Driver	Lets you pick a video card to output Vices graphics if you have more then one.
Bitdepth	Sets the colour depth of the fullscreen displayed by Vice.
Resolution	Sets the resolution of the fullscreen displayed by Vice.
Refresh Rate	Sets the display frequency of the fullscreen display in hz
VBLANK synchronization	Can help stop "tearing" of scrolling games by synchronizing the display to your monitor.
Render to DX Primary surface	Uses DirectX to display the emulator screen. Can help speed things up in some cases.

OK it says VICII in x64 but I though I'd save some time and reuse the Vic 20 shot. Oh VIC and VICII are the graphics chip.

Gamma (0..2)	Sets the brightness of the screen.
Phase (0..2)	Dunno... Any suggestions?
PAL Shade (0..1)	Sets how much Vice darkens the screen in PAL emulation mode.
PAL Blur (0..1)	Sets the amount of blurring used in PAL emulation mode.
PAL Mode	Sets which PAL screen effect is used by Vice
External Palette	Lets you use a different colour palette in Vice from a file. See the Vice documentation for how to make pallette files (if you're feeling brave!)

Saturation	The amount of colour in a screen.
Contrast	How much difference there is between black and white in a screen.
Brightness	The brightness of a screen

The VDC palette option lets you load a palette file to set the colours used in the VDC

 

Before I start to shorten things a bit because on each page there is a button called "Use IEC Device". This button enables the device for Vice to use. The following will describe what the options for the printer and drive pages do.

Printer Emulation	Sets how Vice emulates a printer attached to the C128.
Printer driver	This option lets you set which printer is emulated. It can be ASCII for generic printing, the Commodore MPS803 printer or the Star NL10 printer. The latter two are better for graphic output.
Output	Sets whether to output text or a graphic file.
Output to file #	Sets which printer output file to use.
Output file #1 name	Set up as a file called viceprnt.out which is saved as a file and can be edited later by you.
Output file #2 name	Defaults to LPT1: which is your printer port.
Output file #3 name	Defaults to LPT2: which is a second printer port if you have one.
Send Formfeed	Sends a command to the printer to finish printing and feed out the paper.

Disk Image	Lets you select a disk image file to put into your disk drive.
Directory	Lets you use a folder as a "virtual" disk. The P00 bit is the file type used on Commodore disks.
Real IEC device	This option is only highlighted if you have a real Commodore disk drive attached to your PC. This is done through a special interface. Read the Vice docs for more info.
None	Says that there's nothing in the drive.

 

Drive Type	Vice emulates several Commodore disk drives. Here you can select which drive Vice emulates. If you're a bit of a techie then you can find details of the supported drives here.
40 track handling	Floppy disks at the time of the C128 only used 40 tracks for data. This option lets Vice use more if it needs to.
Drive expansion	Not Sure Yet.
Idle method	This option sets how Vice treats the disk drive at idle. Changing these settings effects the speed of the emulated CPU.
Parallel cable	This is to emulate a Speed-DOS parallel cabled disk drive that was connected to the C128 via a parallel port. A Speed-DOS disk ROM image is needed for this to work properly.

All this window really does is set the speed of the datasette motor. Use only if you are sure you know what your doing. Oh the Reset Datasette with CPU option will "rewind" the tape if you reset the C128.

The options in here help with compatability in games with sprites. New colors sets the C128 colour palette to different settings.

Joystick in port #...	Lets you set the keys/joystick that you wnat to use in Vice.
Select fire button	Lets you set which joystick button is used for fire.
Autofire speed (1..32)	Lets you set the speed of the autofire button on a joystick.
Menu 1	Lets you use an analog joystick axis to set the speed of the autofire,
Menu 2	Lets you select a controller button to use as the autofire button.
Config Keyset ...	Lets you set keys or controller movements as joystick movements in Vice.

This screen lets you use alternative keymaps for use in Vice. This is useful if you don't have a standard US/UK keyboard. The two types are symbolic which means it maps a key combination to a single key on the C128 and positional which maps the keys on your keyboard the the key that is on the same position on the C128 keyboard. To do this it uses keyboard files which you can find documentation for in Vices help files.

DirectX/WMM driver	These are the drivers for your sound caqrd in windows. Each one has it's benefits on different sound cards. You'll just have to see which one siuts your card best.
Sample Frequency	This is the quality of the sound produced by Vice. The higher the better but at the cost of speed on low end machines.
Sound Buffer Size	The sound buffer size helps to stop sound stuttering by always keeping a bit in memory.
Oversampling Factor	Boosts up the volume
Synchronization Method	All this does is decide how Vice syncs the sound to the video being produced. Flexible is probably best unless you get sound problems.

 

SID Engine	This is the way the Vice emulates the SID sound chip used in the C128. You have fastSID which is quick but not accurate, reSID which is very accurate but can slow things down and Catweazle/hardSID which are special bits of hardware for your PC to emulate C128 sound.
SID Model	Selecte which SID chip to emulate.
SID Stereo	Emulates a second SID chip giving stereo sound.
SID Filters	Emulates programmable filters used in SID chips. Again can slow things down on ghetto PC's.

The ReSID lets you set up how accurate the ReSID emualtion is and the HardSID tab lets you set up your HardSID device if you have one.

This window lets you change the ROMS use in the C128. Over periods of time the ROMs get changed and updated for different revisions of the C128 and if you can get hold of them you can use them in Vice.

As you can see this is for experts only. I haven't got a clue either!

Lets you set the country of the C128 that you want to emulate. I cant find any documents on the function ROMs yet so I don't know.

This window sets up Vices RS232 (serial port) output. Like the printer you can send the output to a file or a device connected to your computers serial port. This again is more for the expert but you may find it more familiar as you get more used to Vice and the computers it emulates.

REU stands for Ram Expansion Unit and fitted into the back of the C128 expanding the ram up to 16MB. You can select the size of the expansion with the REU size menu. The REU file is used as a backup image of the contents of the REU.

This window lets you set up the emulation of an IDE64 hard drive in Vice. This requires a specific cartridge ROM image to be running on the C128 which you can get from here. Download the firmware which is zipped and open it. In the archive there is another zip file called perper01.zip. Open that one and extract the peron64.prg to your C:\Vice folder. Now attach the perom64.prg file as a cartridge image from the file menu. To use it you'll need to read the instruction on the IDE64 site.

This is what you'll see if you try and open the Ethernet settings option. If you really want to use ethernet emulation then you'll neet to install some software on your PC. It's calles WinPCAP and you can get it from here. I'm not going into this option as the guide is for beginners so you'll need to investigate this yourself.

The ACIA is a special serial interface used by the C128 for communication. There isn't much documentation on it but it is required for certain serial devices to work.

This window lets you select which serial device you want to use and the speed at which Vice accesses it.