example, Spelunker does require occasional keyboard input.
For example, when the ghost comes in, you are supposed to press space to use your phantom
blaster.
You also have to press D for dynamite and F for flare.
While you can do this with the virtual keyboard, it is a pain.
You might think you could connect a USB keyboard, and you can, but there aren’t enough free
USB sockets, so you’ll have to use a USB hub to accomplish this.
Which makes a clutter mess.
But at least you can work around this problem.
And here’s another problem you might encounter.
Games like Giana Sisters are designed for PAL.
Apparently this unit is emulating NTSC and that’s why there is all those weird artifacts
when the screen scrolls.
There is no option to change the emulator features for this game, so you’re just stuck
with it.
Here’s the second big problem.
This game here, for example, requires the joystick to be in port 1.
On a real C64, you would simply move the joystick from port 2 to port 1 and then you’d be
fine.
But these USB ports don’t work that way.
No matter which port you use, the joystick emulates port 2.
So, some games just flat out won’t work.
And then here’s the 3rd problem you’re likely to run into.
The Movie Monster Game was one of my favorite as a kid.
You get to pick different kinds of monsters and tear up the city.
It’s sort of like Rampage but from a different visual perspective.
But I can’t play it on here.
The main reason is, because when it comes time to swap the disk to side 2, there is
no way to do this even if you have the second disk image on the USB stick.
OK, all is not lost.
There are now several websites that have some special download images just for the C64 mini.
And they’ve made some special compilations of games and there’s also a whole section
on Joystick port 2 hacks.
That’s where they’ve modified games that originally require port 1 so that they now
work with port 2 instead.
There’s another solution for multi-disk games.
Of course, all original C64 games were designed to play from 5 and a quarter floppies like
this.
But they were also designed to use each side separately to make sure they were compatible
with the most basic disk drive, the 1541.
These sorts of images are called .D64 images.
However, drives like the 1571 and the 1581 could actually use both sides at once and
actually store a ton more information on a single disk.
And while few if any games ever supported these, many games have been converted in later
years so that a game that might have been on 3 or 4 floppy disks can now be on a single
1581 disk.
So, The good news is, the C64 mini does support the disk images from the 1581 disk drive.
Those are called D81 images, and they store a lot more information and so you can put
those compilations on a single D81 disk image and then you can eliminate the disk swapping
problem completely on those games.
On the bright side, most games actually do work just fine.
And using some of the hacks I mentioned you can get quite a few more to work as well.
And, while I do like this product, I know it isn’t perfect.
Maybe future firmware updates will make it even better?
Who knows.
However, I should mention the company behind it is still committed to making a larger version
with a functional keyboard.
In fact, they just released another teaser about that a few days ago.
So that’s a product I look forward to because it would really solve a lot of problems with
the games that require keyboard use, including my own C64 game, Planet X2, which absolutely
requires a keyboard to play.
OK, and I also wanted to mention if you want to get really adventurous, it is possible
to actually take this thing apart, and you can hack in an RS-232 serial port and then
you can use a terminal and then you can access the linux kernel directly.
You can make all sorts of changes and one of the things that some people have done,
for example, is actually change the games that are built into flash RAM.
You can actually add new games to the carousel here.
You can put new artwork and you can even change the background music on the menu if you want.
Now, I’m not quite adventurous enough right now to want to do that, but maybe I’ll do
that in a later video.
But, that’s it for the moment, so stick around for the next video and thanks for watching!