VICE Manual - 19 Contact information

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# 19 Contact information

## 19.1 VICE home page

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

    http://vice-emu.sourceforge.net

VICE has moved its source repository to public services provided by SourceForge. You can find it at

    http://sf.net/projects/vice-emu.

We would like to thank the SourceForge staff for that help. 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.

## 19.2 How to send feedback

Before contacting us, have a look at this manual and see if your question is answered there. Keep in mind that we work on VICE in our spare-time, so the more time we don't need to answer the same questions over and over again, the more time we have to improve the emulation itself. On the other hand, that does not mean that you should not contact us, especially if you find bugs or have suggestions which might improve the emulation. Bug reports, suggestions, support requests should be directed to the SourceForge trackers at

- http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=223021.

This way, you, the users, and we, the developers, can track what has been reported and what has been already fixed. Ideally, also sent the report to the mailing address of the Vice team at

- VICE Mailing List (vice-emu-mail@lists.sourceforge.net) for all general questions, bug reports, suggestions.

You can also contact (some of) us on IRC, at #vice-dev on freenode. 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://vice-emu.sourceforge.net);
  - the `comp.emulators.cbm` and `comp.sys.cbm` FAQs (see section 19.5 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://sta.c64.org/sc.html) on DOS, and OpenCBM (http://www.trikaliotis.net/opencbm) on Windows and Linux. 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.

In any case, we would be really glad to receive your comments about VICE. We cannot always answer all the email, but we surely read all of it. Thanks!

## 19.3 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:

- Make sure you are giving us a diff against the latest Subversion trunk version of VICE. For instructions on accessing the Subversion repository, first read http://sourceforge.net/svn/?group_id=223021 and get it with the command:

      `svn co https://vice-emu.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/vice-emu/trunk vice-src'

- send a unified diff file against the trunk version of VICE (see above bullet point) by using the command: ``svn diff'` inside of the SVN workspace you checked out before.
- If you cannot use SVN for one or the other reason, send a unified diff file containing all the changes you have made ``diff -u'`; please don't use plain ``diff'`), as it adds much work for us to get it working;
- 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. But notice from experience it will take at least a full year of continuous work to write a well working and stable port.

## 19.4 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.

## 19.5 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.

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