If you had a Commodore 64 in your youth, or you’re simply curious about the games produced for the system then Gamebase64 is for you.
Gamebase64 is an effort to catalogue every single Commodore 64 game, along with associated media like music, tape or disk covers, adverts and magazine reviews
It’s huge! The latest version is V15 and was released in 2016 holding 25,700 games. The games themselves don’t take up too much data but the artwork, music, and associated material really take up a lot of room. The whole collection is available as 3 ISO files and an artwork zip file. You can find download links to all of those in this thread, but if you don’t want to download them you can browse the collection here (or here) too. You’ll need to download the GameBase frontend to view everything as well as the V15 database files. I use Vice to emulate the Commodore 64.
GameBase itself is a database frontend for Windows that supports multiple databases. Many systems from the Commodore Vic20 to the Amiga or the Speccy and Amstrad CPC range are covered. You can find links to them on the GameBase website as well as many other databases.
I mainly use a Mac so I use Gamebase64 Browser. It’s a very slick frontend but if you search around you’ll find frontends written in a variety of languages for various modern platforms.
Installation was as simple as copying everything out of the ISO files into a directory, installing GameBase64 Browser in the usual way and when first run, pointing it at the directory where I had copied everything else.
Single disk and tape games work perfectly fine but I’ve had trouble with multi-disk games. To play Retrograde I had to manually unzip both disks into a temporary directory and load them in Vice outside of GameBase64 Browser. Not difficult at all but worth remembering when your favourite game asks you to insert disk 2. 🙂
If you’re at all interested in retro computers then GameBase is definitely worth checking out!
As well as other gamebase libraries there’s also Demobase C64 announced here. There’s an improved version linked from here but I haven’t tried either of them yet. I looked through the files however and I did find most of my demos there. 🙂
GameBase64 v17 came out last year and while I installed it in Assembly64 I couldn’t find the database files for the Mac frontend until this morning when I came across this file listing the database files for the different versions.
The V17 database is at http://www.twinbirds.com/gamebase64browser/GBC_v17.sqlitedb.gz and should be copied into the GameBase64 directory.
A torrent of the V17 files can be found here.
Install 7zip to unzip the files found in the torrent. The files are huge and unzip and macOS archiver doesn’t support zip files larger than 4GB.
Gamebase64 v18 came out a few days ago. There’s a mega link of the games here. The sqlite db list in the URL above has been updated with a new one.
Download link for Gamebase64 v18 on archive.org: https://archive.org/download/gbc-v18
sqlite db file: http://www.twinbirds.com/gamebase64browser/GBC_v18.sqlitedb.gz