VICE

The software program VICE, standing for VersatIle Commodore Emulator, is a free and cross platform emulator for Commodore's 8-bit computers. It runs on Linux, Amiga, Unix, MS-DOS, Win32, Mac OS X, OS/2, RISC OS, QNX, GP2X, Pandora (console), Dingoo A320, Syllable, and BeOS host machines. VICE is free software, released under the GNU General Public Licence.

This article is about the software emulator. For the magazine, see Vice (magazine). For other uses, see Vice (disambiguation).
VICE
VICE emulating Commodore 64
Developer(s)VICE Team
Initial release1993 (1993)
Stable release
3.5 / December 24, 2020 (2020-12-24)[1]
Repository
Written inC
Operating systemMicrosoft Windows, macOS, Linux, MS-DOS, RISC OS, BeOS, QNX, OS/2, Solaris, SunOS, OpenServer, AmigaOS, Dingoo, Syllable Desktop, MiNT, MINIX 3
Available inEnglish, Danish, German, French, Hungarian, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Swedish, Turkish
TypeEmulator
LicenseGNU GPLv2[2]
Websitevice-emu.sourceforge.net

VICE for Microsoft Windows (Win32) is known as WinVICE, the OS/2 variant is called Vice/2, and the emulator running on BeOS is called BeVICE.

History

Development of VICE began in 1993 by a Finnish programmer Jarkko Sonninen, who was the founder of the project. Sonninen retired from the project in 1994.[3]

As of version 2.1, released December 19, 2008, VICE emulates the Commodore 64, the C128, the VIC-20, the Plus/4, the C64 Direct-to-TV (with its additional video modes) and all the PET models including the CBM-II but excluding the 'non-standard' features of the SuperPET 9000. WinVICE supports digital joysticks via a parallel port driver, and, with a CatWeasel PCI card, is planned to perform hardware SID playback (requires optional SID chip installed in socket).

As of 2004, VICE was one of the most widely used emulators of the Commodore 8-bit personal computers.[4] It is also one of the few usable Commodore emulators to exist on free *NIX platforms, and one of the first to be distributed under GNU GPL. It is available for most GNU/Linux and BSD distributions. As of version 3.4, support has been terminated for Syllable Desktop, SCO, QNX4, QNX6, SGI, AIX, OpenStep/NextStep/ Rhapsody, and Solaris/OpenIndiana, as well as remaining traces of support for Minix, NeXT, SKYOS, UNIXWARE, and Sortix, due to lack of staff. As of version 3.5 explicit support for OS/2 and AmigaOS has been terminated due to the transition to Gtk3 UI.

Bibliography
  • Simon Carless, Gaming hacks, O'Reilly Media, 2004, ISBN 0-596-00714-0, pp. 5–8
  • Jason Kroll, Commodore 64 Game Emulation, Linux Journal, Issue 72, April 2000

See also

References
  1. "VICE - the Versatile Commodore Emulator". Retrieved 25 December 2020 – via SourceForge.
  2. VICE - the Versatile Commodore Emulator vice-emu.sourceforge.net
  3. VICE - Acknowledgments: http://vice-emu.sourceforge.net/vice_16.html
  4. Carless, p. 5
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