RISCWORLD 5/RISCWORLD_VOL5.iso/SOFTWARE/Issue6/VICE/VICE.ZIP/!ViceRsrc/!Help

Text File | 2005-01-25 | 34.5 KB | 756 lines

Vice 1.16 for RISC OS
=====================




For general information see the Vice documentation. This file only deals with
differences / specialities in the RISC OS version.



RISC OS NEWS since 1.15
=======================

Only two things, really (apart from minor, strictly internal issues):
1) Fixed savebox handling bug (return and click on OK button didn't work in
   all cases the savebox was used)
2) Built this release with GCC-3.4.4



RISC OS NEWS since 1.14
=======================

Nothing. I was hoping to compile this version with the GCC-3.41 prerelease,
but the resulting VICE binaries didn't work, so it's GCC-3.3 again.



RISC OS NEWS since 1.13
=======================

This time there were lots of internal changes, one side-effect of which is
that the VICE RISC OS binaries can now also be built with the GCCSDK
crosscompiler on a Unix machine with the standard tools used for building
VICE there (including the auto* stuff). A configure script to use for this
will be in the ViceROKit.zip archive for this version (available from my
homepage). This release was built with GCC 3.3 on a Linux machine, for
instance, as my tests so far showed the code to be stable and a little
faster than 2.95.4 builds. Should unforeseen problems arise after all,
I'll make a 2nd release based on 2.95.4.
Playing around with lots of different compiler versions lately also helped
me find two ancient Wimplib bugs, so this release should have improved
stability compared to older versions. Important news in this version:

- Since VICE supports 4 true drive devices now, memory requirements
  have gone up another notch, so the memory footprint is now between 9MB
  and 13.5MB, depending on the emulator (except for VSID, which is still
  around 6MB).

- C64 and C128 support the 1351 mouse emulation now. Using the mouse in
  WIMP mode is a bit tricky, since you'll end up with two pointers and
  the emulated one will not move unless the real one is within the
  emulator window, also it's hard to sync the speeds of the two. If you
  want to use the mouse without hassles, go to fullscreen mode.



RISC OS NEWS since 1.12
=======================

No new features this time either, just kept the RISC OS port in sync. There
is one important change regarding the DigitalRenderer module, however.
Formerly, this module was distributed along with Vice in !ViceRsrc. Since
other projects started using it recently (e.g. various SDL game ports),
this is no longer sensible, so now the emulators try to load the the
module from System:Modules. For you as a user, this means you'll have
to download the module (e.g. from my homepage at the bottom of the file)
and copy the module from there to <System$Dir>.310.Modules.



RISC OS NEWS since 1.11
=======================

I added no new features and just kept the RISC OS specific files in sync
with the main distribution. However, there were many internal changes to
my Wimplib and the support modules (DigitalRenderer and BPlot) that make
this release of Vice 32bit compatible. From what I've heard, an Iyonix can
sustain 100% emulation speed even under tricky conditions, which would be
good news for a change. Note you'll need the 32bit SCL installed on your
system to run this release.



RISC OS NEWS since 1.9
======================

There have been mostly internal changes between those releases, as there
haven't been any new features in the emulation core and I don't see the
need to change the way the existing features are handled. Internal changes
mostly deal with updates in my WimpLib (Small-footprint LGPL C/C++ library
providing the interface to RISC OS, also available from my Software pages),
e.g. better sprite handling, a standard menu for text windows (allowing you
to e.g. save or edit text). Other changes include support for chip-specific
video caches.
Also note that my email address changed to [e-mail] since I
successfully finished my PhD thesis and consequently quit FORWISS last may.



RISC OS NEWS since 1.8
======================

- (Internal change: switched to GCC 2.95.4)

- Stereo SID option. Basically the driver for this already worked in 1.8,
  I just hadn't tested it before the release. Note that if you use the
  StereoSID Player you have to run Vice in NTSC mode!

- Due to the many new options introduced with PAL emulation, there is now
  a separate video configuration window.

- In order to support PAL emulation, the low-level interface in Vice has
  changed. In the old versions, a bitmap with the correct colours for the
  current mode was created, whereas in the new version, the bitmap always
  has the C64 colours. That means I had to move to (slower) OS_SpriteOp plots
  rather than my old BPlot module. There are some cases where the BPlot
  module can still be used: for non-PAL emulation canvases, in case the screen
  depth is more than 8bpp or in full screen mode if the screen palette is set
  (see video config window "Set Palette"). If you select "Use BPlot" in the
  video config window, you can still use the BPlot module in these cases,
  otherwise Vice will always use OS_SpriteOp.
  In case you own a ViewFinder graphics card, Vice will probably run much
  better if you always switch OFF "Use BPlot".

- PAL emulation: this probably requires some additional words, in particular
  regarding scaling. PAL emulation really needs a 2x screen to be fully
  operational; you can achieve this by ticking the PAL double box in the
  video config window. Note that the resulting bitmap is NOT just the 1x
  bitmap scaled up, which is also the reason why I handled scaling the way
  I did: the toggle icon on the emu pane does the ``soft'' scaling, i.e.
  it merely allows plotting the bitmap at twice its normal size. PAL double
  allows calculating a bitmap at twice the size, and you can use the soft
  scaling in addition, if you want to. That system may seem a bit confusing
  at first (try juggling 3 scaling factors in your coordinate transformations
  for confusing, buddy: eigen factors, soft scaling, PAL double), but if you
  bear in mind that the toggle icon on the pane just displays the same thing
  larger whereas PAL double does more, it is logical in a way.
  Regarding the depth used for PAL emulation, you can select five options
  here:
  - off (disables it)
  - auto (uses the depth of the current screen mode, but at least 8bpp)
  - 8/16/32: use this depth regardless of the current screen mode
  8bpp PAL emu has to compromise, so you should use either 16bpp or 32bpp
  modes if you want the real thing -- and use a screen mode of the same depth
  for display.
  A word of warning on PAL emu, though: it's very expensive, especially in
  double size mode, plus the high colour depth required and the additional
  frame buffer really choke the life out of the pitifully little bandwidth
  we have available on RISC OS. Unless a miracle happens and someone releases
  new RISC OS hardware with a fast bus and about 1GHz of processing power,
  PAL emulation is unusable for anything but making nice screenshots on
  RISC OS, I'm afraid.

- In order to save some trouble there are different screen modes possible
  for full screen emulation in normal, PAL and double size PAL mode
  possible (see video config window).




RISC OS NEWS since 1.7
======================

No visible ones, since I was very busy towards the end of last year and could
just keep the port in sync. The new stuff like PAL emulation and GUI (plus
testing) of stereo SIDs will follow in the next version.



RISC OS NEWS since 1.6
======================

- (Internal change: switched from GCC 2.7.2 to GCC 2.95.2)
- (Internal change: DigitalRenderer now voice generator based or 16bit enabled)
- Added support for GZIP-compressed image files (file type &f89 or /gz extension)
- Clear/Load/Save fliplist files. Clear and save is obvious, using the fliplist
  menu (note that you can't save an _empty_ fliplist). You can load a fliplist
  by dragging the fliplist file (must have filetype Text) to the emulation pane;
  the first image in the fliplist will be attached to drive 8 automatically.
- Provided interactive help because the emulators have become rather complex and
  many people will probably not be aware of what the buttons can do.
- Made drive types 2040, 3040 and 4040 available from the drive config window.
- Fixed cartridge detaching by selecting type None (this works now).
- Finally fixed Auto refresh speed and made it the default for all emulators.
  That means that the number of frames are reduced automatically down to a
  minimum number if the emulator can't run at 100% and redraw every frame.
  That means that games like Delta and Armalyte are pretty playable (if a bit
  jittery) now. You can configure the maximum number of skipped frames in the
  system configuration window. The default is 5 and choosing larger values
  doesn't improve emulation speed much more, but the display gets very jerky.
  You should always use odd values for the maximum (some games and demos have
  things flashing every other frame which you won't see otherwise).
- Added a log window with the log messages. People who know Vice on Unix will
  be familiar with the log messages, others may be somewhat surprised at all
  the stuff that's logged. The log messages help diagnosing problems, also for
  normal users; for instance if the log message is ``VDriveCommand: ERR = 30,
  SYNTAX ERROR ...'' you tried to use high-level drive emulation on a program
  that requires true drive emulation turned on. The maximum number of lines
  kept in memory is limited to 1024, so you don't have to worry about memory
  consumption exploding during long sessions with Vice. In the unlikely case of
  the new log window causing problems or if you want to disable them for some
  other reason, you just have to add ``-logfile null:'' to the last line of
  the emulated machine's !Run file (without the `` / '', of course). I'm sorry,
  but logging is determined too early in the program to allow for GUI widgets
  to configure them.
- Automatically suspend emulation in lots of places like attaching images etc.
  to avoid these operations screwing up emulation (especially sound when the
  image is on CDROM).
- Extended the DigitalRenderer module to support 16bit sound as provided on
  RO 3.5 and newer; as a matter of fact the DigitalRenderer module saw a major
  overhaul in this release, see !ViceRsrc.DocDRender if you're interested in
  more details and/or want to use sound in an application of your own. By default
  16bit sound is _off_ in order to minimize compatibility issues, but if you have
  16bit sound hardware I recommend that you enable it because it sounds much
  better and causes less problems with the painfully exact sync reSID needs,
  although both of these issues are probably just consequences of emulating the
  old 8bit system on the new 16bit one. You can enable it from the sound config
  window. In case you experience problems with 16bit sound, please let me know.
- Image contents work with normal directories too. Since we already have the
  filer you might ask: what for? And verily I tell you: because it allows you
  to autostart PRG files without having to type LOAD statements by double-
  clicking. You open an image contents viewer by holding down shift while
  dragging the directory to one of the drive icons.
- Double-clicking on the title in an image contents window does LOAD"*",8,1
  (except for normal directories).
- The semantics of dragging PRG-files to the emu window have changed. Now the
  PRGs are autostarted on all emulators. If you hold down shift when releasing
  the drag, on the C64 the file is only loaded (this is the old behaviour).
- Added keyboard-shortcuts for snapshots and screenshots. Note that these can
  only be used after a valid shot was made using the normal GUI elements, otherwise
  you'll get an error. The main reason for these keyboard shortcuts was to be
  able to handle snapshots and screenshots in full screen mode. The keys are:
  Print (save screenshot), ^F9 (save snapshot), ^F10 (load snapshot).



RISC OS NEWS since 1.5
======================

- Added read-only options for all drives (marked as RO in the drive configuration
  window to keep space requirements low).
- Dag Lem modified his reSID engine so the actual engine is run fewer times,
  resulting in a substantial speedup. In addition I rewrote some remaining
  sound-related FP code to fixpoint, resulting in another big speedup. reSID
  is now usable under RISC OS :-)
- Added VSID mode. The VSID player uses the C64-binary in a special mode and
  allows playing SID files without burdening the emulation with video and
  drive issues, therefore the !Vice64 binary must have been seen by the filer
  for VSID to operate. If you have a SA RPC do use reSID since it sounds much
  better.
- Improved speed limit code: NTSC works now, plus disturbances have less effect.
- Added some functionality to wimplib. Now the monitor window is limited to
  around 4096 lines to save memory when you're doing long sessions (like an
  xterm does).
- Some minor changes to the DigitalRenderer module for improved stability.



RISC OS NEWS since 1.4
======================

After a long time of just keeping the source in sync with the other ports I
added some new stuff for 1.5 again. I've been working on WimpLib a lot lately
and added a text window that can be used for both displaying text and as a
command line widget so I could finally integrate the monitor better. In order
to compile Vice you now need WimpLib 0.10 or newer.

- Replaced the monitor with a (multitasking) text widget. That means opening
  the monitor does no longer freeze the entire desktop, apart from that you
  get scrollbars and all the other niceties of a real window. While the monitor
  is open the emulator is paused and you can't unpause it except for closing
  the monitor again. This makes sure that there can be no reentrancy into the
  monitor and is in fact the only system which was totally compatible with
  Vice's internal use of the monitor (e.g. opening the monitor after a JAM code).
  But nothing is modal, and that's the main issue here.
  I know, most people won't ever use the monitor, but this is something I've
  wanted to add for ages. Note that the monitor window can't be closed while
  the monitor is outputting stuff, but the close request will be recorded and
  executed as soon as the output is finished.
- The other text windows (license, warranty, contrib) are now displayed with
  the new WimpLib class as well and can be open concurrently (also you can
  now navigate through them using the keyboard, but they're read-only).
- Split drive window into (disk) drives and tape.
- Resetting the emulator with double sized window now works correctly.
- Fixed auto-attach of images on startup (interface must have changed somewhere
  on the line).
- Added FlipList support. This allows you to keep certain disk images in a
  sort of hotlist for quick access. The Fliplist menu is accessible from the
  emulation window menu and allows you to add the current disk image to the
  fliplist, remove the current disk image from the fliplist, attach the next
  and previous image in the fliplist. There's also a submenu that allows
  direct access to all images in the fliplist; since this menu is also mirrored
  somewhere there's also a detach entry to detach the currently active image.
  You can also use PageUp / PageDown to walk through the fliplist which is
  very handy for full screen mode.
  Note that the fliplist is only available for drive 8!
- The menu containing all the fliplist images is now also available by clicking
  menu over the drive 8 icons on the emu pane.
- The currently selected drive image is now displayed in the emulation window
  title.
- Added a window to create a new, empty disc image. It's accessible from the
  icon bar menu.
- Thanks to a wimplib extension almost all menus are indirected now. That means
  that the menu text can become considerably longer than the 12 characters
  possible so far. ATM I set the limit to 32 which should be fine for now.
- Added a new sound device ``VIDC Sync'' (for synchronous VIDC). The old code
  was running the sound as an asynchronous thread which has the advantage of
  having very good latency characteristics, but unfortunately doesn't integrate
  well with the way Vice handles complex sounds (e.g. samples) and issues like
  oversampling internally. The synchronous device can handle these; the only
  problem is that emulating sound samples as exact as Vice does, the performance
  usually drops to 50% on my StrongARM RiscPC, so we'll have to wait for much
  faster machines until it becomes really worthwhile...
  In the meantime: as long as you're using ``simple'' sound, stick with the old
  asynchronous device, if you want to listen to samples or use oversampling, use
  the new synchronous one.
  Note this also required a big update of the DigitalRenderer module.
- Added screenshot functionality for saving sprites. The Unix version also allows
  BMP and PNG but I figured we don't want BMP on RISC OS and we don't want about
  100kB of libpng and libz linked into each emulator, so it's sprites only for us.
- C64: files named "*/PRG" are now treated like ones with file type &64, i.e.
  you can drag them into the emu window to load native C64 files.



RISC OS NEWS since 1.1
======================

Basically I kept the port in sync, i.e. added icons for new resources and so on.
My main contribution to 1.2 was a restructuring of the drive emulation code which
now uses shared code and private data sections for both drives. That cut about
150kB off each executable and made the true drive emulation a little faster on
RISC processors.



RISC OS NEWS since 1.0.0.1
==========================

- Fixed bug concerning pause when the joystick window is open.
- Optionally display status line in full screen mode (toggle with F9)
- Support for multiple emulation windows; currently used by Vice128 (see below).
- Support for keyboard configuration files (see below)
- Message windows for License, Warranty and Contributors, available from icon
  bar menu.





RISC OS NEWS since 0.16.1.0
===========================

- Sound code more stable.
- Added freeze menu entry for modules like Action Replay.
- ROMSet support via ROMSet Archives (see System window).
- Imagecontents added: drag an image file (D64, T64, ...) to one of the drive
  icons or the drive paths while holding down shift and instead of attaching the
  image file a directory viewer will appear -- unless an error occurred. Also
  since RISC OS doesn't allow more than one open on a file that has been opened
  with write access you can't use this mechanism on an image that has already
  been attached. Double-click on an item to load it into the emulated machine.
- Option full screen mode operation (see below).
- Lots of small bugs and features.






Overview:
=========

1) What is it?
   Vice is a collection of emulators covering 5 CBM machines, the C64, the C128,
   the VIC20, the PET series and the CBM2 series.

2) Memory requirements: Huge.
   It's not possible to run any of these emulators on a 4MB machine. It's an
   extremely close shave on an 8MB machine if you can get around 5-6MB free,
   depending on which emulator you want to run. You should have more.

3) CPU requirements: Huge.
   Vice is cycle-exact, so if you compare it to Frodo you have to compare it
   to FrodoSC and relative to that Vice is very fast. That doesn't change the
   fact that you won't have much fun running Vice if you don't have a StrongARM.

4) Concluding:
   Vice is only recommended on StrongARM RiscPCs with 16MB or more.




Running Vice:
=============

Just double-click on the Vice-machine's filer-icon and it will install an icon
on the icon bar and open the emulation window. Make sure !ViceRsrc can be
written to if you want to save your Vice settings. The settings for each
emulator will be stored in !ViceRsrc.<machine-name>.vicerc.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Do not terminate any of the emulators by force using ALT BREAK
or something similar while sound (meaning the VIDC sound device) is active.
While this is no problem when (VIDC) sound emulation is off this will in all
likelyhood kill another one of your applications if it's on.




Troubleshooting:
================

If nothing happens after the double-click the reason is probably 1) not enough
memory or 2) !ViceRsrc has been moved so Vice$Path, the central variable pointing
to the shared resources for each emulator, is no longer valid. In that case just
double-click on !ViceRsrc and all necessary information will be updated.

If one of the emulators (not an emulated program!) should crash with sound
emulation enabled you'll keep hearing the last sample buffer and no other
program can use sound anymore. To remedy that you have to issue ``*DRenderOff''
at the CLI.




Vice configuration:
===================

There are a sh**load of configurations for each Vice. Check the general docs
for a description of what everything does. You won't need many of those in
everyday use.
A lot of the configurations are in the form of menus. I didn't put descriptive
labels next to those menus since that'd take up too much space. If you want
to know what a menu group does just open the menu and check the title. The
only menus that need a little extra explanation are probably the ones consisting
of menu icon + descriptive icon + value icon (e.g. ``DOS Name'' and ``Cartridge''
in the System configuration window). In the case of ``DOS Name'' the menu
selects the drive type whose ROM name should be displayed (and made editable)
in the writable icon, in the case of ``Cartridge'' the menu selects the type
of the cartridge file in the value icon.
Most configurations take immediate effect. Changes to writable icons only take
effect after pressing <Return>. Some changes only take effect when Vice is
restarted or the configurations are reloaded, however. Among those are the
names for the various system resources like ROMs or palette files, all of which
are found in the Configure->System window.



RISC OS specifics:
==================

System and Video window:
------------------------

Auto Pause:    automatically pause the emulator when the emulator window is
        closed.
Poll cs:    Minimum number of centiseconds between polls. Increase the
        value to make Vice faster but the desktop less responsive.
Speed cs:    Evaluate the emulation speed with this frequency.
Sound cs:    Poll the sound hardware with this frequency. This value should
        always be smaller than the configured sound buffer size. Using
        a value of 0 defaults to half the buffer size.

ROMsets:    These are handled via ROMset archives (*/vra). The menu to the
        left lets you choose one of the ROMsets currently available,
        the one to the right lets you edit them. Create: add the current
        ROM configuration to the ROMsets (give it a name first). Delete:
        delete the currently selected ROMset. Save: save the currently
        selected ROMset (not all of them). Dump: save entire ROMset
        archive as ``romset/vra'' to the current machine's folder in
        !ViceRsrc. Clear: remove all ROMsets, emptying the archive.
        Restore: reload the ``romset/vra''-File mentioned above.
        You can add a romset archive file to your current archive by
        dragging this file (named */vra) to the System & Video window.



Pane icons:
-----------

At the top are the 4 icons for each of the possible 4 disk drives. Immediately
below that (initially blank) is an icon that'll display the current halftrack
for drive 8 or 9 when in True Drive Emulation mode. You can toggle the drive
whose halftrack you want to see by clicking on this icon. Below that icon is
the Pause/Resume icon which should be self-explanatory. The Reset-icon will
reset the emulated machine; click with select for a soft reset, adjust for a
hard reset (which will also clear memory). The icon at the bottom can be used
for toggling the size of the emulation window.
In contrast to other platforms the drive LEDs also work when not in True Drive
Emulation mode.



Multiple emulator windows:
--------------------------

You can have multiple emulator windows for a machine (ATM C128 only). In this
case only one of the windows will have a pane attached to it (this is the
''active emulator window'') and you can use the pane to toggle its size. You
can transfer the pane to another window by either pressing F10 or using the menu
entry ``MovePane'' in the emulator menu. In full screen mode you can use F10 to
select the emulation window you want to display.
Opening & closing: clicking select on the icon bar icon will always affect
the last active emulator window, i.e. the one with the pane will be either
opened or raised. You can open the other emulator windows by moving the pane
(i.e. F10 or menu).
Note: the 40/80 key of a C128's keyboard is ``emulated'' in the C128 config
window.





Data IO:
========

On RISC OS we use drag and drop, so forget all references to file selection
dialogue boxes and similar bullshit.

Attaching disk images / directories to drives:
Drag the directory or disk image icon to the drive's LED on the EmuWindow's
pane or the corresponding writable path icon in the Configure->Drives window.
Disk images should be typed &164 (D64Image). If everything went well the
writable path icon will be updated to show the new path afterwards, otherwise
it'll remain unchanged (for instance when trying to attach a disk image to a
drive that has drive type ``none'').

Selecting the files for RS232/Printer/Sound devices:
The groups {OK-Button, writable path icon, draggable sprite} in the corresponding
Configuration windows behave like in a Save As box.

Saving snapshots:
Open snapshot savebox via the emulator window's menu. From then on it's exactly
like a standard savebox. Note that when making a snapshot the emulator will
run for a little more until it's ready. So even though you've got the emulator
paused it'll progress a little -- this can't be helped.

Loading snapshots:
Drag snapshot file icon to EmuWindow. The file must be typed ``Data'' (which
it is by default) and of course be for the correct (virtual) machine.

Loading files directly into Vice64:
Files typed &64 are interpreted as raw C64 files with the load-address in the
first two bytes. These files can be loaded into Vice64 (not the other Vices!)
by dragging them to the emulation window. This has the same effect as if you
had loaded the file using ``LOAD "file",8,1'' from the emulator, except it's
a lot faster and you don't have to worry about overwriting the IO area at
$D000 for long files.


Joystick configurations:
------------------------

Each joystick port can be mapped to 5 ``devices'': None (inactive), two sets
of keys for emulation or two real (Acorn-compatible) joysticks. You can edit
the keys thus: 1) make sure the Joystick-configuration window has the input
focus by clicking inside it. 2) place the mouse pointer over the icon for
the direction you wish to change and press the key you want to map to this
direction. You may have to hold the key depressed for a while before it's
recognized. You can also use keys like shift/ctrl/alt here.


Keyboard shortcuts:
-------------------

F5:   Toggle sound
F6:   Activate monitor
F7:   Restore-key (usually only has effect in combination with RUN/STOP=Escape)
F8:   Reset emulator
F9:   Toggle emu pane
F10:  move pane to next emulation window (has effect on C128 only)
F12:  (when in full screen mode) Return to desktop
Print: Save screenshot to same path as last one (doesn't work for 1st save)
^F9:   Save snapshot to same path as last one (ditto)
^F10:  Load snapshot from last path (ditto)
num/: Toggle True Drive Emulation. This will grey out drive icons 10 and 11.
Copy: Toggle pause
ScrollLock: When active, Vice goes into single tasking mode. This is 1) a
      bit faster and 2) ensures continuous sound playback.


Languages:
----------

The frontend is language-independent. All you have to do is provide a
file containing the label --> text translations and set up the variable
<Vice$Messages> to point to this file before startup. The english version
can be found at Vice:Messages.
This doesn't affect messages generated by the cross-platform Vice code itself,
however, which will remain english. You'll have to complain to the Vice core
team if you want that changed ;-).



Full Screen Mode:
-----------------

You can now also run Vice in full screen mode, i.e. single tasking outside
the WIMP environment. You can enter full screen mode using the icon bar
menu and leave it again by pressing F12.
The screen mode to use is very dependent on your computer and the machine
emulated by Vice; therefore the mode is user-definable. The screen mode is
described by a string of the form ``mode:resx,resy,lddepth'' (no spaces;
lddepth is log2 of the depth, i.e. 2 for 4bpp, 3 for 8bpp, 4 for 16bpp, ...),
to accomodate both new and old style mode selection. If you're running
Vice on a RiscPC the second part of the mode descriptor string (resx,resy,lddepth)
will be used, otherwise it's the mode number. By default ``28:640,480,3''
is used because it's a standard mode and big enough to display all emulators;
but it's certainly not ideal for all emulators, so have a play yourself.
Also, if ``SetPalette'' is configured on, the screen mode has <= 8bpp and
can display enough colours for the emulated machine, the palette will be
reprogrammed, so when using a 4bpp mode with !Vice64 you'll get exact colours.
Depth issues: internally Vice uses 8bpp for the display. On older machines
it'll be more efficient to use an 8bpp mode because it minimizes computational
overhead. On a StrongARM RiscPC, OTOH, you'll be better off using a mode with
less colours (e.g. 4bpp for !Vice64) because that'll require less bandwidth.
Since the palette can be reprogrammed there's no reason whatsoever to use
a mode with more than 8bpp unless you think Vice is running too fast.
You can edit the full screen mode string in the system configuration window.
As far as configurations in full screen mode go: there are none. Neither can
you attach any images and so on, only the keyboard-shortcuts still work. And
I definitely won't re-program all the stuff that's available in the multi-
tasking version for the fullscreen version.





Keyboard configuration files:
-----------------------------

This is a new feature (wasn't available on RISC OS in Vice 1.0.0.1 yet). It
allows you to change the keyboard mapping from your RISC OS computer to the
keys of the emulated machine. The files used by the Unix-Version of Vice
are unusable for this, therefore I made a new format. The RISC OS keyboard
mapping files have the name RO*/vkm in the corresponding machine's sub-
directory in !ViceRsrc (e.g. !ViceRsrc.C64.ROdflt/vkm). You have to edit
these files (it says they're for RISC OS in the first line), not the ones
for Unix.
Hacking these files is quite low-level and thus not for the faint-hearted.
On the RISC OS side you have to deal with _internal_ key-numbers which
have nothing to do with ASCII. On the emulated machine's side these keys
have to be mapped to row/column indices (see the Vice documentation for
keyboard layouts).
A line of this file has the format

intkey row col [s [srow scol [s]]] ["keystr"]

- intkey is the internal key number.
- row, col are the row and column of the keyboard matrix of the emulated
  machine. Use 15 for both to disable the key.
- if row/col are followed by an 's' this means that a pressed shift-key
  should also be emulated (e.g. for cursor left which is shift+cursor right
  on a real C64).
- if this is followed by another pair of numbers these are interpreted as
  mappings for this key if the shift key is pressed.
- at the end of each line is an optional string-representation of this key
  in double quotes (valid for an english keyboard).

The mapping for shifted keys will probably need additional explanation:
you DON'T have to (and shouldn't) define anything here if it's a trivial
shifting, e.g. a+shift --> a+shift (the default keyboard mappings don't
have any shifted mappings defined!). It should be used if the shifted key
doesn't obey the mapping <base key> + shift --> <base key> + shift, e.g.
mapping the asterisk (shift + '8' on an english keyboard) to the asterisk
on a C64 (an unshifted key which is located where the ']' is on an english
keyboard). For this example the mapping of the key '8' (internal key number
21) for a C64 would look like this:

21 3 3 6 1

As a general rule of thumb: don't screw around with this file and make a
backup copy before you do. It should also be noted that the more entries
you define in the shifted keymap and the more 's'-flags you use the more
likely problems arise (especially for games where a faithful mapping might
be required). Imagine for instance a program that uses shift and '*' for
two operations and you mapped the RISC OS '*' ( = shift + '8') to the '*'.
You could never use both operations at the same time which can be a real
nuisance if e.g. one of those operations is ``run'' and the other is
``fire''. You should therefore always strife to minimize both shifted
keymaps and 's'-flags. The default mappings don't define any shifted keymaps
and only 3 's'-flags, for instance. Also take care that you don't use keys
that have a special meaning for Vice, e.g. F5-F10 etc.
It's a dirty job but at some point I had to to it... ;-).

I didn't bother to make the filenames configurable; they're ROdflt/vkm
for all emulators except for PET where they're RObusi/vkm (for business
layout) and ROgrph/vkm (for graphic layout). Deleting these files will
run Vice with the default keymap. You can load a keymap at run-time by
dragging the file to the Kbd-icons in the System configuration window.
One of these icons also opens a menu from where you can save the currently
active keyboard mappings to a file.







Misc:
-----

- When turning on true drive emulation or dealing with snapshots, sound is
  suspended for a short time. This is not a bug, it has to be done.
- The default sound buffer size of 0.35s is only recommended when playing
  music. If you're doing anything interactive you should use a lower value,
  no higher than 0.1s.
- Attaching compressed images (disk/ROM/...) is not supported on RISC OS.
  Well, we have image filing systems for that.






Support Programs:
=================

c1541 and petcat are inside the !ViceRsrc directory and can be run using
vice:c1541 / vice:petcat. For a description of both check the general Vice
documentation. I didn't provide hacks to run either from one of the emulators,
though.







Thanks:
=======

- Richard Atterer ([e-mail]) for creating a set of
  very nice looking icons.

- Stefan Bellon ([e-mail]) for repeatedly compiling the CPU-files
  with optimization for me back when I only had an A5000 at my disposal
  (some of those need over 40MB).

- Richard Atterer, Stefan Bellon, Michael Kübel ([e-mail])
  and Erhard Furtner ([e-mail]) for beta-testing.






Ported by:
==========

Andreas Dehmel
[e-mail]
http://home.t-online.de/~zarquon