12 Contact information

12.1 VICE home page

You can find the latest news about VICE at the official VICE home page:

http://www.tu-chemnitz.de/~fachat/vice/vice.html

Also the public patches and beta releases will be available there as well, so you might want to have a look at it periodically. If you are going to report a bug, please check those pages first; it is possible that the problem you encountered has already been fixed with a newer version.

12.2 How to send feedback

If you want to report bugs, make suggestions or contribute to the project, please email one of the following people:

• Teemu Rantanen (tvr@cs.hut.fi) for the SID stuff;

• Andreas Boose (boose@linux.rz.fh-hannover.de) for the 1541 disk drive;

• André Fachat (fachat@physik.tu-chemnitz.de) for the PETs;

• Ettore Perazzoli (ettore@comm2000.it), the current maintainer, for everything else.

It's always nice to receive feedback and/or bugreports about VICE, but please read these few notes before sending mail to anybody in the team.

• Please put the word `VICE' in all capitals in your subject line (e.g. `VICE fails to run game XXX'). This helps mail splitting and reduces chances that your message is unintentionally deleted, forgotten or lost.

• Please don't send any HTML mail (we really hate that!). If you use M$ Outlook or Netscape Communicator, make sure you turn off the "rich text" (HTML) feature.

• Please don't send any binaries without asking first.

• Please read the following documents carefully before reporting a bug or a problem you cannot solve:

  • the VICE documentation (you are reading it!);

  • the VICE FAQ (it is available on the Internet, and reachable from the VICE home page: http://www.tu-chemnitz.de/~fachat/vice/vice.html);

  • the comp.emulators.cbm and comp.sys.cbm FAQs (see section 12.5 FAQs you should read).

• When you report a bug, please try to be as accurate as possible and describe how it can be reproduced to the very detail. You should also tell us what machine you are running on, what operating system you are using as well as the version of it.

• Please don't ask us how to transfer original C64 disk or tapes to your PC; this has been asked a gazillion times through email. To transfer disks, you can use the Star Commander (http://ludens.elte.hu/~sta/sc.html). And no, you cannot read C64 disks with your old 5"1/4 PC drive.

• Please don't ask us where to find games for the emulator on the Internet.

• Please don't ask us when the next version will be out, because we really don't know.

• Please write in English, or in the language of the person you are writing to (Ettore is Italian, André and Andreas are German, Teemu is Finnish, Daniel is from Canada).

In any case, we would be really glad to receive your comments about VICE.

Thanks!

12.3 How to contribute

If you want to make a major contribution, please ask first. It has already happened a couple of times that somebody started working at something that had already been done but not released to the public yet, and we really do not want anybody to waste time.

If you are going to make a patch, please make sure the patch is relative to the very latest version, and provide us with the following:

• a diff file containing all the changes you have made (`diff -c' or `diff -u' (better) is fine; please don't use plain `diff');

• GNU-style `ChangeLog' entries with a description of the changes you have made (look at the `ChangeLog's provided with the original VICE sources for an example).

This is very important, and makes adding patches much smoother and safer.

People willing to port VICE to other platforms are always welcome. A Windows and a MacOS port are in the works, so if you are interested in those platforms, please let us know. There is plenty of work to do and any sort of help can be very useful.

12.4 Interesting newsgroups

There are some Usenet newsgroups you might be interested in:

• comp.emulators.cbm, discussing about emulators of Commodore 8-bit machines (definitely not Amiga emulators).

• comp.sys.cbm, discussing various topics regarding real Commodore 8-bit machines. This newsgroup is mainly for people who actually use original Commodore equipment (so please don't talk about emulation here).

• comp.emulators.misc, discussing emulators in general.

12.5 FAQs you should read

We recommend reading the comp.emulators.cbm and comp.sys.cbm FAQs, which are posted regularly on the corresponding newsgroups and are also available via FTP from ftp://rtfm.mit.edu.

Go to the first, previous, next, last section, table of contents.