I lately wanted to try some of the Commodore 64 games I have kept as D64 files on my Fedora Linux system using VICE. I have lately upgraded the system from Fedora 26 to Fedora 32.
After I started up VICE, attached a D64 image of a floppy disk and typed LOAD"*",8,1 the emulator displayed "SEARCHING FOR *" and "LOADING", just like a real Commodore 64. And just like a real Commodore 64, the "LOADING" message just stayed there for several minutes.
Shouldn't modern systems be able to load files consisting only of tens of kilobytes into memory in microseconds, not minutes? Why then was it taking so long to load?
I turned off "true drive emulation" and turned on "enable virtual devices" from the settings menu but that didn't help.
Googling for this suggested enabling "warp mode" by pressing Alt-W but no such option appears on the settings or the menus and pressing Alt-W does nothing.
It also turned out that VICE actually runs x64sc, not x64. I don't even have the command "x64" installed. I tried dnf to see how I could get it, here is the output.
$ dnf whatprovides x64
Fedora 32 openh264 (From Cisco) - x86_64 2.5 kB/s | 2.5
kB 00:01
Fedora Modular 32 - x86_64 7.0 MB/s | 4.9
MB 00:00
Fedora Modular 32 - x86_64 - Updates 6.5 MB/s | 3.9
MB 00:00
Fedora 32 - x86_64 - Updates 9.5 MB/s | 27
MB 00:02
Fedora 32 - x86_64 9.3 MB/s | 70
MB 00:07
home:FrodeSolheim:stable (Fedora_31) 12 kB/s | 35
kB 00:02
RPM Fusion for Fedora 32 - Free - Updates 242 kB/s | 664
kB 00:02
RPM Fusion for Fedora 32 - Free 172 kB/s | 679
kB 00:03
RPM Fusion for Fedora 32 - Nonfree - Updates 146 kB/s | 119
kB 00:00
RPM Fusion for Fedora 32 - Nonfree 148 kB/s | 225
kB 00:01
vice-x64-3.2-6.fc32.x86_64 : Vice Commodore 64 Emulator
Repo : rpmfusion-nonfree
Matched from:
Filename : /usr/bin/x64
$ sudo dnf install vice-x64 [sudo] password for:
Last metadata expiration check: 0:16:14 ago on Wed 11 Nov 2020 11:37:51 AM EET.
Package vice-x64-3.4-1.fc32.x86_64 is already installed.
Dependencies resolved.
Nothing to do.
Complete!
Apparently vice-x64-3.2.6 provides "x64" but since I already have vice-x64-3.4.1 dnf doesn't install it.
How can this be resolved? Note that I don't necessarily need to install "x64" instead of "x64sc" if there's some other way. What I really want in the end is to have VICE load programs faster than a real Commodore 64, because that should be what modern systems are quite capable of.