You Can Now Play Commodore 64 Games In VR Thanks To This Awesome Hack

No doubt that by now you’ve seen the gamut of VR headsets. Everything from the rather large offerings like the Oculus Rift and the HTC vive, to the much smaller and lighter, and not to mention cheaper, headsets like the Samsung Gear VR or the ROK7 VR Box 2.0 headset.

These great new pieces of tech let you play in some of the most immersive environments imaginable – riding along with Apollo astronauts on their way to the Moon, riding incredible new roller coasters and even feeling a bit sick to your stomach as you peer over that first drop.

But what are you to do if you love old school games? No, I’m not talking about games from just a few years ago like Skyrim. I mean REALLY old school games – Atari and C64 old school.

Well, if you’re 64jim64, you build your own VR headset display. A true hacker, maybe madman, who decided to set his mind to the task of connecting up his Commodore 64 to an off the shelf $10 VR headset. If you watched the video above, you’ll quickly learn that his VR64 is very capable of playing VR games from his antiquated system.

Right now there’s only a single game that can run on this mod – Streets Defender. For anyone that had a C64, C128 in my case, you’ll know that the games came on 5.25″ floppy disks. Considering that there was never a thought of using the C64 for VR, 64jim64 had to write the game himself. Given that he’s only written a few games, this being the third, what he’s come up with doesn’t look too bad.

What’s most impressive is that when you’re playing with the VR64, the in game characters actually appear to be coming out towards you. According to info over at 64jim64’s blog, it’s able to create the illusion of depth as it presents the beautiful 8-bit pixels in a true stereo 3D environment.

If you’d like your own VR64 to play with, definitely have a go at it. What 64jim64 has created is a fairly simple, albiet tedious, DIY project. The hardest part of this would likely be not only finding a working C64, but rather a working 1541 floppy drive!

The post You Can Now Play Commodore 64 Games In VR Thanks To This Awesome Hack appeared first on Roving Reality.