Vic 20

The Vic 20 was one of Commodore's early CBM machines, in a similar era to the C64. It gained popularity amongst many computer users and with a built in BASIC interpreter was a typical 8 bit home computer of the early 1980s.

ArcVic

Boris Van Schooten has written this emulator which is rather rare in that it uses dynamic recompiling (also known as Just In Time/JIT recompilation) rather than the normal (and has to be said, easier to implement) interpretive method. The method used is still somewhat experimental in this still developing emulator, and hasn't been tested properly with more complex self-modifying code which could cause it to fall over. Since dynamic recompilation is generally a faster method of emulating than interpretive, and ArcVic is written entirely in ARM code, it is not surprising that it runs very fast. Since dynamic recompilation makes extensive use of self-modify code (the bane of StrongARM users) anyone with a StrongARM will have to turn off the cache in order for ArcVic to run. Since ArcVic is so fast though, it still runs at a reasonable speed even with the cache off, and is full speed on an ARM2.

The emulator hasn't been extensively tested since it is still in the early stages, and most of the games I downloaded to try on the emulator didn't work too well. At the moment the emulator lacks a lot of features, it needs better screen rendering, colour emulation, sound, better time and Input/Output emulation, and a user interface. In order to run ArcVic you'll need to get hold of copies of the Vic20 System ROMs, supplied on the ArcVic site. Although the emulator is a little simple at the moment, Boris has also written a version for the PC which is much more developed and he is hoping to add the necessary features to ArcVic as soon as possible. As the help file says, this has been hacked together in a week, and with that in mind it's a very good start.

ArcVic v0.3 (30/5/98)
Speed Rating: ARM 2 ARM 250 ARM 3 ARM 6 ARM 7 StrongARM

ArcVic homepage
ArcVic homepage (mirror)

System ROMs

Software:
ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/cbm