I'd like to play Jumpman on my DS

[Shane R. Monroe]

Oh I agree completely.

[Joshua B]

Thanks for the upload Shane. I ran Jumpman in the emulator. Can I use the DS gamepad for direction and the A button to jump?

[Shane R. Monroe]

You should be able to!

[Joshua B]

For some reason then, I can't control any movement or jump...

[Shane R. Monroe]

You have to switch ports ... I THINK by pressing SELECT?

[Womp]

You have to switch ports ... I THINK by pressing SELECT?

Yeah sounds like he needs to hit that "Swap Joysticks" option.

Pretty common thing really.

[Shane R. Monroe]

Actually, not that common. Out of the thousand or so C64 games I remember playing, I can only recall a handful that were asses and made me use Port 1 (that were not two player, that is).

Time for an interesting observation/story ...

For those that didn't come up "Commodore", both the C64/128 line and the Amiga line had TWO joystick ports: Port 1 and Port 2. For 99.9% of all games, Port 2 was the accepted controller port. On the C64, many people had a second joystick plugged into port 1 for two player games or the occasional Port 1 game like Jumpman here.

On the Amiga, Port 1 was for the mouse, Port 2 for joystick - and yet some developers STILL required Port 1 for single player games (surprisingly, the ratio of games that used Port 1 was HIGHER on the Amiga).

For non-Commie people, the comment is "So what? You lazy f*&^, just unplug the joystick and put it in the other port." Nice in theory - but strangely enough, one of the weakest designs on BOTH machines was the joystick port (9 pin - same as the Atari 2600, btw). Not that the port wasn't sturdy or anything, but because it was EXTREMELY susceptible to static shocks which would do INSANE things to the computers. On the Amiga, it could wipe out one of the CIA chips. On the C64, it could do anything from destroying the port to actually frying something on the board making the C64 not power up at all - or power up in the oddest, unusable states.

In fact, I believe the original "buy and swap" scam was invented by Commodore 64 fans that had blown their controller ports; you go to Sears or wherever and buy another C64, take it out, put your dead one back in, and return it as defective (no serial number checking went on back then). I will admit, I did it 3 or 4 times in my Commie days.

The Amiga ... well, there is a great story there. The CIA (control interface adapter chip) in the Amiga had at least one saving grace - the CIA chip for the joyports was IDENTICAL to the floppy drive's CIA chip ... and they were both socketed! So, if you blew your joyport CIA chip, you could pop the computer open, and swap CIA chips and get your ports back while you ordered another CIA. Of course, the down side is - your floppy drive didn't work (or sporadically failed) - but most of us were on hard drives fairly quickly, so it didn't really matter -- you only needed floppy discs for the occasional over-copy protected game.

The static CIA chip blow up issue led to MANY aftermarket "port switcher/sharing" products that had circuitry designed to safely switch between a mouse and a joystick in port 1. I had several in my lifetime.

[Womp]

I must have had all those games that required it then because I remember having to do it quite a bit.

Maybe I am hazy but I swear I recall some games wouldn't even START unless they were switched.

[Gordon Bennett]

I tried FrodoDS once. It was..problematic. I don't think that I was actually able to successfully load anything on it. A pity. I ended up buying a PSP to try Vice on it instead, but as it is a PSP 3000, it can't yet run homebrew. A pity. Can't decide whether to trade it in for an older model or wait for it to be properly hacked.

On the DS side, the best option that I have found for 8-bit computer emulation is ZXDS. It emulates the Spectrum beautifully. It supports all of the Sinclair and Amstrad models, plus the Russian clones. As the Speccy resolution is the same as a DS screen, everything on it looks gorgeous. It runs full speed, is easy to use, and has run everything I have thrown at it flawlessly - even some of the new demos with more advanced effects.

There was no Jumpman port to the Speccy, but for a platforming fix you can't go wrong with Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy.

[Womp]

The best way to play C64 IMO is on a custom firmware PSP-2000. It's the closest I've gotten to recreating my original experience with the actual hardware and it's portable to boot.