I recently received a little bit of a ribbing, I suppose, via email about not writing about emulators that were not of the Nintendo vintage. This is a fair criticism, I probably spend more time messing with Commodore 64 things such as chatting on IRC with a Commodore 64 or playing with my new THEC64 Maxi (more on that at a later date).
I have been doing some dabbling with the Commodore 64 again, but instead of just running or configuring things, I am interested in doing some application development. Instead of playing, doing something useful and practical. For real. That said, on a fresh clean installation of openSUSE Tumbleweed on my HP EliteBook I decided to install the latest VICE Emulator using the Open Build Service and do a little poking and playing around. It had been a while since I used the emulator.
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Generally, it is more common to see some sort of Raspberry Pi OS or Debian based system as a retro gaming machine but the fine folks of the openSUSE community keep the repos up to date to have the latest in retro Commodore experiences. I love seeing the work being done to keep the Commodore experience alive. I know that much of this work has trickled into other projects which is what make the community based open source projects so wonderful.
I do want to highlight two individuals that are directly responsible for my excellent experience on openSUSE: Wolfgang Bauer and Karol Sławiński. You see these two names on the package change log for the last year. My sincere thank you goes to them.
If you haven’t kicked the tires of VICE recently, I highly recommend downloading version 3.5 and giving it another try. The GUI is better, the sound and video is better, the system controls are better based on the change log, the underpinnings are better. I think you will be pleasantly surprised on this refreshed experience.
