Sonic the Hedgehog on TheC64 with SNES Style Gamepad

One of the games that I think is a great accomplishment is the direct port of “Sonic the Hedgehog” from the SEGA Master System to the Commodore 64. This was manually converted from Z80 to 6502 assembly by Mr. SID. The game plays great on real hardware with a RAM Expansion Unit or REU. I have personally played this on my C64 with the Turbo Chameleon but what I wanted to do was play this on TheC64 in the living room and take advantage of the save states feature to pick up and play as time permitted.

Although this game will play just fine with TheJoystick, I really wanted to play it on TheC64, an ARM based Commodore 64 reimplementation, with a more modern style controller. Although I grew up on the joystick, it is the gamepad I now seem to prefer. I especially prefer it with platform games like this.

I toyed around with the configuration file and I think I am happy with where it is now

CJM Configuration

The CJM file is set up to automatically pass to the emulation that this needs to be in a PAL Commodore 64 mode with the 512k RAM Expansion Unit. The gamepad configuration sets Joystick 2 with not just the shoulder buttons to jump but also the “X, Y” buttons. I set the “A” and “B” buttons be joystick up For me, the buttons for my thumb to press is how I want to “jump” so the configuration is set as such.

X:64,pal,reu512
J:2*:JU,JD,JL,JR,JF,JF,JF,JF,JF,JF,JF,,,,

Place this CJM in the folder along side the disk image of Sonic the Hedgehog for the Commodore 64 to get this gamepad configuration. Yes, it is incredibly simple and probably not worth the bytes data usage for this post but I wanted to have it someplace.

I also wanted to note that I did this configuration file on TheC64 itself with the X-Windows mod which was incredibly convenient.

Final Thoughts

Once I discovered how I can use the CJM files for configuring the gamepad, I decided to make my gaming experience every so slightly better for TheC64. Is it as authentic as I remember from the days of old? No, I actually think it is improved. The key, as I see it, is to make the CJM files work with TheJoystic or any gamepad. So far, so good!

References

Sonic the Hedgehog (2021) for the Commodore 64
TheC64 on CubicleNate.com
TheC64 X-Windows Mod