@jamrom2 Yes Space Taxi was definitely the biggest jump to nostalgia for me with the C64. I installed lr-vice from source. It's a bit clunky but ultimately I got it to work. Thank you for your suggestion. Load time was about 2 minutes. Had to hit select/coin to bring up the virtual keyboard just to get past the cheat menu. Then I was finally able to use the joystick.

Thanks again for your help!