**The Commodore 64 Emulator: A Mixed Bag**

As I embarked on this journey to test the Commodore 64 emulator, I was eager to dive into its features and capabilities. The first thing that struck me was the controller's lack of microswitches, which made it difficult to use for games that required pixel-perfect movement. This was evident in one of my favorite games, Cyber Noid, where even with a bit of practice, I couldn't shake off the feeling of frustration due to the joystick's inaccuracy.

I tried swapping out the controller for other options, including a PS3 controller and a keyboard, but unfortunately, none of them worked as seamlessly as I had hoped. The PS3 controller was too sensitive, while the keyboard required a bit too much effort to navigate through the games. This made me wonder if there was something fundamentally wrong with the joystick itself.

I decided to test out some other games to see how they fared, and unfortunately, it seemed that every single one of them required accuracy to play correctly. Whether it was a fast-paced platformer or a precise puzzle game, the controller's lack of precision made it a hindrance. I couldn't help but feel frustrated with this joystick, which was meant to be a joy to use.

As I continued testing the emulator, I noticed that it worked well for most games, but there were some notable exceptions. The lag and inaccuracy issues seemed to plague every game that required precise movement or timing. It was clear that the controller's design was not suitable for these types of games, which made me wonder if the developer had done enough research before creating this product.

One potential solution to this problem was a firmware update that would enable other controllers to be used with the emulator. However, as I mentioned earlier, this seems unlikely, and I'm left wondering whether there's anything else that can be done to improve the controller. Another option is to replace the joystick altogether, which I've considered doing, but it's not a trivial task.

The packaging of the Commodore 64 emulator was certainly impressive, with its injection-molded case making it a stunning display piece. However, for what I paid for it, I expected a more reliable controller that wouldn't make me want to pull my hair out in frustration.

As of now, there are third-party sellers on Amazon and eBay offering the Commodore 64 emulator, but be warned: they're charging an arm and a leg for these devices. A friend who bought one from Amazon UK had to pay $150 for it, which is certainly steep considering that I've heard rumors that a Raspberry Pi can be used as a substitute.

In conclusion, while the Commodore 64 emulator itself works well, the controller is a major letdown. It's clear that more research and development went into this product than was put into its controller, and it shows in the final result. Whether or not to wait for a firmware update or consider using a Raspberry Pi as a substitute are questions that I'll be grappling with in the days to come.

**Update**

As of now, there is no word on whether a firmware update will be available to enable other controllers to be used with the emulator. However, I've decided to proceed with the plan to use a Raspberry Pi 3 as a substitute controller. If you're interested in seeing how this process goes, I'll be documenting my journey and providing updates on the channel.

**Note**

I'd love to hear from my viewers about their experiences with the Commodore 64 emulator and its controller. Do you have any thoughts on whether or not to wait for a firmware update or consider using a different controller? Let me know in the comments below!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat's going on guys this ETA prime back here again I finally got my hands on the c64 mini and I'm super excited to show this thing off now I've heard a lot of stuff about this input lag laggy games and things like that I'm gonna put it through its paces and see if it acts up on me this unit comes pre-loaded with 64 classic commodore 64 games now like a lot of these little mini units coming out there's some really good games and then there's some crap on there licensing is really hard to get for all the good stuff so they definitely have to throw a little trash in there with the treasure to make the catalogue a little bigger they kept basic in here so you can actually load your own games from a USB Drive they also offer firmware updates and I'm not gonna update this I want to get it out of the box this is on firmware version 1.0 because like I mentioned at the beginning some people were having a lot of input lag with these I'm hoping it's not true but you never know so in this video I'm gonna be doing an unboxing a teardown and I also want to do some testing here let's get right into it right off the bat the packaging is amazing the slides right out of the sleeve really nice packaging I could display just this box on my shelf and be happy so here we are this baby is tiny the color is a little off I'm not sure if they tried to do a little bit of a you know an aged look for the commodore 64 or not it is a little darker than it should be but i like it i think it looks great we got two USB ports power button on the back 5 volt power in an HDMI out that's about it there's also a status LED on top and a little ventilation on the bottom the keyboard is non-functional when I first saw this announced I was hoping that the keyboard would be functional I know it's a little small for some hands but it would have been an awesome addition definitely would have brought the cost up also the joystick is modeled after the elevated competition pro joystick for the c64 and older computers they didn't use a USB port back in the day this was an Atari style connection and this is USB so I also owned the D 64 plug-and-play commodore 64 now this isn't just your run-of-the-mill plug-and-play you buy from Walmart these things are pretty expensive and they're really great if you can get your hands on one for cheap I definitely recommend it looks like they used a similar mold for the joystick on the mini c64 it's a full-size replica so you don't have to worry about it being a little smaller there are a few other knickknacks in here now it does not come with a power supply you will have to provide your own we have an HDMI cord about six feet long I guess and a micro USB cable to power the unit so you'll have to provide your own power supply I recommend that at least two amps I've seen some people getting lag with one amp power supplies and then I've seen some people say that they used it too and alleviated all the lag we're gonna have to test that out since we're talking about these mini consoles I wanted to break out the SNES mini just compare sizes and the NES mini while I'm here I figured I'd throw in one of my favorite 3d printed Raspberry Pi cases this is an Amiga style 3d printed case by the guys over at retropie cases I'll leave a link in the description he offers all kinds even has a Commodore 64 3d printed case that looks amazing I just wanted to throw this little case in here because I do a lot of Raspberry Pi emulation videos and the Raspberry Pi can run commodore 64 games very very well if you run retropie Locka or recall box you can have pretty much the same experience as this mini c64 and you can add hundreds of games and of course you know I had to take this thing apart so I just pulled the feed off took the four screws out and the top will come right off there's not much going on in here we do have our little single board computer which I'm gonna call it that there is a button connected to this board and you can access it from outside of the case underneath the sticker so you could either poke a hole there I'm not sure if this is for recovery or firmware upgrades there's also a status LED and they added some weights in here and I'm actually glad they added these weights because without them this thing would be super light it would just move around the desk all day long I went ahead and pulled the board out for the CPU we have the all winner a 20 arm cortex a7 it's a dual-core CPU its clock to either one to 1.2 gigahertz it definitely has more than enough power to run c64 games the GPU is built into this a 20 it's a Mallee 400 MP - that's a dual core GPU they're usually clocked from 100 on up to 650 so this is in the 400 to 500 range and again this GPU is perfect for c64 or as for RAM we only get 256 megabytes of SDRAM there were two slots on the board I'm not sure if they were gonna add 512 or to 128 to make 256 either way it really doesn't matter now because we only have 256 megabytes of SDRAM not the highest but perfect for this kind of little unit flash storage it's a NAND flash storage unit 256 megabytes that holds the operating system games and everything else that they put into this from the outside of the case we've already seen the two USB 2.0 ports the power button the micro USB and the HDMI but there's a few other little things hidden inside of here that I just want to show you real quick there is a recovery button here that's not accessible from the outside of the case this could be for flashing the entire operating system there's also a you boot button and a UART connection since we have access to all of these there is a good chance that we could add more games to the internal storage now I'm not exactly sure how much storage is left after they put 264 games that come pre-loaded but there's a chance that we could add more the games are very small now this does run some sort of Linux version I'm not sure if it's just some kind of custom Linux operating system that they created specifically for this or some sort of custom Android version either way they're both Linux and there's a really good chance that this thing could be hacked in the future both Linux users and Android users love to tinker so I'm sure something will come and will come of this all right guys so here we are this is the interface it looks really nice 720p as soon as you boot up you just have to choose the language of the system there's also some options down here we have pixel-perfect european four by three North American four by three pixel perfect CRT got some decent scan lines in it european four by three CRT North American four by three CRT now these aren't scan lines like the new analog Super NT but they do the job they don't look bad I'm gonna leave it in pixel perfect mode back out of here have some more options you can change the language from here I've got a few to choose from and USB keyboard setup u.s. got a couple other options legal notices system information like I mentioned I wanted to test this out on version 1.0 because there's a lot of complaints out there so I'm gonna be doing that I will do a video showing you how to update the firmware if enough people are interested and factory reset so there's a lot of games here that you'll like to play there's a lot of fluffier also there's a few games that I really like to play I want to show you basic real quick it's super easy to use you're gonna need a fat32 formatted USB stick and your game on the stick you can use an external keyboard plugged in with USB or we can use the virtual keyboard or the on-screen keyboard in this video I'm not gonna run a game from a USB Drive I just want to test what's on here I'm just gonna test a couple games couple games that I know of couple games that I know I can play pretty decently at least in emulation with retropie let me find something here if you want a full list I'll leave a link to their website there's a lot of games in here though we'll go with Hawkeye not a bad game I actually enjoy playing this one okay so some of these games will require a keyboard to get started this one here you can use the joystick just to start the game but if you need a keyboard you can either plug in a USB or open up the virtual keyboard sometimes you need to hit a specific button like f1 f3 f5 to get the game up and running or even just a number to choose your joystick or keyboard but this one we can play completely with the joystick swap over to a bigger gun straight off the bat I'm not trying to jump here and my joystick is making me jump so I'm not feeling the lag that people are talking about here but I am feeling the crud enos of this joystick itself it is not micro switched so it's a little hard to use I guess you could get used to it but some of these games require really pixel-perfect movement and this is definitely going to be the downside of this system so I need to jump over and I just stopped dead there because of this joystick right in midair this is one of those games I have played a lot through emulation get over here sometimes you jump when you press over sometimes you don't jump when you press jump it's hit or miss with the stickman I don't know it's not oh it's not the lag that's killing me I don't notice much lag it's just the inaccuracy of the stick itself now trying to hold this between your legs or something like that it's not gonna work out too well you gotta have this on the tabletop you can get used to it though back out of here and I'm gonna try another one of my favorite games cyber noid or cyber annoyed - played this game a lot if I can find it we'll go with number 2 so this is one of those games that does require pixel-perfect movement to pretty much do anything and switch to my bouncers I already feel like I got to push too hard on this joystick to get anything done give me a second come on come on made it bouncers go go go go go go go switch back to bouncer oh come on baby really not feeling the stick and to get through here it's gonna be impossible using this thing I'm actually really frustrated right now alright guys so so here's the deal straight out of the box the joystick sucks I don't think it's really input lag that's messing me up it is the joystick itself at the press way too hard on it I did try an SNES USB pad doesn't work ps3 controller a bit o controller also try to keyboard to play the games it will not work in the games it does work in basic for typing everything if they add support for game pads I think this could be pretty awesome but then you're losing the c64 stick here which is a big part of the commodore 64 or if they just added support for keyboard inside of each one of these games it'd be worth it I don't really know I'm I'm actually kind of frustrated right now with this joystick it's hard to move around and I don't think it's the lag that's killing me I really don't I tested out a few games off-camera and every one of them it's the same scenario if I try to press over sometimes it hits jump these require pixel perfect movement to play these games correctly 99% of them do some of these games are gonna be fine but like you just saw cyber noid cyber noid - they require accuracy to get this done now this was a hard game already out of the box but playing it with this controller it really sucks so overall the emulation is great works fine the controller is horrible there's two options here either I can wait for a firmware update to enable other controllers because there's really no way to fix this controller that it comes with or I could throw a Raspberry Pi inside of here one of the main reasons I got this was because of the injection molded case here I think it looks great it's an awesome display piece but for what I paid for it I think the controller should work a little better as of making this video they are not officially available in the United States yet there are third-party sellers on Amazon and eBay I'll leave links in the description but they want a hundred and fifty US dollars they are available on Amazon UK I'll leave a link down below for the viewers in the UK I had one of my buddies actually buy one of these from Amazon UK and ship it over to the United States it was actually cheaper that way than to buy for the hundred and fifty dollars the scalpers are charging for these right now I think it's a cool idea and I completely understand how emulation works it's not going to be perfect but having something that's almost unplayable is definitely not acceptable so I'm gonna leave this decision up to my viewers leave a comment down below if you want to see me throw a Raspberry Pi 3 in here also if you just want me to wait for a firmware update let me know I think I already know where this is gonna go so I'll start getting things ready really appreciate you guys watching if you could hit that like button and subscribe to the channel and like always thanks for watchingwhat's going on guys this ETA prime back here again I finally got my hands on the c64 mini and I'm super excited to show this thing off now I've heard a lot of stuff about this input lag laggy games and things like that I'm gonna put it through its paces and see if it acts up on me this unit comes pre-loaded with 64 classic commodore 64 games now like a lot of these little mini units coming out there's some really good games and then there's some crap on there licensing is really hard to get for all the good stuff so they definitely have to throw a little trash in there with the treasure to make the catalogue a little bigger they kept basic in here so you can actually load your own games from a USB Drive they also offer firmware updates and I'm not gonna update this I want to get it out of the box this is on firmware version 1.0 because like I mentioned at the beginning some people were having a lot of input lag with these I'm hoping it's not true but you never know so in this video I'm gonna be doing an unboxing a teardown and I also want to do some testing here let's get right into it right off the bat the packaging is amazing the slides right out of the sleeve really nice packaging I could display just this box on my shelf and be happy so here we are this baby is tiny the color is a little off I'm not sure if they tried to do a little bit of a you know an aged look for the commodore 64 or not it is a little darker than it should be but i like it i think it looks great we got two USB ports power button on the back 5 volt power in an HDMI out that's about it there's also a status LED on top and a little ventilation on the bottom the keyboard is non-functional when I first saw this announced I was hoping that the keyboard would be functional I know it's a little small for some hands but it would have been an awesome addition definitely would have brought the cost up also the joystick is modeled after the elevated competition pro joystick for the c64 and older computers they didn't use a USB port back in the day this was an Atari style connection and this is USB so I also owned the D 64 plug-and-play commodore 64 now this isn't just your run-of-the-mill plug-and-play you buy from Walmart these things are pretty expensive and they're really great if you can get your hands on one for cheap I definitely recommend it looks like they used a similar mold for the joystick on the mini c64 it's a full-size replica so you don't have to worry about it being a little smaller there are a few other knickknacks in here now it does not come with a power supply you will have to provide your own we have an HDMI cord about six feet long I guess and a micro USB cable to power the unit so you'll have to provide your own power supply I recommend that at least two amps I've seen some people getting lag with one amp power supplies and then I've seen some people say that they used it too and alleviated all the lag we're gonna have to test that out since we're talking about these mini consoles I wanted to break out the SNES mini just compare sizes and the NES mini while I'm here I figured I'd throw in one of my favorite 3d printed Raspberry Pi cases this is an Amiga style 3d printed case by the guys over at retropie cases I'll leave a link in the description he offers all kinds even has a Commodore 64 3d printed case that looks amazing I just wanted to throw this little case in here because I do a lot of Raspberry Pi emulation videos and the Raspberry Pi can run commodore 64 games very very well if you run retropie Locka or recall box you can have pretty much the same experience as this mini c64 and you can add hundreds of games and of course you know I had to take this thing apart so I just pulled the feed off took the four screws out and the top will come right off there's not much going on in here we do have our little single board computer which I'm gonna call it that there is a button connected to this board and you can access it from outside of the case underneath the sticker so you could either poke a hole there I'm not sure if this is for recovery or firmware upgrades there's also a status LED and they added some weights in here and I'm actually glad they added these weights because without them this thing would be super light it would just move around the desk all day long I went ahead and pulled the board out for the CPU we have the all winner a 20 arm cortex a7 it's a dual-core CPU its clock to either one to 1.2 gigahertz it definitely has more than enough power to run c64 games the GPU is built into this a 20 it's a Mallee 400 MP - that's a dual core GPU they're usually clocked from 100 on up to 650 so this is in the 400 to 500 range and again this GPU is perfect for c64 or as for RAM we only get 256 megabytes of SDRAM there were two slots on the board I'm not sure if they were gonna add 512 or to 128 to make 256 either way it really doesn't matter now because we only have 256 megabytes of SDRAM not the highest but perfect for this kind of little unit flash storage it's a NAND flash storage unit 256 megabytes that holds the operating system games and everything else that they put into this from the outside of the case we've already seen the two USB 2.0 ports the power button the micro USB and the HDMI but there's a few other little things hidden inside of here that I just want to show you real quick there is a recovery button here that's not accessible from the outside of the case this could be for flashing the entire operating system there's also a you boot button and a UART connection since we have access to all of these there is a good chance that we could add more games to the internal storage now I'm not exactly sure how much storage is left after they put 264 games that come pre-loaded but there's a chance that we could add more the games are very small now this does run some sort of Linux version I'm not sure if it's just some kind of custom Linux operating system that they created specifically for this or some sort of custom Android version either way they're both Linux and there's a really good chance that this thing could be hacked in the future both Linux users and Android users love to tinker so I'm sure something will come and will come of this all right guys so here we are this is the interface it looks really nice 720p as soon as you boot up you just have to choose the language of the system there's also some options down here we have pixel-perfect european four by three North American four by three pixel perfect CRT got some decent scan lines in it european four by three CRT North American four by three CRT now these aren't scan lines like the new analog Super NT but they do the job they don't look bad I'm gonna leave it in pixel perfect mode back out of here have some more options you can change the language from here I've got a few to choose from and USB keyboard setup u.s. got a couple other options legal notices system information like I mentioned I wanted to test this out on version 1.0 because there's a lot of complaints out there so I'm gonna be doing that I will do a video showing you how to update the firmware if enough people are interested and factory reset so there's a lot of games here that you'll like to play there's a lot of fluffier also there's a few games that I really like to play I want to show you basic real quick it's super easy to use you're gonna need a fat32 formatted USB stick and your game on the stick you can use an external keyboard plugged in with USB or we can use the virtual keyboard or the on-screen keyboard in this video I'm not gonna run a game from a USB Drive I just want to test what's on here I'm just gonna test a couple games couple games that I know of couple games that I know I can play pretty decently at least in emulation with retropie let me find something here if you want a full list I'll leave a link to their website there's a lot of games in here though we'll go with Hawkeye not a bad game I actually enjoy playing this one okay so some of these games will require a keyboard to get started this one here you can use the joystick just to start the game but if you need a keyboard you can either plug in a USB or open up the virtual keyboard sometimes you need to hit a specific button like f1 f3 f5 to get the game up and running or even just a number to choose your joystick or keyboard but this one we can play completely with the joystick swap over to a bigger gun straight off the bat I'm not trying to jump here and my joystick is making me jump so I'm not feeling the lag that people are talking about here but I am feeling the crud enos of this joystick itself it is not micro switched so it's a little hard to use I guess you could get used to it but some of these games require really pixel-perfect movement and this is definitely going to be the downside of this system so I need to jump over and I just stopped dead there because of this joystick right in midair this is one of those games I have played a lot through emulation get over here sometimes you jump when you press over sometimes you don't jump when you press jump it's hit or miss with the stickman I don't know it's not oh it's not the lag that's killing me I don't notice much lag it's just the inaccuracy of the stick itself now trying to hold this between your legs or something like that it's not gonna work out too well you gotta have this on the tabletop you can get used to it though back out of here and I'm gonna try another one of my favorite games cyber noid or cyber annoyed - played this game a lot if I can find it we'll go with number 2 so this is one of those games that does require pixel-perfect movement to pretty much do anything and switch to my bouncers I already feel like I got to push too hard on this joystick to get anything done give me a second come on come on made it bouncers go go go go go go go switch back to bouncer oh come on baby really not feeling the stick and to get through here it's gonna be impossible using this thing I'm actually really frustrated right now alright guys so so here's the deal straight out of the box the joystick sucks I don't think it's really input lag that's messing me up it is the joystick itself at the press way too hard on it I did try an SNES USB pad doesn't work ps3 controller a bit o controller also try to keyboard to play the games it will not work in the games it does work in basic for typing everything if they add support for game pads I think this could be pretty awesome but then you're losing the c64 stick here which is a big part of the commodore 64 or if they just added support for keyboard inside of each one of these games it'd be worth it I don't really know I'm I'm actually kind of frustrated right now with this joystick it's hard to move around and I don't think it's the lag that's killing me I really don't I tested out a few games off-camera and every one of them it's the same scenario if I try to press over sometimes it hits jump these require pixel perfect movement to play these games correctly 99% of them do some of these games are gonna be fine but like you just saw cyber noid cyber noid - they require accuracy to get this done now this was a hard game already out of the box but playing it with this controller it really sucks so overall the emulation is great works fine the controller is horrible there's two options here either I can wait for a firmware update to enable other controllers because there's really no way to fix this controller that it comes with or I could throw a Raspberry Pi inside of here one of the main reasons I got this was because of the injection molded case here I think it looks great it's an awesome display piece but for what I paid for it I think the controller should work a little better as of making this video they are not officially available in the United States yet there are third-party sellers on Amazon and eBay I'll leave links in the description but they want a hundred and fifty US dollars they are available on Amazon UK I'll leave a link down below for the viewers in the UK I had one of my buddies actually buy one of these from Amazon UK and ship it over to the United States it was actually cheaper that way than to buy for the hundred and fifty dollars the scalpers are charging for these right now I think it's a cool idea and I completely understand how emulation works it's not going to be perfect but having something that's almost unplayable is definitely not acceptable so I'm gonna leave this decision up to my viewers leave a comment down below if you want to see me throw a Raspberry Pi 3 in here also if you just want me to wait for a firmware update let me know I think I already know where this is gonna go so I'll start getting things ready really appreciate you guys watching if you could hit that like button and subscribe to the channel and like always thanks for watching\n"