VICE
Emulator for Commodore's 8-bit computers
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, macOS, OS/2, RISC OS, QNX, GP2X, Pandora, Dingoo A320, Syllable, and BeOS host machines. VICE is free software, released under the GNU General Public License since 2004.
VICE for Microsoft Windows (Win32) prior to v3.3 were known as WinVICE, the OS/2 variant is called Vice/2, and the emulator running on BeOS is called BeVICE.
01History
The development of VICE began in 1993 by Finnish programmer Jarkko Sonninen, who was the founder of the project. Sonninen retired from the project in 1994.
VICE 2.1, released on December 19, 2008, emulates the Commodore 64, Commodore 128, Commodore VIC-20, Commodore Plus/4, C64 Direct-to-TV (with its additional video modes) and all the Commodore 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. It is also one of the few usable Commodore emulators to exist on free Unix-based platforms, including most Linux and BSD distributions.
VICE 3.4 drops support for Syllable Desktop, SCO, QNX, SGI, AIX, OPENSTEP/NeXTSTEP/Rhapsody, and Solaris/OpenIndiana, as well as remaining traces of support for Minix, SkyOS, UNIXWARE, and Sortix, due to lack of staff.
VICE 3.5 drops explicit support for OS/2 and AmigaOS, due to the transition to GTK3 UI.
In December 2022, the VICE emulator was used as an inspiration for an Apple Macintosh emulator powered by a Raspberry Pi.
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “VICE”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
Images, from Wikimedia Commons:
- Vice-c64.png by The original uploader was DASHBot at English Wikipedia., Public domain
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