BMC64 Updated To v1.5

04/19/2019

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The developers of BMC64, a C64 Emulator for the Raspberry Pi models 2 & 3, has posted a update to version 1.5 with the following PSA.

IMPORTANT PSA: BMC64 v1.0.6 through v1.4 were not properly putting the other 3 (unused) cores to a low powered mode and was causing CPU temperatures to rise close to or beyond automatic throttling limits. I’m very sorry about this. I don’t believe this pushed the devices beyond their limits, it was just a waste of heat. The Pi will automatically throttle itself if CPU temperature goes beyond a certain limit. If you saw thermometer icons in the top right corner of your screen, this is probably why. V1.5+ fixes this.

If you are using an older version, I strongly recommend you update to v1.5

BMC64 is a bare metal C64 Emulator (using VICE) for the Raspberry Pi (Models 2 & 3). There is no bloated O/S to boot and the emulator has direct access to hardware resulting in better performance than the Linux based distributions. VICE dependencies are satisfied using circle-stdlib.

GitHub Link: https://github.com/randyrossi/bmc64

Features

Quick boot time: 5 seconds!
True 50hz/60hz smooth scrolling (no horizontal tearing or jitters!)
Low latency between input and audio/video
Excellent audio/video synchronization
No need to issue a shutdown sequence, just power off
Supports wiring real joysticks via GPIO pins (optional) Click Here for adapter build instructions

Downloads

1.5 Release

Format a FAT32 SD card and/or partition and unzip bmc64-1.5.files.zip onto it. The Pi will boot from the first FAT partition. See below for files you will need to provide yourself.