Posts Tagged ‘vice emulator’

VICE PSP version 2.1.1 released

Saturday, May 23rd, 2009

VICE PSP is now out. The sound lag seems to be fixed; however there are some issues: for one, the FPS counter sometimes reports incorrect data after frame skipping goes into effect (showing 4 FPS, when the emulator’s actually rendering at 50), and annoying stuttering noise while frames are being skipped.

I would like the sound engine to be more polished prior to release, but I’ve only had a few hours to work in the last two weeks (not likely to improve any time soon), and I feel like it’s in a suitable enough state.

VICE is a series of Commodore emulators; for now, I’ve only ported the C64 emulator. I’ve wanted to port a C64 emulator for a while now; as a fan of chiptunes/demoscene music (I recommend Kohina, by the way), I’m familiar with the popular SID chip that gave talented musicians like Martin Galway, Rob Hubbard and Ben Daglish an outlet to produce some of the most brilliant sets of bleeps and bloops to grace one’s ears.

Now it’s almost 4 AM, and I should probably turn in.

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Posted in Release, VICE | 19 Comments »

VICE PSP status

Tuesday, May 12th, 2009

VICE PSP is largely complete; I say “largely,” because the main thing holding it back at the moment is intermittent sound lag.

What is definitely going to be in the release:

  • The usual features present in my other computer emulator ports: virtual keyboard, state autoloading, per-game configurable input, peripheral indicators, state saving/loading
  • Support for tape images, disk images, cartridges. Each can be “inserted”, “ejected”, and auto-run (by which I mean that a specific program on tape/disk can be automatically run) separately
  • Several other things that are a side-effect of being a port of VICE, so to speak :)

The sound lag issue presents itself when emulator begins to skip frames – sound works perfectly (as far as VICE is concerned, anyway) otherwise. It would be fairly safe to say that once this is fixed, a release is imminent.

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Posted in Update, VICE | 2 Comments »

Corrections, clarifications

Friday, April 24th, 2009

I realized my description from the last post wasn’t entirely correct, the emulator isn’t actually new per se, it’s just new vis-a-vis those that I’ve already released. Most everyone guessed correctly that it was a Commodore 64 emulator – it’s VICE, to be exact. I realize a port of VICE already exists (called PSPVICE), but as I mentioned before, I port software because I enjoy doing it, not necessarily because it’s needed :)

To answer some of the questions that are already coming in, yes it will have a virtual keyboard (it’d be pretty stupid to have a computer emulator without some form of one), and yes, it does support CRT files. VICE PSP is based on the latest version of VICE, 2.1.

The amusing part of this is that VICE PSP would have probably been released half a year ago, if it wasn’t for a misinterpretation of its performance, on my part. Due to a variety of factors, I was getting what seemed like surprisingly poor performance from the emulator; work on it was shelved for months, until I decided to take another look.

I still don’t have a definite release date, but work is progressing well, and a release shouldn’t be that far off.

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Posted in Update, VICE | 4 Comments »