1 · Load your ROMs
Drop in your own dumps — including an aftermarket KERNAL you
already own, such as JiffyDOS. Every patch site is found by scanning, so those
work as well as a stock one, and nothing is uploaded: all patching happens
locally in this page. If you have VICE installed, its stock ROMs are in a
C64/ directory beside the binaries.
Or fetch the stock set. They come from VICE on GitHub, pinned to one commit and checked against the fingerprints below before they are accepted. This is the one thing in Romulus that touches the network. JiffyDOS is a commercial product and is not there — supply your own.
2 · Boot screen
Raw PETSCII, printed straight to the screen editor — so color and reverse codes work inside the text. Length is fixed by the space in the ROM.
3 · Default colors
Border and background come from the VIC-II init table; the text
color is the immediate operand feeding $0286.
4 · Convenience patches
The classic quality-of-life changes, applied only where the matching code was actually located in your ROM.
Boot preview
Rendered from your character ROM with the colors and text above.