Yesterday, on Thursday February 15th, 2018, I scored a great find on eBay. I won the UK floppy disk album version of the classic game Up 'n Down for Commodore 64. I already had a boxed C64 US cartridge release, but the UK disk was missing. Many C64 collectors go crazy about the UK album disk releases and this game was no exception: My winning bid was a whopping 137,55 GBP (i.e. approximately 154€) plus 10 GBP for shipping. So it was not exactly cheap, because many C64 fans were after the game.
The silly thing is that I told my friend before bidding that I am going to make my last-minute maximum bid so high that only a network outage can prevent me from winning the auction. So what happened? Three minutes before the auction ended, I tried to reload the eBay auction page only to find out that my iPad Safari had indeed gone bonkers, it would not reload the page! Opening a new tab would not work either!
I panicked big time, abandoned the iPad, yelled in despair, and rushed towards a laptop! I managed to login to eBay only one minute before the auction would end! Holy fuck, I was a nervous wreck, shaking all over and quickly placed my bid! I won't tell you how much it was, but I was confident that I would win, and, as I said, I did manage to get the damn game! But I almost missed the whole auction, it was nearly a disaster!
This UK disk release is indeed very rare. I don't remember ever seeing it on eBay although I am sure these items have been sold earlier.
In my opinion Up 'n Down has much going for it: it is a great game, it has cool cover art and it is rare, too. It is no wonder many collectors want it so bad. Yes, the music is repetitive and can get boring, but that is probably the only tiny flaw in this fantastic game. I consider myself quite lucky to have won it.
According to a Wikipedia article
Up'n Down is a video game developed and published by Sega. It was first released in 1983 as an arcade game, then later ported to the Atari 2600, ColecoVision, Atari 8-bit family, and Commodore 64. In Up'n Down the player drives a car forward and backward along a branching, vertically scrolling track, collecting flags and jumping on other cars to destroy them.
On this page I will show you different versions, provide them for you to download and play, and show you how to start them using different emulators on Fedora Linux. All for free, no ads, no click-whoring, no bullshitting you around different lame sites to download ROMs. This is just a helping hand to gamers who need some guidance with emulators.
Without further delay, here are five different Up 'n Down versions for you to download. Sorry, they are all named upndown.zip for consistency, so please make sure to put them inside appropriate subdirectories to keep track of them. Or if you want only one, then it will not matter.
MAME seems to have Atari 2600 system ROMs built-in, so you won't have to download them separately, but Colecovision system ROM is something you do need to download. It is here for you:
Here are some screenshots from my Fedora Linux experiments with emulators today.
The original arcade, coin-op version. This is arguably the coolest looking version of these! It is simply stunningly beautiful:
Atari 2600. This is, without doubt, the most terrible port, but remember that Atari 2600 is a very primitive machine. With that kind of poor hardware, the programmer who created this did what he could, but the end result is not pretty:
Atari 8bit version running on atari800 emulator:
Atari 8bit version running on atari++ emulator:
Colecovision version running on ColEm emulator:
Colecovision version running on MAME:
Commodore 64 version running on VICE:
Here are instructions for getting the games running.
cp -iv upndown.zip /usr/share/mame/roms/
mame -window upndown
cp -iv upndown.zip /usr/share/mame/roms/a2600
mame a2600 -window -cart /usr/share/mame/roms/a2600/upndown.zip
unzip upndown.zip
atari++ -acceptlicence true -joystick.0.port AnalogJoystick.0 -cartpath /your/path/to/UpNDown.bin -carttype 16k
unzip upndown.zip
atari800 -stretch 2 -cart /your/path/to/UpNDown.bin
Choose 16k cartridge in the atari800 menu.
unzip upndown.zip
colem /your/path/to/upndown.col
I am not sure whether Unix ColEm supports joysticks, I played only using keyboard.
mkdir /usr/share/mame/roms/coleco
cp -iv coleco_rom.zip /usr/share/mame/roms/coleco
cd /usr/share/mame/roms/coleco
unzip coleco_rom.zip
rm coleco_rom.zip
cp -iv upndown.zip /usr/share/mame/roms/coleco
mame coleco -window -cart /usr/share/mame/roms/coleco/upndown.zip
x64sc /your/path/to/upndown.zip
Crackers have modified this C64 version. To end their intro, press SPACE. To skip reading instructions, press ESC, you may have to do it twice, I just cannot remember. Then press SPACE. Answer N for "NO" to all questions about cheating. Use joystick in port 2, press button to start the game. Enjoy, it is a great version!
Based on these instructions for Up 'n Down, hopefully you will be able to run emulators to play other games too!
It is not difficult. I use a Logitech Rumblepad 2 USB controller to play retrogames and it works great!