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…
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Yes, DiskImagery64 is portable… that’s the reason why I wrote this little tool with the Qt Library. The published source already contained all you need for compiling on both platforms. I test all my releases with the Open Source Qt Versions on Windows XP and on Ubuntu Linux 6.10.
Some users asked for a binary on these platforms and that wish led me away from my beloved Mac platform to try out bundling on foreign terrain 😉 on Linux and Win. On Win I found the nice open-source installer creator NSIS that helped me creating a nice installer. But compiling the source on windows by hand was not my style so I finally hacked some *urgs* DOS .bat file to automate building… Gradually I added all nice features including automatic CBM font installation, D64 extension registration and Startup Menu shortcuts!
On Ubuntu I had my first experience with debian package creation. Wow I am impressed what powerfull mechanisms there are to create complicated packages without any problems automatically. With the help of the wonderful Debian New Maintainer’s Guide I got a package for DI64 in a few hours and peeking at the source of other packages helped me to create a fine bundle with embedded font installing and desktop registration. Only extension binding currently does not work out of the box… so if there are any deb packagers with ideas out there then drop me a mail!
Now have a look at the Download area of DI64 and check out the win installer and the ubuntu packages… If there are any problems with them so bear with me – they are my first non-mac ones 😉
The last weeks I only had my MBP with me and that slowed down my DI64 development a bit. Nevertheless, I set up VICE with ethernet support and run the network stuff there 😉 One core of my system handled the virtual C64 and the other one run DI64. In between I had a Monitor running to trace all packets that were floating between the two “machines”..
Yes, a new release is ready before I leave for the weekend 😉 Sorry, the documentation is not updated yet but there is lots of fresh code inside (bugs of course, too :/):
This time I added networking support. If you have a RRNet ethernet card and a Retro Replay with the Final Replay ROM 0.6 flashed on it then you are ready for real networking fun…
Oops! I think it was too late yesterday…
The Mac application bundle of version 0.5 is corrupt! It only runs on a system with Qt libraries installed. I forgot to fix the internal references of the relocated Qt frameworks 🙁
Help is on its way: I just uploaded version 0.5a that fixes the bundling script. Now the Mac app should run on any system…
BTW: If you have installed the CBM Fonts then you might need a logou/login on your Mac to enable them correctly!
First of all: The best wishes for 2007 to you all!
The nice thing with christmas holidays is the spare time you have to work on some retro projects. One of the my number-one want-to-have-tools is a browser for disk images (D64 of course) to quickly scan through the pile of disk image files I have on my Mac’s hard disk. There are some disk editors available that would do the trick, but mostly on Windows or Java and not natively on Macs. Since none of my christmas parcels contained such a Mac App, I simply started to write my own one…
Today I finished a larger patch for the Mac port of VICE that overhauls the bundling process.
The major changes are:
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.
Graham’s WarpCopy64 is *the* tool if you want to copy some of your real c64 disks directly via ethernet to your host. The initial release was windows only, but j0x did a really nice job of porting the host code as a command line tool to linux.
So I thought, why not run this little gem on my MBP (as it is a well-behaved un*x-system, too)…
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The Final Replay (TFR06) is a ROM replacement for the Retro Replay cartridge. It supports the network adapter RRNET very well and provides nice networking features like the codenet or WarpCopy64 (a high speed disk transfer tool).
Unfortunately, TFR06 does not run on the current version (1.20) of VICE. It simply hangs the emulator after a reset cycle if the RRNET emulation is enabled. Here is how to fix it: