Quickly booting C64 games in Linux

Maybe the Fedora version is different, but in Kubuntu I was able to install vice with "sudo apt-get install vice" as you might expect. However, trying to run games as shown in the article doesn't work: it reports "C64MEM: Error - Couldn't load kernal ROM `kernal'." It appears that this emulator needs a ROM image from the original C64 which isn't part of this package, and this article forgot to tell us about this.

Look here:

http://www.brighthub.com/hubfolio/matthew-casperson/articles...

Cool, thanks for the link. That's a much more complete article.

However, I did find that enabling "warp mode", which definitely sped things up, seemed to screw up the Scott Adams Pirate Adventure game I tried out; pressing spacebar between words turned into a linefeed.

Old C64 games often used the processor's slow response time rather than writing proper input timing loops... Who'da thunk, 30 years ago, they'd be running these programs on processors that were literally 250,000 times faster?!?!

You may call it "slow", but it was totally deterministic, to the point that counting microseconds was feasible for programmers. This opened up new vistas (literally) in what the chipset could be made to do.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsRRCnque2E

It's over an hour long, but his explanation of cycle-counting and what it meant for programmers is excellent. I don't think any major chip players expose that kind of control any more.