Install vice with Homebrew, apk, apt, Nix, pacman, winget

Project links

• Homepage
• Repository
• Upstream docs
• Package manager page

Commands and aliases

• c1541
• cartconv
• petcat
• vsid
• x128
• x64
• x64dtv
• x64sc
• xcbm2
• xcbm5x0
• xpet
• xplus4
• xscpu64
• xvic

Project history

VICE development began in 1993 under Finnish programmer Jarkko Sonninen, who founded the project and retired from it in 1994. The project later continued as a volunteer-maintained emulator suite under the VICE Team, with official distribution and source hosting on SourceForge.

By the 2000s VICE had become one of the standard Commodore 8-bit emulation packages, especially on free Unix-like systems where historically fewer full-featured Commodore emulators were available. VICE was released under the GNU General Public License from 2004, and its manual and source tree document a broad, preservation-oriented codebase rather than a single-machine emulator.

Adoption history

The VICE name also covered platform-specific identities over time: older Win32 builds were widely known as WinVICE, while OS/2 and BeOS variants were called Vice/2 and BeVICE. As the project modernized, some old host ports were retired; VICE 3.4 dropped support for several legacy Unix-like systems because of lack of maintainers, and VICE 3.5 dropped explicit OS/2 and AmigaOS support during the GTK3 UI transition.

How it is used

Users typically launch the machine-specific emulator they need, such as `x64sc` or `x64` for Commodore 64, `x128` for Commodore 128, `xvic` for VIC-20, `xpet` for PET, or `xplus4` for Plus/4. The suite also includes command-line and conversion tools such as `c1541`, `cartconv`, `petcat`, and `vsid`, making it useful both for playing preserved software and for retrocomputing development workflows.

Why package nerds care

For package maintainers and retrocomputing users, VICE is significant because it packages a large preservation stack into reproducible builds across operating systems. Its breadth means distributions often expose many executables from one package, and its SourceForge-era history makes it a classic example of mature free software infrastructure surviving multiple host-platform and UI transitions.

Timeline

• 1993: VICE development began under Jarkko Sonninen.
• 1994: Sonninen retired from the project.
• 2004: VICE was free software under the GNU GPL.
• 2008-12-19: VICE 2.1 release documented support for C64, C128, VIC-20, Plus/4, C64DTV, PET, and CBM-II families.
• 2019-2020 era: VICE 3.4 and 3.5 retired several old host ports while moving through GTK3 UI modernization.
• 2025-12-24: VICE 3.10 released.

Related projects

• Related Commodore and emulator projects include CCS64, MAME, and VICE.js, a JavaScript port of VICE.
• The suite targets Commodore 8-bit families rather than later Amiga systems, so it complements rather than replaces Amiga-focused emulators.

Sources

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VICE
• https://sourceforge.net/projects/vice-emu/
• https://vice-emu.sourceforge.io/
• https://vice-emu.sourceforge.io/vice_toc.html