The Games
Since the unit is just a joystick with a few extra buttons, the games all had to be playable this way. This limits the games that the manufacturers could included. Not to worry though there is still lots of games to play and some great classics.
There are actually 30 games included with the Joystick but some of those games are only part of an originally larger game. It is kind of a shame as you would think they could have found a few full version games to use instead. The game selection does lean towards the sports side but includes a number of good adventure, platform and shooter games. The majority of games have been licensed from Epyx and Hewson, two of the premier 3rd party developers for the Commodore 64 in the day. It would have been nice to see a wider cross section of games and manufacturers represented in the unit. Although it is possible that the Epyx and Hewson licenses are owned by the same group thus the game selection. It does however contain more games than most comparable game systems do.
The 30 games included within the joystick are:
Impossible Mission, Impossible Mission 2, Jumpman Junior, Cyberdyne Warrior, Cybernoid, Cybernoid II Paradroid, Pitstop, Pitstop 2, Gateway to Asphai, Tower Topler, Uridium, Eliminator, Surfing, Exolon, Firelord, Flying Disk, Summer Games, Super Cycle, Silicon Warrior, Ranarama, Winter Games, Speedball, Zynaps, World Karate Championship A, World Karate Championship B, Bull Riding, Sumo Wrestling, Championship Wrestling and Sword of Fargoal.
It should be noted that a few games Bull Riding and Sumo Wrestling are events from World Games, Flying Disk and Surfing are events from California Games and World Karate Championship A and B are basically the same game.
The Hardware
The outer shell of the Commodore 64 Plug 'n’ Play is modeled after the Competition PRO 5000 joystick. A popular joystick used by many for playing games on the original Commodore 64. It is a Ball top joystick with two fire buttons and 4 extra buttons that act as extra keys needed by a few games since there is no keyboard for input. There is also a power switch and a reset button. It fit well into your hand and works well for playing the included games.
The chip in the Commodore 64 Plug 'n’ Play unit is unique and was designed specifically
for it. The chip is a complete Commodore 64 including the VIC and SID chips and the
CIA's providing complete video, sound and drive control (full 1541 emulation). Being
a true Commodore 64 just reduced to a single chip allows for full use of all the
Commodore 64 gaming modes, sprite multiplexors, characters, border removal, hi-
This C64 on a chip uses an enhanced 6510 chip that increased the processing speed over the original Commodore 64. It also has a few megabytes of ROM added for holding the game programs and basic. This method allows for near instant loading and execution of the game programs. Much better than waiting for a Floppy Disk or worse a tape to load the game. Being a real computer on a chip you can wire almost any device you want to it. This includes drive interfaces, keyboards and joysticks to name a few. There is some information on the Internet about how to hack these controllers to make them into a functional Commodore 64 computer.
Although it is a nice unit it is not as solidly constructed as I would have liked. It will not take much abuse so be careful with it.
Easter Egg (DON’T READ if you want to find out for your self)
If you wiggle the joystick left and right very quickly after you turn the stick on, during the startup. If you get it right you will see an alternate menu that contains several small games and BASIC. Basic uses the joystick as a virtual keyboard so you can do just about anything.
Commodore 64 DTV 30-
Well, this little gem went to market and no one was there. When you consider how popular the Commodore 64 computer was you wonder why this TV device didn’t get much attention. I suspect failures in marketing and distribution, I didn’t know it existed until it didn’t, found one and loving it.
The Original
While the Commodore 64 was a fairly powerful and versatile computer when it came out in 1982 and perhaps the best selling home computer of all time. The C64 as it was know was often used as a glorified game console rather than for doing any programming or real work. It had all sorts of extras you could get like tape drives, hard drives, printer, Joysticks and other devices. It was produced for ten years and then disappeared into history.
The Setup
The Commodore 64 30-
The games are not replicas of the original or re-
