VICE 3.5 has been released with a massive list of changes!

Xmas eve 2020. The turkey on the table and wine in the glass. All the gifts are wrapped and neatly placed under the tree. What else would we wish for after a tough year? A new VICE version, of course!

VICE 3.5 has been released with a long list of changes that will please its users. As the main change, this release completes the transition to the new GTK3 based GUI, which means a more modern interface and, most importantly, prepared for the future. As a consequence of this change, support for OS/2 and AmigaOS is removed. These platforms should be able to use the SDL port.

Here is a few of the changes that I’ve found more relevant:

  • Emulator timing is now directly driven by the host system audio device. If sound emulation is disabled, timing is synchronized with the host clock. As part of this change, the choice of sound synchronization method has been removed.
  • Lower input latency – Emulation now occurs in blocks of time directly related to the sound fragment size. Previously, emulation of an entire frame happened as quickly as possible and then the host system would sleep until it is time to emulate the next entire frame. This means that user input is now visible to the emulated software with lower latency than before.
  • Audio latency is much lower on all platforms, and new lower latency defaults have been set.
  • Proper support for dual drives has been added
  • Autostarting works from any drive
  • Added support for 2nd and 3rd joystick button (potx/poty) (currently only via keyboard and via UNIX joystick driver.)
  • Added mapping for the THEC64 joystick
  • New emulation for LT.Kernal, CMD-HD, CMD RAM-Link, D9090/60
  • New icons for the applications!
  • Fixed/improved “native” screenshots. It will now work with all video chips and always generate “best-effort” results.
  • Fixed lightgun/pen emulation
  • Monitor: Completely new binary remote protocol for debuggers.
  • Monitor: Check watchpoints in the order they were added
  • Monitor: Show rasterline and cycle in both decimal and hex
  • Monitor: Fixed accessing cartridge memory
  • True drive emulation: More realistic modelling of the floppy drive wobble
  • SID: Fixed the filter saturation
  • SID: Envelope regression fix
  • SID: Added 4 possible additional SID chips for a total of 8 (x64*/xscpu64/x128 only)
  • VICE GTK performance on macOS is now excellent and it is recommended over the SDL version
  • Full list of changes here

Link: VICE 3.5

Author: Paulo Garcia

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