VirtualC64 emulates a Commodore 64 personal computer on your Macintosh. I wrote the software with two major goals in mind. First, I wanted to create an emulator that can be used as a demonstrator program in a first year or second year course on computer engineering. To achieve this goal, I have integrated various debugging capabilities that let you peek inside the CPU, RAM, ROM, or one of the custom chips. Second, I tried to make the emulator as user friendly as it can get. In short: VirtualC64 tries to combine the ongoing fascination of the ancient Commodore computers with the great user experience of today's Macs.

VirtualC64 utilizes a cycle based simulation engine to achieve high compatibility. Although cycle accurate emulation consumes more computing time than, e.g., line based emulation, all modern machines provide enough computing power to imitate a C64 in real-time. Please note that VirtualC64 is still beta! It does not yet reach the awesome compatibility of the classical emulators such as Frodo, Vice, or CSS. However, plenty of games are already running and the list of compatible applications grows with every new release. Right now, VirtualC64 supports the following file formats: D64, T64, PRG, P00.

I have spent a lot of time on designing a user-friendly interface. My overall goal was to restrict myself to those features that everybody expects from a descent emulator, but no more! VirtualC64 neither supports ancient devices such as virtual dot matrix printers, nor does it offer thousands of preference switches like other emulators do. VirtualC64 pursues the philosophy that typical actions must be easy to perform. E.g., to load a game, simply drag the file into the main screen. Installing ROM images works the same way.

The debug panel opens up when you click the Inspect button in the upper right corner of the toolbar. The panel lets you peek inside the virtual computer. E.g., you can inspect the CPU, RAM, ROM or one of the custom chips with a single click. In addition, VirtualC64 provides the main functionality of a typical source-level-debugger. You can freeze emulation any time, set breakpoints or memory traps, or single-step through your program.

VirtualC64 is open source software published under the GNU general public license. If you agree with VirtualC64's philosophy, you are welcome to join the project. The core emulator is written in C++. The graphical user interface is a native Cocoa application written in Objective-C. Please note that I don't want to port the emulator to other operating systems yet, nor do I want to add localizations. Stabilizing the emulation engine must be the first priority for now!