How to start a cracked Commodore 64 game from the title screen?
February 4, 2021 10:03 AM   Subscribe

My dad has recently gotten his old Commodore 64 up and running, and he has a huge library of pirated games on floppy (please don't arrest us). The only problem is that there seems to have been some trick to getting the game to start once you're on the title screen, and neither of us remember it since it was 30+ years ago. What was it?

This is when loading cracked games from a disk; joystick is hooked up too, so it may be either a keyboard input or a joystick input. OR it may be a special way of loading the game, beyond "LOAD "*", 8, 1". He has gotten other games to work, so it's not a disk drive issue. Two games he's having issues with are H.E.R.O. (won't load past title screen) and Impossible Mission (will pass title screen but then freeze on the first frame with the elevator). Hope us, please!
posted by fiercecupcake to Technology (6 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
Are there any mentions of the Cracker team in the title screen? - that may give you a way to search for a way to progress.
posted by azlondon at 10:15 AM on February 4, 2021


ISTR that some single-player games (and Impossible Mission is one of these) only pay attention to joystick port #2.
posted by Rat Spatula at 10:16 AM on February 4, 2021 [3 favorites]


one thing i vaguely remember was to actually remove the floppy disc completely from the drive. At least for one baseball game that definitely did the trick.
posted by alchemist at 10:28 AM on February 4, 2021 [1 favorite]


Sometimes it was F1 or F7 to get started, but those symptoms sound like it might be a hardware problem to me.
posted by samj at 11:13 AM on February 4, 2021


Most game have disk images available online and you can by a SD card reader that mimics a disc drive - the SD2IEC+.

Anyways that's fun because a) those floppies won't last forever and b) you can get an image file online and see if that works where the version on floppy is maybe failing due to corruption.
posted by GuyZero at 11:29 AM on February 4, 2021 [4 favorites]


Whoa, Impossible Mission!!! That was my favorite C64 pirated game. I would echo alchemist about ejecting the disk and trying again many, (at least ten) more times. I would also add my childhood techniques of: blowing on the floppy disk, tapping my feet rapidly on the carpet, running circles around the room and even chanting “Stay a while, stay forever!!!”
posted by oxisos at 11:51 AM on February 4, 2021 [6 favorites]


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