Lallafa's Blog » VICE on Mac

What I’ve done lately…

lallafa — Sun, 05 Jun 2011 17:30:59 +0000

So many month passed by and no update here… I wasn’t lazy (at least not all the time and so I’ll give you a short summary what retro projects I’ve been involved with lately:

DiskFreeezerX – My pet project that aims to build a standalone disk capture device… Should come very handy for partys or meeting people that don’t want to leave their precious disks… Take the device with you, slip in a disk, press a button and some time later you have a shiny exact clone of the disk on your SD card… That’s the goal!
The current state here is: The device is built and functional as a prototype and as a first Rev A PCB… See my shiny new dfx hardware page for all the glory details and lots of photos…
MacVICE – Not much own contribs done here lately. But always following the flow of new features and busy building current snapshots. And before I forget it: With MagerValp’s help I finally fixed the dreaded “black-screen” display problem when the fine blended display is enabled… So enjoy temporal filtering with no more black outs!
PUAE – I am really happy that GnoStiC is now bringing together the current WinUAE and the already dated E-UAE code base to create finally a greate Amiga emualator for all *nix, Linux and Mac users… I really appreciate that and help by submitting small patches. I’ve created my own little fork/clone of the repository at GitHub: You can check this out if you want to have a look what I am patching lately: PUAE/cnvogelg
amitools – Another little crazy project started by me. Its a python library that allows you to read and parse Amiga’s Hunk-based binary format. With all the memory on the good ol’ times fading away and with UAE refreshing my old desire for the Amiga I wrote this lib to refresh and to store the old knowledge in readable python code. Currently, there is not much docs there. But a real hacker will find his/her way… I wrote a small sample that scans your harddrive for amiga files (even in adf, lha containers) and tries to parse the exe with the lib… The lib got a new push with the introduction of the AROS m68k Port (yay!!).. This port uses a decent gcc compiler to generate m68k-elf binaries. So I added ELF parsing to amitools. The only thing still missing is now the converter elf to hunk and back again in python (similar to elf2hunk)…

That’s it! See you soon with more updates…

MacVICE News: Introducing IO Tree

lallafa — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 12:37:44 +0000

While the last added debugging features to MacVICE are all well-known and mostly ported from WinVICE this one is a new and currently mac-only debugging feature: The IO Tree. “What’s this?”, you might ask.

The IO Tree is actually an anotated dump of the memory-mapped IO registers from your beloved cbm platform. All is packed into a GUI Tree to make it hierarchical and let you control the vast amount of information that is kept there. But IO Tree is not only a register dump with descriptions, it also allows to combine and format the register values to make most sense and to reflect the actual function they represent. So the IO Tree can combine LO-/HI-Addr registers to show a 16 Bit address, can mask out a bit flag and show its state, maps a masked value set to a set of string descriptions or even do very special things like decoding VIC II color values…

The nice thing about the IO Tree is, that it is actually not stored in the MacVICE binary but in a text PList called IOTree.plist. This allows to extend the tree with new custom registers for every user. Currently, I have typed in all VIC II, SID, CIA 1, CIA 2 and 6510 On-Chip registers right out of AYY64 (Thanks Ninja/The Dreams for this great resource!). If you find errors or have something to add then drop me a comment… Currently the syntax of the plist is not documented but simply have a look at the existing tree and you’ll find out how it works…

If you want to try out IO Tree then have a look at the latest MacVICE snapshot (at least revision 23154 is required). While waiting for its upload/download enjoy a screenshot:

MacVICE News: New Debug Windows

lallafa — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 12:03:50 +0000

I am currently working on extending MacVICE with some fancy debugging features. Users of WinVICE already know the memory, register and disassemlby windows that exist besides the monitor view.

I adopted all of these window types with a slight make-it-the-mac-way style attached My debug windows are tied to the main or drive CPU and need no switching. Currently, only the CPU windows are available.

The windows are available in the current MacVICE snapshots:

I hope you like them…

BTW: If you don’t find this feature have a look in the “Window/Debugger Windows” menu

MacVICE on Twitter

lallafa — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 10:36:59 +0000

I always searched for an elegant (i.e. automatic and scriptable ) way for announcing freshly compiled VICE snapshots. Now with the emerging hype of twitter I tried this out and with TTYtter it was easily integrated into my build scripts…

So follow me on macvice @ twitter to get the latest updates on freshly build MacVICE versions…

doremac.com online!

lallafa — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 17:52:18 +0000

After thinkcommodore.com finally shut down its business, it was a sad time for Mac + Commodore fans without having a forum to discuss. Now the wait is over: a new site hit the ground: doremac.com. The site has a forum with strong focus on Commodore computing done by Mac users. Starting from data transfer connection issues to CBM emulators on the Mac you can find everything there. Head over and check it out!

Grasstust, the site maintainer, was kind enough to add a MacVICE Forum Thread. So all MacVICE related stuff including bug fixes and user support can be discussed there.

VICE and VICEplus Leopard fix

lallafa — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 16:27:31 +0000

Unfortunately, the new MacOS X 10.5 (Leopard) does not run the release binaries of VICE 1.22 and VICEplus 1.0 anymore.

Some debugging revealed three issues:

The X11.app startup has greatly simplified and does not need open-x11 (which by the way does not exist any more) to determine a valid DISPLAY value. Now MacOS X already defines a valid DISPLAY that automatically launches the X11 server. This needed a minor modification to the VICE launch scripts.
A really nasty bug in the CoreAudio sound driver now crashes the application. The bug existed for a long time but was never discovered since previous versions of MacOS X simply tolerated the wrong API call. Now Leopard is more picky and simply crashes. A small fix in the audio driver fixes this problem.
Finally, Apple updated the autoconf build tools and thus the build files needed minor modifications. Additionally, /bin/sh now seems to point to a real sh and since some scripts require /bin/bash they need to be changed to call the right shell.

I fixed these issues and now VICE and VICEplus run on Leopard, too. The fix is already applied to the current development versions of both branches.

For your convenience I also recompiled the current version with the patch applied:

Project State Update

lallafa — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 15:41:51 +0000

This post summarizes the state of the Projects I am currently involved in:

VICE: Cocoa Port is progressing well. Core already finished.
DiskImagery64: Almost no time lately. Moved to SF.net
OpenCBM: Joined development to support Mac port

VICE Cocoa Port

During the spare time of almost half an year, I integrated the VICE Mac Cocoa Port that was written by Michael Klein into the current official code base. Ok, integration itself was not the main effort, I also changed some core features: The port is now fully multi-threaded and uses Cocoa’s distributed objects approach to handle the synchronization across threads. The emulated machine runs in one thread and the other one displays the virtual viewport, handles user input and all other UI elements. With this approach no UI interaction (i.e. dialog, menu) blocks the emulation.

Another quite big change to Michael’s port is found in the UI: Michael used the menu-based UI of the X11 port where each setting of the emulator is represented in a single menu entry. This leads to very large and deep menus that are not very usable IMHO. So I had a look at other VICE ports and found that the win port is very confortable to use. There the most common settings are found in a short menu and all other settings are embedded into dialogs. I wanted this kind of dialog-based UI for Macs, too and started this new approach. Dialogs are easily created with the Interface Builder of Apple’s DevKit and so I started to integrate all UI elements with this elegant tool. Currently, I finished the menu bar UI for the x64 emulator and created dialogs for the drive and joystick settings. All other dialogs are still missing and will be added one after the other…

I also reworked the whole code base to fit in the new structure seperated by machine code for the machine thread and UI code for the UI thread.

The following cool features were already available in Michael’s port and are of course still available:

OpenGL Rendering: The viewport is rendered with OpenGL and is thus very fast and scales automatically to any size.
Fullscreen is available. Menu bar stays visible so you still can access the options and settings.
Peripheral Drawer: A Drawer on the left side of the emulation window shows all available drives and tapes and gives their current state.
Drag & Drop is supported in the emulation window to smart attach any kind of image or program file. You can also drag & drop onto the peripheral drawer to mount an image in a specific drive

I just submitted a patch for inclusion into the official source tree. It contains the multi-threaded emulation core that is now used in all VICE emulators of this port. It implements the required basic UI interface for all emulations. What’s still missing are the menu bar UI files for all emulators except the x64 and a lot of setting dialogs. Only the large drive and useful joystick settings dialog are already finished. This missing parts are now added step by step and maybe with the help of other developers to speed things up…

For now only x64 runs well and already provides the features mentioned above. In this stage of development its time to include some beta testers that help to test the core on a wide range of machines and find the numerous bugs that are surely there… I will start to compile and release binaries for the small group of beta testers. If you are interested in helping out then just drop me a mail and I will add you to the list and give further instructions….

Diskimagery64

Due to the huge amount of time the Cocoa port of VICE currently consumes of my spare time, there was almost no time left for my other pet project: DI64. The only major thing I did was to move the whole code base to SourceForge. This allows to use their infrastructe (e.g. SVN repository, ticket system, bug tracking) to simplify the development of such an open-source project. You can reach it at: http://sourceforge.net/projects/diskimagery64. There you will find instructions on how to check out the source from the SVN repository…

OpenCBM

Yes, this is a new one Recently I played around with the XU1541 USB cable to connect my MBP directly to a 1541 floppy. With the help of the OpenCBM software you can then transfer files easily from retro media to your current machine. I added some patches to the current CVS Tree to compile and use OpenCBM on a Mac. The maintainer ask me if I’d like to join the development to keep the Mac port up to date.. And so I got another retro project with Mac connection

Currently, I am helping out to get the CVS version to compile cleanly on Macs (just use the Linux Makefiles – they support the Mac, too). Later on I’d like to integrate the OpenCBM Mac Library into my other projects: MacVICE and DiskImagery64. VICE already can access a real floppy via OpenCBM – I will have a look what needs to be done to add it to the Mac port. DiskImagery64 will have a new I/O device for disk image import and export: the XU1541…. So stay tuned… interesting projects are coming up

PS: Today I moved to a new Blog system. Namely the database of my WordPress was moved from a SQLite one to a MySQL DB. I hope everything works now as expected… If not then just drop me a mail. Thanks!

What’s new in VICE 1.21 for Macs

lallafa — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 10:31:22 +0000

On 10th of march the newest version of VICE was released to the public. As your fellow Mac port maintainer I’ll give you a short summary what’s new in this version from an Apple Fan’s point of view…

First of all Mac VICE is now available in two flavors: The well-known X11 with Athena Widgets user interface and starting with this version, a Gtk Widgets on X11 user interface is available, too. The Gtk Library provides a nicer user interface build upon X11 and is already used in well known applications like The Gimp or the The Gnome Desktop. Compared to the Athena widgets the GUI is much more confortable with a menu bar and simple to use UI elements. Unfortunately, the Gtk are no system libs on Macs so I had to pack them into the VICE application bundles. This results in a quite large VICE.app bundle and distribution. So decide yourself: either a small bundle or a comfortable user interface.
All VICE emulators are now packed into a single application bundle, called a Smart Bundle. Why smart, you may ask.. Well, If you click on the bundle a small selection dialog will pop up and allows to select which emulator to run… That’s ok if you often switch the emulator. If you prefer the old VICE apps with an own bundle for each emulator you may find the selector cumbersome. Now with a smart bundle you can simply copy or move the VICE.app and rename it like one of the emulators and from then on the named emulator will launch immediately. That’s what I call smart The smart bundle allows me to distribute a single (with gtk: large) application bundle and I do not need to duplicate all libs for each emulator bundle.
The 1.21 also uses a new starter script for X11 and GTK+ that embeds Platypus as an application launcher. I integrated it to add some kind of drag and drop starting of disk images. It works quite well but is not as comfortable as native d’n'd as it only works on startup of the VICE emulator.
A tools directory is available with all command line versions of the emulators found there. Just add this to your PATH and call x64, x128… directly from inside your shell in Terminal.app with all console output redirected there. Very useful for command line users and for debugging or working with the montior.
FFMPEG multimedia support is compiled in for Macs. This allows you to record sounds directly from the emulation and store them in popular formats (MP3, AIF, WAV…). Also AVI recording with MP4 video and MP3 sound is available for recording live captures of the emulator (always assumed your Mac is fast enough…
I improved the TFE (final ethernet) emulation in VICE and compiled it in for Macs. Now you can emulate a network adapter connected to your virtual C64 by attaching it to a real network interface on the Mac. Have a look at the ReadmeOSX.txt for more details and enjoy internet-aware APPs on your C64. Unfortunately, the Airport network interface of portable Macs is not working in this release, but I am working on it…

That’s it for this release! I hope you enjoy it!

New MacVice X11/Gtk+ Bundles

lallafa — Sun, 10 Dec 2006 21:20:19 +0000

Today I finished a larger patch for the Mac port of VICE that overhauls the bundling process.

The major changes are:

Support of both X11 and Gtk+ Builds
A single application bundle contains all emulators.
The application bundle is “smart”
Command Line Usage is greatly improved

X11 and Gtk+ UI

The first notable difference in the new build is the support of both X11 and Gtk+ versions. Both are now built with the distributed source scripts and will be available as official binaries in the next release. The X11 release is smaller (8MB vs. 28MB gtk) and suitable for users that only need the emulation window and can live with the spartanic UI. The gtk+ is larger as all required libs are embedded and provides a much nicer UI with pull-down menus. This version will be more suitable for beginners.

Building GTK+ is required if you want to build your own version of VICE. This build process is quite complex. To simplify this, the VICE distribution will contain helper scripts that can build all the required external libraries out of the source archives. Simply grab the source tarballs and run the script. A few minutes/hours later and you have all the required libs (including cross-arch versions if you build a universal-binary version of VICE). Builder scripts are also available for the other external libs that are required for joystick (HID Utils) and networking support.

VICE.app

From now on the VICE distribution contains only a singe application bundle called VICE.app. “Oh, where are the nice emulator application bundles!” you might say. They were removed because they are too large, but the VICE.app is “smart” and can emulate the old bundles.

Hows that? In the old release 1.20 each emualator had its own bundle. Thats nice for launching but it took quite a lot space in the distribution bundle, because each emulator needed some common ROMs and other stuff like docs in the bundle. The situation got really worse for the Gtk+ version as for this one the bundle needs to contain all Gtk+ libs. Cloning this bundle for each emulator led to a 250 MB distribution with mostly duplicated lib data…

The new VICE.app now contains all emulators and opens a small dialog to select the emulator you want to launch if you click on its icon. Thats a cumbersome process if you want to quickly launch the same emulator again and again. Thats the reason why I made the bundle “smart”. This means the application bundle checks its current name and if its named after an emulator (e.g. “x64″) then it will launch this emulator directly without showing the menu. Nice, eh? So to emulate the old emulator bundles simply copy the small distribution bundle with VICE.app to your hard disk and the clone copy VICE.app for each emulator you want to access directly. Make sure each copy has the exact emulator name (e.g. x64.app), otherwise it won’t work!

Comand Line Usage Improved

Power users of VICE (including myself) often launch an emulator from the command line and pass options there. In the old 1.20 release it was possible to directly launch the VICE emulator binaries from inside the application bundles. Thats not very convenient as the launch path inside the bundle is usually not in your shell’s PATH. Furthermore the console output of VICE was always written to a fresh xterm and not to your current shell’s console. Both issues are now fixed. The latter one is already described in my last post. So lets focus on the first one:

The new bundles contain a tools directory. There all command line applications are found. In 1.20 only cartconv and c1541 were placed there. Now a new vice-launcher.sh script and links with the names of all emulators are placed there, too. You can now simply add the tools directory to your shell’s PATH variable and you have all emulators ready for launch! If you call an emulator (e.g. x64) this way then the vice-launcher.sh script is executed with $0 set to the emulator. Now the magic takes place: the script searches the VICE.app bundle in the parent directory of the tools directory. If its found then the corresponding emulator binary inside the bundle is launched with the given command line options. In between the x11-launcher.sh is used to correctly set up X11 from any terminal. You can still move the distribution directory around and everything works well. You only have to make sure that the VICE.app bundle is placed in the same directory where the tools directory is found.

New X11 Launcher for MacVICE

lallafa — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 10:47:12 +0000

VICE on Macs is currently an application bundle that launches X11 and the X11 version of VICE. I added a new launcher script for the next VICE release that allows to drop files on the app icon. Each dropped file is autostarted when opening the emulator. Furthermore, you can run the launcher from the command line in your terminal and pass arbitrary arguments. In this case, no xterm for VICE input/output is opened but the terminal is used.

Recently, I found a really nice tool for Macs called Platypus. This tool can package a script in an application bundle. A click on the bundle runs the scripts and even passes the dropped files as arguments to the script. Thats the feature, I was missing in VICE so I started to integrate this new packager.

In the current VICE release, two scripts are used to launch VICE: the first one is a shell script that calls open-x11 to launch the X11 server and then executes the second script in the X11 context (i.e. a DISPLAY variable is defined). The second one now runs an xterm for VICE input and output and the xterm finally runs the VICE binary. Puh! A lot of stuff to run the emulator and not very well suited for Platypus integration. Furthermore, calling the first script on the command line would run VICE but its output is always in an external window and not on the console. Also any arguments passed to the first script were not propagated to VICE.

Looking at other Applications that launch X11 apps, I found the launcher of Gimp-App very interesting: There a single script is used (with Platypus) to fire up X11 and launch the application. Inspired by this work I created a new x11-launcher.sh that does VICE startup in a single script.

This script also sets up a temporary .xinitrc for the user if none is available. This startup file does not open an unwanted XTerm as the default does.

The launcher now determines in which context it was called and changes its behaviour accordingly: If called on the command line then no xterm is opened and VICE is started with output on the console. Additionally, all arguments are passed directly to VICE. If called by Platypus then the arguments are the dropped files and the script creates -autostart arguments for VICE.

I adapted the make bindist distribution build process to use Platypus on default if its installed on the build system. You can pass NO_PLATYPUS=1 if you don’t want to use the packager. Then the launcher script is installed directly in the application bundle. This works like the current launcher: no file drops are possible. The command line features work for both distribution types.

Another nice side effect of the new launcher in a single script is the fact, that the VICE application icon will stay in the dock and not disappear after startup…