Pirates! and VICE

From	Harriet Bazley <harriet@bazleyfamily.co.uk>
Newsgroups	comp.sys.acorn.apps, comp.sys.acorn.games
Subject	Pirates! and VICE
Date	2026-03-22 22:15 +0000
Organization	Bazley family
Message-ID	<87ddc2bd5c.admin@bazleyfamily.co.uk> (permalink)

Cross-posted to 2 groups.

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I used to be able to play Commodore 64 games, notably Sid Miere's
Pirates! (which I never actually played on a C64!) using the VICE
emulator.
However, there no longer seems to be an up to date version of the
emulator for RISC OS - the Arc Wiki https://arcwiki.org.uk/index.php/VICE
says that support for RISC OS was removed in 2012.  The outdated version
I managed to find on the link given (dated 2010) doesn't seem to be
32-bit compatible
https://www.zimmers.net/anonftp/pub/cbm/crossplatform/emulators/VICE/vice-riscos2_2.zip
and of course it runs like sludge under Aemulor, and seemingly with no
sound - though it does run.

I succeeded in locating a disc image for the game at http://csdb.dk/release/?id=113902
and with rather more difficulty worked out how to actually load and run
it (you have to hold down Shift while dragging the D64 file to one of
VICE's drive icons, then double-click on one of the lines in the
resulting listing - in the case of this particular disc image, as it
happens a lot of them are just dummy entries used to create ASCII art!)

But while I got some of the shorter programs to run, painfully slowly -
the emulator is printing text to the screen at about 1cps - I couldn't
get the game itself to run at all.  I left it for about half an hour and
when I came back it was still stuck with the disc light active and the
message LOADING at 26% emulation speed.  I don't know if it had crashed
or simply still hadn't finished initialising.

The weird thing is that this software actually used to be fast enough to
be playable on a considerably slower computer, so I had hopes....

-- 
Harriet Bazley                     ==  Loyaulte me lie ==

Whenever I feel like exercise, I lie down until the feeling goes away.

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Pirates! and VICE Harriet Bazley <harriet@bazleyfamily.co.uk> - 2026-03-22 22:15 +0000
  Re: Pirates! and VICE Rob Heaton <rob@robheaton.co.uk> - 2026-03-24 22:05 +0000
    Re: Pirates! and VICE Harriet Bazley <harriet@bazleyfamily.co.uk> - 2026-03-26 18:32 +0000
      Re: Pirates! and VICE Harriet Bazley <harriet@bazleyfamily.co.uk> - 2026-03-26 18:44 +0000
        Re: Pirates! and VICE Harriet Bazley <harriet@bazleyfamily.co.uk> - 2026-03-27 01:37 +0000

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