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4 System files

In order to work properly, the emulators need to load a few system files:

The place where they will be searched for depends on the value of the Directory resource, which is a colon (:)-separated search path list, like the UNIX PATH environment variable. The default value is

$HOME/.local/share/vice/EMU:PREFIX/share/vice/EMU:BOOTPATH/EMU

Where PREFIX is the installation prefix (usually /usr), EMU is the name of the emulated machine (C64, C64DTV, C128, PET, PLUS4, CBM-II, SCPU64 or VIC20) and BOOTPATH is the directory where the executable resides. The disk drive ROMs are looked for in a directory with EMU set to DRIVES. $HOME is the user’s home directory.

For example, if you have the C64 emulator installed in

/usr/bin/x64

then the value will be

$HOME/.local/share/vice/C64:/usr/share/vice/C64:/usr/bin/C64

And system files will be searched for under the following directories, in the specified order:

  1. $HOME/.local/share/vice/C64
  2. /usr/share/vice/C64
  3. /usr/bin/C64

System files can still be installed in a different directory if you specify a complete path instead of just a file name. For example, if you specify ./kernal as the kernal image name, the kernal image will be loaded from the current directory. This can be done by using command-line options or by modifying resource values (see Format of resource files).


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