Now that I have connected the Turbo Chameleon V2 to a dedicated Benq BL702A monitor and got the settings the way I like them, I’m really ready for some of the longer games that I want to play, like Sam’s Journey and Caren and the Tangled Tentacles. Although I have the version of Caren that came with the C64 Visual Compendium, I want to play the 2018 Thank You Edition. And that’s a crt file. As for Sam’s Journey, I rather play the crt version instead of the disk version that came in the box (I used the same crt file of Sam’s Journey that I used with the Easy Flash 3; the cracked version).

I had trouble saving the games, but with some help I managed to do this via the file browser and pressing F4. You than can select the slot in which you can save the image. It seems like you’re not able to write over a particular file, so eventually you’ll get a long list of “savegames”. I’ll probably want to put them in a separate folder. Now I just need to remember doing this every time I want to save the game. As with most things retro, nothing is as easy as you think. In this case the Chameleon cannot wholly replace the Easy Flash 3’s functionality, but the Chameleons vga output is such a good feature for me that I cannot go back to using the Easy Flash 3 with another monitor. And sadly you cannot have both at the same time.

Playing Caren brings me to another benefit of the Chameleon: it’s dual SID emulation. I have an old SID fitted inside my C64 and the game doesn’t sound good with it. The game recommends the newer version, but I would say that it is actually required, the music is that bad with the old chip. And while the emulation doesn’t sound very good compared to an actual SID, it’s passable for now. I’ll probably want to look into a hardware dual SID solution like the SIDFX sometime.

To round things off for now, I’ll mention that I also played a bit of Zombie Calavera and a Dizzy game. The zombie game looks very nice, but I didn’t like playing it very much. The Dizzy game was cool. I only ever played (and completed) Magicland Dizzy on the Amiga 500 and I think I want to play through a Dizzy game on the C64 as well at one time.