C64 games supporting four joysticks

This is a list of all (?) C64 games that support four joysticks. In contrast to the Amiga, the concept of connecting four joysticks to the computer never really took off: until recently, only three games supported such an adaptor. Another problem is that there are no less than three different and incompatible joystick adaptors available.

The first game supporting four joysticks was Starbyte's 1990 tennis game Tie Break. Apparently, only one more game was released supporting the same adaptor: Kingsoft's well-known Bomberman clone Bug Bomber (1992). Not much is known about this first adaptor, it seems to be somewhat of a rarity.

In 1997 the German team Classical Games released their commercial Bomberman clone Bomb Mania which comes bundled with another joystick adaptor. This adaptor is not compatible with the one from Starbyte - probably due to a lack of documentation - and as it acted as a sort of copy protection for the game it was delivered with, it wasn't documented all that good either - actually the printing on the TTL chip inside was removed to stop people from building their own adaptors.

In 1999, members of the scene groups Hitmen and Digital Excess were publishing instructions for building yet another joystick adaptor. Motivated by the lack of information on the previous two offerings, the idea behind this project was that the hardware should be as easy to build as possible - unfortunately, that also means the the adaptor is not compatible with either of its predecessors. Several games supporting this adaptor are listed below, according to rumours a follow-up to Hitmen's game Detonators has been nearly finished.

Actually, there's even a fourth option available: In 1998 Ninja/Dreams published instructions for connecting up to eight SNES joypads to a C64. Might be interesting for people that like joypads, but there are only two games supporting it.

Games

Okay, so here's the list of all games known to support four joysticks. The "Type" column lists the adaptor(s) supported by a game: Classical Games, Digital Excess & Hitmen , Starbyte or Ninja's SNES adaptor.

Name	Genre	Players	Type	Notes
Bomb Mania	Bomberman clone	2-4	C	Buy online
Bug Bomber	Bomberman clone	1-4	S	See below
Garrison	Gauntlet clone	1-4	C,D	Hacked to support 4 players
Grubz (Preview)	Worms clone	2-4	C	Preview only, work in progress
Hockey Mania	Ice hockey	2-4	C	Buy online
International Karate +	Beat'em up	1-3	C,D,N	Hacked to support 3 players
M.U.L.E.	Trading sim	1-4	C	Hacked to support 4 joysticks
Marble Madness	Arcade	1-4	C	Hacked to support 4 players
Pac It	Pacman clone	1-4	C	Buy online
Phong	Four player Pong	2-4	C	phong.zip (14K)
Quadris	Tetris clone	1-4	C	quadris.zip (19K)
Quadtron	Tron clone	2-4	C	quadtron.zip (11K)
Rampage	Arcade	1-3	C,D,N	Hacked to support 3 players
Snakes for Snakes	Tron clone	2-4	C	Snacks_4_Snakes.zip (90K)
Super Off Road	Offroad racing	1-3	C,D	Hacked to support 3 joysticks
Tanks 3000	Tank battles	2-4	C	Buy online
Team Patrol	Racing	2-4	C	Buy online
Tie Break	Tennis	1-4	S
Tour de France	Joystick waggling	2-4	C	Tour_de_France.zip (22K)

Candidates for a conversion

This section is used to list titles that would benefit from being hacked to support the four player adaptor, in the hope that one of the guys patching existing titles might get some inspiration this way.

Name	Genre	Players	Notes
BMX Simulator 2	Bicycle racing	1-4	Being worked on
Bug Bomber	Bomberman clone	1-4	Being worked on
Cheecky Twins 2	Bomberman clone	1-3
Tie Break	Tennis	1-4	Only works with Starbyte adaptor

Schematics

The schematics for the adaptors from Digital Excess/Hitmen and Classical Games are available below. The one you might want to build yourself if you want to play (most of) the games listed above is the Classical Games version.