Commodore VIC20 Install scripts

I am writing a script for adding the VIC20 game JetPac, using VICE Commodore emulator. The running the script the the install is OK, hitting a few issues running the game.

Log from running the game.

– GAME LOG –
Started initial process 13340 from gamemoderun /home/user/.local/share/lutris/runners/vice/bin/xvic -chdir /home/user/Software/VIC20 -VICdsize -sdl2renderer opengl /home/user/Software/VIC20/Jetpac.prg
Start monitoring process.
/home/user/.local/share/lutris/runners/vice/bin/xvic: error while loading shared libraries: libreadline.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Monitored process exited.
Initial process has exited (return code: 32512)
All processes have quit
Exit with return code 32512

There is the missing library, but first I’ll go through a couple of other observations first.

  1. There is no option (a game option?) to config the memory size, to emulated adding RAM Cartridges. This game does require adding memory expansion (option is “-memory 8k”)
  2. VICE does not have an “-sdl2renderer” option. There is “-sdl2backend” (VICE Manual - 8 Platform-specific features), though I see the default Ubuntu package is not built with it, unless Lutris has it’s own build that enables SDL.
  3. Finally, the missing libraries, first was libreadline.so.6, for a workaround around for now I put in a link to a later version.

$ cd ~/.local/share/lutris/runtime/Ubuntu-18.04-x86_64
$ ln -s libreadline.so.7 libreadline.so.6

And re-running the game gave the error;

– GAME LOG –
Started initial process 2529 from gamemoderun /home/user/.local/share/lutris/runners/vice/bin/xvic -chdir /home/user/Software/VIC20 -VICdsize -sdl2renderer software /home/user/Software/VIC20/Jetpac.prg
Start monitoring process.
/home/user/.local/share/lutris/runners/vice/bin/xvic: error while loading shared libraries: libFLAC.so.8: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Monitored process exited.
Initial process has exited (return code: 32512)

I put in a link to a later version in my KUbuntu install

$ cd ~/.local/share/lutris/runtime/Ubuntu-18.04-x86_64
$ ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libFLAC.so.14.0.0 libFLAC.so.8

Which then gives the error;

– GAME LOG –
Started initial process 2624 from gamemoderun /home/user/.local/share/lutris/runners/vice/bin/xvic -chdir /home/user/Software/VIC20 -VICdsize -sdl2renderer software /home/user/Software/VIC20/Jetpac.prg
Start monitoring process.
Monitored process exited.
Initial process has exited (return code: 132)

As this point I am not too sure if the error is due to the invalid “-sdl2renderer” parameter or could be due to a lib mismatch.

I am running Lutris version 0.5.19, OS is KUbuntu 25.10 running in a Virtual Box VM (version 7.2.4 r170995).