Developer(s) VICE Team | Written in C | |
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Initial release 1993; 24 years ago (1993) Stable release 3.0 / December 22, 2016; 3 months ago (2016-12-22) Repository sourceforge.net/p/vice-emu/code/HEAD/tree/ Operating system | ||
The software program VICE, standing for VersatIle Commodore Emulator, is a free and cross platform emulator for Commodore's 8-bit computers, running on Amiga, Unix, MS-DOS, Win32, Mac OS X, OS/2, RISC OS, QNX, GP2X, Dingoo A320, Syllable, and BeOS host machines. VICE is free software, released under the GNU General Public Licence.
It's also available for a variety of platforms: for instance 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.
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 microcomputers. 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 Linux distributions.