I recently had a hankering for some MULE, so I thought, before I can get 4 people together, I might as well set it up all up optimally. So here's what I got.

End result

As of right now, I have MULE running from a script, autolaunching, with four players: one real joystick (a PS2 pad into a USB adaptor), and three keyboard joysticks centred around s, l, and numpad 5. I wasn't able to get fullscreen.

How to get there

Install VICE, which is in the vice package in Debian.

VICE requires a number of C64 system ROMs, which are non-free, so aren't distributed with the emulator. I found them pretty easily on Google (don't copy that floppy!). The minimum set of ROMs is:

• 1541 (the disk drive, which has its own CPU?)
• basic
• chargen
• kernal (yep, that's the way C64 spells it :P)

Stick them in the proper locations (/usr/lib/vice/EMU, or more precisely, PREFIX/lib/vice/EMU:$HOME/.vice/EMU:BOOTPATH/EMU), or put them wherever and specify the location using the -kernal $pathtokernel etc. arguments.

Get yourself a MULE disk image, which is also kind of piracy so I won't link to it. Also get Peiselulli's 4 player crack. You need to replace the M.U.L.E.prg file in the disk image with the mule4p.prg file from the crack. (You might be able to execute mule4p.prg directly with VICE, as opposed to the disk image, but I didn't try that.) To modify the disk image, I used droid64, which is a little beta-y, and make sure you back up the original disk image first, because it writes straight to it. In order to use the 4p crack, you need to enable the CGA Userport adaptor.

Configure your joysticks. I used my real joystick as 1, numpad as 2, then keysets 1 and 2 as joy 3 and 4.

I also like the VICII DoubleSize option to make it actual visible at 1080p :P

Save them settings in an external file, and/or save the command-line switches in a shell script.

Dead ends and problems

Without the 4p crack, the 3 and 4 player keys were a right bastard to get working for reasonable people who had never played MULE or C64 before, although I eventually did do it. I think using the standard VICE Symbolic keymap, the keys are:

• Left keyboard up: Q on C64 => Q on PC
• Left keyboard down: C= (Commodore) on C64 => Left Ctrl on PC
• Right keyboard up: = (equals) on C64 => = on PC
• Right keyboard down: up arrow symbol on C64 (not the up arrow cursor) => ` (grave/unshifted tilde) on PC

The ` thing took me ages to figure out, and I don't think it worked at first. I tried to figure out the keymap files and get up and down mapped to Q, A, O, and L, but the keymap codes (row/column) are based on the original matrix wiring of the C64 which I couldn't find a good source for, but figured out that the up arrow key is (6,6).

VICE supposedly supports a fullscreen mode via XRANDR or Vidmode switching, but neither of them worked, nor did setting the WindowHeight or -Width properties in the config file. It might have something to do with an incompatibility with GNOME3 or my oft-busted NVIDIA drivers, but I'm not overly concerned about it, and was able to work around it with a global zoom plugin/extension for GNOME3.

References

• http://www.c64-wiki.com/index.php/MULE