Hi guys,

Maybe some of you have seen this last weeks a port of Super Mario Bros for C64 being realesed and then some days after his distribution forbiden from Nintendo.
Thankfully we can always download it easily to do it a try and admire this axcellent pice of work.

This is why I decided to try VICE on my PowerBook G4.

My first experience with VICE was difficult beaucause of a bug. To acces menus, using the double finger gesture on trakpad freezes the GUI and the CPU goes to 100%. Using a real mouse with the right button, the bug desaperes.

Unfortunatly, the sound is very crappy and the framerate is too slow.
I tryed it into my G5@2.0Ghz and the max framerate is 18 FPS.

Do you know if it's possible to optimise the settings?

Do you use this emulator or another one?

Thank you for your help.

It should be faster. I used to use VICE on an old PC back in 2002, with no frameskip. A G4 should be able handle it, although the MOS port may be based on SDL and clearly is not very optimised.

Give Frodo a try. It isn't as compatible as VICE (as it's much older) but it was faster. (Edit: I used Frodo on my G3 Pegasos with no problems.)

(Useless fact: Itix's Frodo port for MorphOS is the only C64 emulator on any platform that supported the SID chip on a Catweasel Mk.3).

[ Edited by KennyR 12.05.2019 - 20:57 ]

@ KennyR: very good idea.
I Tried frodo and it works fine.
Thank you very much.

[ Edited by sergius 12.05.2019 - 23:03 ]

Well, Frodo does not support VSP which Super Mario Bros requires for faster scrolling.

[ Editiert durch polluks 12.05.2019 - 23:28 ]

Quote:

I think Vice is somewhat broken on G5 computers. I tried Sam's Journey on it with my G5 and it looked, sounded and played pretty awful.

There are problems with VICE. Especially sound routine is messy. I have G5@2GHz and sound is teared.

Other thing is that the higher version is, the higher requirements are. VICE 3.x is not too playable even on PC's with dual cores and >=2GHz.

Quote:

No, VICE for Windows have support for HardSID/SIDblaster, i'm using it this way (have SIDblaster).

Well, HardSID is a different product by a different maker than the Catweasel, and it's designed only for SID output, and is really quite well supported given it was the first of its kind on the mass market.

The Catweasel was meant mainly for non-IBM style floppy disk drives. Mk.3 had an Amiga joystick port, an Amiga keyboard port, and a SID chip, but the first two are likely to be useless unless you use an Amiga with a Mediator board, Amithlon, or MorphOS, and the last one works only in Frodo in MorphOS. Even finding support for the floppy is now really hard unless you run old Linux kernels.

But anyway, it seems like VICE on MorphOS sucks and needs some attention. It really should be faster.

Hmm.. I haven't used VICE for ages, and I seem to have 2.0 installed on my HD. I now tried Super Mario Bros on it and it runs just fine... full frame rate and sound is OK. This is on a Mac mini 1.5GHz.

Then I tried to download the latest VICE for MorphOS (3.1) and it indeed is very slow and audio is garbled... so it seems that it's gone much worse at some point.

If you don't find any settings that'd make the difference, I'd recommend to try some earlier versions.

Just tested Vice 3.1. on my system (MMini 1.42Ghz) and it is working at full speed with CPU usage below 30%.
For better sound I was select Stereo in Sound settings/Sound output mode (Default is System).
In options menu for video I use Video cache and Video Overlay only.