New 3DS again TT

 

This is really exciting stuff; I grew up with the C64 but never had a 128, this seems like the perfect time to jump on board.

I don't have any 128 software yet, so I tried loading up a few C64 games since I recall the 128 was backward-compatible, but they all seem to crash on a blocky green screen. Is there anything I can do on my end about that, or is that a non-starter?

Regardless, thanks so much for making this. Off to check out what 128 games were good!

 

Aha! Yep, this does the trick. Zeropaige's Super Mario Bros. C64 port correctly identifies the system as a C128. Thank you!

 

Been reading about the C128 a bit more and just found another tidbit: you can switch to C64 mode at any time from the BASIC shell by typing "GO64".

EDIT: I figured I should expand on why anybody would use a Commodore 128 emulator to play Commodore 64 games in backward-compatibility mode when there's already a perfectly good Commodore 64 emulator. The answer is pretty simple: both systems use 6502-based CPUs, but while the C64's is clocked at 1MHz, the C128 has a variable clockspeed that can run at 1MHz or, for C128 and C128-enhanced games, 2MHz. Because of this, there are several C64 games which take advantage of the bump to the 128's hardware to run better:

The disk for Qix had a normal C64 version on side A, and a C128-enhanced version on side B. Ultima V has no music on the C64, but play it in C64 mode on a C128 and it uses the extra processing time to have music playing throughout the game. This also extends to homebrew, like Zeropaige's Super Mario Bros. port, which runs pretty poorly on a stock C64 but can be enhanced by CPU addons or, drumroll, the C128. There's still some slowdown, but it's really night and day.