The Great Commodore Treasure Hunt
Three Projects Bringing Order to 40 Years of Digital Chaos. Master Bookmark Computer, D64 Cataloger and D64 Hunter attack three different sides of the same wonderfully ridiculous problem: there is now so much preserved Commodore software that finding what you actually want can be harder than preserving it in the first place.
There was a time when owning a serious Commodore software collection meant having a few boxes of floppy disks, a handwritten index and at least one disk labelled something spectacularly unhelpful like “STUFF 3”. Forty years later, the problem has changed. We won. The software survived. In fact, rather a lot of it survived.
Games, utilities, demos, applications, BBS software, programming tools, educational packages, home-made disks, obscure public-domain releases and things whose original purpose has probably not been understood since 1989 are scattered across FTP archives, preservation projects, personal collections and specialist websites. The problem today isn’t necessarily getting Commodore software. It’s finding the bloody thing again.
And that is where three interesting projects — Master Bookmark Computer, D64 Cataloger and D64 Hunter — suddenly fit together rather nicely. They aren’t three components of one system, nor does there appear to be a shared backend or formal technical integration between them. Instead, think of them as three stages of the same treasure hunt.
Master Bookmark Computer tells you where to look. D64 Hunter searches an enormous public collection. D64 Cataloger searches the enormous collection you’ve already accumulated yourself. And if you’ve spent years collecting Commodore files, that distinction matters.
First Stop: Master Bookmark Computer
The modern web is extraordinarily good at serving you whatever an algorithm thinks you ought to be interested in this week. It is considerably less good at remembering the homepage of a chap who wrote an excellent Commodore utility in 1998. That’s why Master Bookmark Computer immediately feels useful.
Rather than attempting to become another all-purpose retrocomputing portal, it acts more like a carefully assembled directory of the surviving retro web. Its Commodore section currently contains 472 bookmarks, divided into categories covering forums, stores, blogs, software sources, programming, hardware, emulators, GitHub projects, online tools, archives, podcasts and more. The wider site now also covers Amiga, Atari, classic Macintosh, DOS, OS/2 and several generations of Windows. The important word here is directory.
You don’t visit Master Bookmark because it contains every Commodore program ever created. You visit because somebody has already done the tedious job of finding the places that might contain it. Among its recently added Commodore resources are — conveniently enough — D64 Cataloger and D64 Hunter. That turns Master Bookmark into the front desk of our little digital archaeology expedition.
Visit Master Bookmark Computer
Then Things Get Serious: D64 Hunter
Click through to D64 Hunter and the numbers become slightly absurd. At the time of writing, its database reports 1,167,744 disk and media images containing more than 10.1 million indexed files. Almost 949,000 of those images are D64 files alone. Yes. More than a million images. This is no longer a software collection. This is geological strata.
D64 Hunter’s creator introduced the project publicly in August 2026 as the result of material collected from various sources over roughly twenty years. The archive can be searched, its images downloaded, and users can also upload material. More interestingly, disks and the files within them are fingerprinted so related images, duplicates and potentially damaged copies can be identified.
The front page lets you search Commodore filenames using familiar * and ? wildcards, while filtering by format or platform. Its collection isn’t restricted to the Commodore 64 either: filters currently cover C64, VIC-20, C128, C16/Plus/4 and PET/CBM systems. Supported material includes D64, D71, D80, D81, D82, G64, CRT, TAP, ROM, BIN and SID-related formats.
That’s important because plenty of genuinely interesting Commodore software is buried inside compilation disks whose host filename tells you almost nothing. You might have: UTILITIES_0047.D64. Inside it might be the program you’ve been trying to remember for twenty years. Searching only the disk-image filename won’t help you. Searching its internal Commodore directory might. That is the real magic.
D64 Hunter also contains several standalone tools that push it beyond being merely an archive. There’s a NIB-to-G64 converter for preserving low-level disk structures, a T64-to-D64 converter, a character-set finder capable of locating embedded C64 fonts, and perhaps most intriguingly an Unblitz tool that attempts to recover readable BASIC from programs compiled using Blitz!/Austro-Speed.
It’s the sort of site where you open one tab intending to look for a utility and surface two hours later investigating a homemade telecommunications disk from 1987.
But What About the Mountain on Your Hard Drive?
Here’s where the story becomes interesting. Because after visiting archives like D64 Hunter for long enough, many Commodore enthusiasts eventually develop another problem. Their own archive. Maybe you’ve downloaded TOSEC collections. Then GameBase. Then some FTP mirrors. Then someone’s old BBS archive. Then a hard drive image. Then another collection because you couldn’t remember whether you already had it.
Eventually you possess 20,000, 40,000 or 100,000 disk images and discover the digital equivalent of owning a warehouse where none of the boxes have labels. Enter D64 Cataloger.
Its developer describes the problem perfectly: imagine trying to remember which of 40,000 disk images contains a particular PRG you vaguely remember from 1987. D64 Cataloger exists specifically to answer that question. Unlike D64 Hunter, this isn’t primarily a giant public archive. It is a tool for cataloguing your archive.
Give its Python scanner a directory tree and it walks through the collection, reads supported images, extracts their internal directories and stores the results in an SQLite database. Search is handled using SQLite’s FTS5 full-text search engine, with results ranked for relevance. And despite the name, D64 is only the beginning.
The current version understands D64, D71, D80, D81 and D82 disks, T64 and TAP tapes, PRG files and CRT cartridges. It even ventures into the 16-bit world by cataloguing Amiga ADF and compressed ADZ floppy images, including OFS/FFS directory trees. For each Commodore disk file it can preserve details including the PETSCII filename, an ASCII-transliterated searchable version, file type, block count, locked or splat status and track/sector information where applicable. Rescanning a massive collection doesn’t necessarily mean starting again either. Images whose size and modification time haven’t changed are skipped during incremental scans.
There’s a command-line interface for people who enjoy feeling powerful and a PureBasic GUI for people who have better things to do with their afternoon. The graphical version runs on Windows, macOS and Linux and can search both image names and filenames stored inside those images. Double-clicking a result takes you back to the corresponding image in your file manager.
Crucially, D64 Cataloger isn’t attempting to tell you that your disk is the officially recognised release of X from preservation set Y. The developer has explicitly described its purpose as cataloguing your own files rather than identifying them against TOSEC DATs or similar external databases. It’s your private librarian.
So How Do the Three Fit Together?
This is where these otherwise independent projects become much more interesting as a group. Imagine you’re trying to find some obscure C64 program called Super Widget Maker that you remember using around 1989. You don’t remember who wrote it. You don’t remember which disk it came on. You aren’t even entirely certain that Super Widget Maker was its actual name.
Step one: find the surviving Commodore world.
Master Bookmark Computer gives you a curated map. Instead of throwing increasingly desperate phrases into Google, you can browse specialist Commodore archives, software repositories, databases and tools that still exist.
Step two: search the collective attic.
D64 Hunter gives you access to an enormous public corpus. You aren’t just looking through filenames of downloaded ZIP archives. You’re searching a database constructed from more than ten million files living inside more than a million preserved images. That dramatically increases the chances of discovering something obscure.
Step three: search your own attic.
Maybe you already downloaded the program fifteen years ago. D64 Cataloger indexes the pile sitting on your NAS, external hard drive or workstation and turns it from an incomprehensible folder tree into a searchable database. The three projects therefore solve three different layers of essentially the same problem:
- Where are the good retrocomputing resources? Master Bookmark.
- Does the wider community have this software? D64 Hunter.
- Do I already have this software somewhere? D64 Cataloger.
That’s the relationship. Not shared code. Not competing implementations. A surprisingly sensible ecosystem.
Preservation Has Entered Its Second Phase
There’s a larger point here. For decades, retrocomputing preservation concentrated on copying things before the original media died. That work remains important, particularly with ageing magnetic disks and tapes, but we’re increasingly entering another stage of preservation. Indexing. A million disk images sitting anonymously on a server is technically an archive. A million disk images whose contents can be searched is a library. That’s a substantial difference. And tools such as D64 Cataloger demonstrate that the same principle applies to personal collections.
Anybody who has spent twenty years downloading retro software knows the absurdity of discovering a fascinating archive and then realising, halfway through downloading it, that there’s a suspiciously similar 14GB directory already sitting on another hard drive. Collecting is easy. Organisation is where civilisation begins.
The Verdict
None of these projects is particularly glamorous. That’s precisely why they’re valuable. Master Bookmark Computer preserves the pathways into an increasingly fragmented retro web. D64 Hunter tackles the astonishing volume of Commodore software already preserved and makes the contents searchable rather than merely downloadable. D64 Cataloger takes the same fundamental problem and turns its attention inward, giving enthusiasts a practical way to interrogate their own collections without opening 40,000 disk images individually.
Together they demonstrate something encouraging about the modern Commodore community. The challenge is no longer simply keeping old software alive. We now have enough surviving material that we’re building better ways to navigate it. And somewhere inside those million-plus images, underneath forty years of games, demos, utilities, BBS disks, half-finished BASIC programs and filenames that made perfect sense to somebody in 1986, is probably the exact program you’ve been trying to remember. The hunt just became considerably easier.