Denise C64/Amiga emulator with PAL shader and runAhead

Whenever I need to play my favourite C64 and Amiga games, using emulation, I have always relied on my three favourite emulators which I’m sure you’re used to, or at least heard of. WinUAE for Amiga, VICE or CCS64 for Commodore 64, and I’ve never really looked for anything else, as these all do the job perfectly. While browsing online looking for more News these last couple of days, I noticed the name Denise kept popping up in my rss feed. One emulator that runs C64 and Amiga, that’s unusual, it’s time to take a look.

I grabbed the denise_win64_v2.1.zip and extracted the contents to my emulators folder, and proceeded to load the emulator up. As I suspected there are a lot of settings to play around with for the Amiga emulation. Nothing new to me here, very much like WinUAE, it was pretty easy to set up and point the emulator to a new kickstart rom. I chose good old Kick 1.3 for my testing.

I must say the emulation for Amiga is very good, every .adf I threw at it, loaded first time, sound was great, everything is smooth, no issues. Setting up the Joystick was a bit of a pain though. I use a wireless Xbox controller on my pc and the emulator wouldn’t play ball with the analogue sticks, so I set the controls up on the d-pad instead and then everything was ok. So overall Amiga emulation was good, except one major issue, the mouse. I spent a good amount of time trying to get this to work with no avail.

In WinUAE it’s very easy, you click the emulator window, WinUAE locks your mouse into the window and you use your mouse within the emulator, F12 or clicking the mouse wheel unlocks it out again. Denise won’t let you do this, in fact it just doesn’t work at all, and I couldn’t find a setting anywhere to change this. A big problem, maybe I have missed something obvious somewhere, I have no idea. Maybe the coders behind Denise could drop a comment below to let us know how to sort this, as some games you just can’t play without a mouse click past the intro.

Moving onto the C64 side of things, I really don’t have much to say about this, everything worked, no real issues, well maybe one, the latency when shooting in some games can be a bit laggy, this could do with a tweak in the future, as some games really need that accuracy and timing, but overall C64 emulation is solid.

I would say this emulator still has a few teething issues, but it’s looking to be a good contender against the older well known emulators. I think in the future, this could be a number one choice. Head over to https://sourceforge.net/projects/deniseemu/ and take a look yourself.