#1192 VICE fails to output anyting to the console

[Tamás Kovács]

Vice version: GTK3VICE-3.4-win64-r37486
OS: Windows 10 Pro 1909, x64

Input:

• extract the above release,
• run cmd.exe
• cd into the vice directory
• run x64.exe -help

symptoms:

• there's no output on the screen

expected:

• vice prints usage information

Command line parsing seems to work, for example running x64.exe -keybuf hello starts the emualtor with "HELLO" typed in. Vice just doesn't print anything to the console.

[gpz]

that never worked in the windows versions afaik

[Greg King]

GTK VICE on Windows used to pop up a console (terminal) window even when it wasn't needed. That action has been suppressed. As a result, console output normally is redirected to "nowhere". In order to see the usage list, you must "catch" that output before it's dropped. Use this command:

x64 -h|more

[compyx]

You can get the terminal 'back' by compiling with --enable-debug, but that also enables some debug code wrt memory allocations and such, making it slightly slower. There's a hack where you change a single byte (or even a bit) in the .exe to switch the .exe. from UI-mode (-mwindows) to console-mode (-mconsole), but I forgot what it was.

Greg is correct: if you want any output from an -mwindows build, you'll have to pipe/redirect stdout/stderr to a file or a tool like 'more'.

[compyx]

Since this is 'normal' behaviour for Windows, I'm closing this.