Newbie confused by VICE ...

[canuckster]

A few days ago I asked for help tracking down an old PET game; through Robert's help, I was successful. Since then I've installed VICE (on a 64-bit Windows 7 machine) and have started exploring. But I'm coming up with some strange behaviour that a cursory search of VICE's sourceforge pages did nothing to help.

1) I run xpet.exe.
2) I attach the appropriate disk image (a D64 file).
3) I load the game and run it.
4) It appears to start running just fine, and I'm able to press 1 or 2 to indicate the number of players; a moment later, the game starts and ...
... no keys function anymore.

I remember this game in particular being a left-arrow-right-arrow game (no joystick required) and I've pressed every key -- nothing does anything. I'm forced to reset. What's more, the layout on the screen seemed odd, as though all the action was in the top half of the screen but the player was in the bottom half all by himself (and that's not how it's supposed to be!).

So I tried a few other games in the disk image, and in each case things seemed strange. For example, "Word Search" would ask me how many words I'd like to search for, but every response of mine (which I'd see echoed back to me on screen, ie "1", "2", or "79") was ignored (so I'd be asked to answer the question again). Yet another game, "Maze", would get stuck while 'building' the maze.

Now I realize that you may not know these games at all, and that my problems sound way to vague to diagnose, and that's fine -- I'm not looking for a detailed answer. But the overall experience has been so odd and I have no other point of reference, so I guess I'm asking whether this sort of behaviour surprises you? Do you have any suggestions on how to troubleshoot?

Thanks for your patience!

[LoneWolf33]

Hi,

VICE can emulate many different PET machines, and they are different in terms of screen (40 vs 80 column display) and memory layouts.
You can see which PET type is currently emulated by checking the "PET model settings..." from the Settings menu (see the attached screenshot).

A program which is written for a specific PET model may run incorrectly (or not run at all) when launched on a different PET model.
From the description you've provided it seems you're trying to run a code which is written for a PET with 40 column display,
while VICE emulates a PET model with 80 column display.

I hope this might help.