📰 New article from Retro Handhelds
C64-Live Wants to Take Commodore 64 Multiplayer Online, No Setup Required
https://retrohandhelds.gg/c64-live-wants-to-take-commodore-64-multiplayer-online-no-setup-required/
Remember those glory days of sitting shoulder-to-shoulder on a beanbag chair, fighting over the same joystick? It was great, but it required your friends to actually be in the same room.
Enter C64-Live, a new platform from developer Andrew Hayes that’s bringing the Commodore 64 into the modern era of streaming. While browser-based emulation has been around for a while, it’s usually a lonely experience. C64-Live changes the math by using a “shared machine” approach. Instead of two people running separate emulators and hoping they stay in sync, one person hosts a session on a server, and everyone else jumps into that same virtual machine to play or spectate.
The magic here is the lack of friction:
- No installs required: Just a browser and a link.
- True multiplayer: Players interact on the exact same emulated hardware.
- Massive library support: It works with cartridges, disks, and snapshots.
Hayes’s goal is to bring C64 multiplayer “to the masses,” making it possible to challenge a friend halfway across the world without needing a degree in network engineering. For a console that’s well over four decades old, this is a pretty slick way to keep the nostalgia alive.