2. What is VICE?

VICE is an emulator for many of the CBM machines. It runs on Unix, DOS and Windows 95. It emulates the Commodore 64, 128, VIC20, PET and the 600/700 machines. For more information see the VICE home page:

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dsladic/vice/vice.html

VICE has a builtin machine language monitor that may be used for debugging your programs. Using an emulator for debugging has some advantages:

• Since you're using a crossassembler/-compiler anyway, you don't need to transfer the program to the real machine until it is done.
• An emulator allows many things that are almost impossible one of the original machines. You may set watchpoints (detect read or write access to arbitary addresses), debug interrupt handlers and even debug routines that run inside the 1541 floppy.
• You may use the label file generated by the linker to make much more use from the monitor.

Please note that you need at least VICE version 0.16 for the label file feature to work. This version has still some problems (see Problems and workarounds), but older versions had even more problems and do not work correctly.