You know iAN CooG's divine Fast KERNAL hack for the C64.

Patching the KERNAL for faster reset

This is optional, but makes a big difference when it comes to eliminating start-up time.

When using the stock KERNAL, we must wait for about 3 seconds before sending the next command with netcat, otherwise this command is ignored by VICE. The BASIC memory test is what takes the most time, so we can patch the KERNAL to skip the memory test:

We need to store $9f in $fd69 in the KERNAL to achieve this. This cannot be done using the monitor, we need to patch the actual KERNAL file of VICE and then tell VICE to use the patched KERNAL. Patching goes something like this:

cp /usr/local/lib64/vice/C64/kernal kernal-quick-memtest
echo "1d69: 9f" | xxd -r - kernal-quick-memtest

Any method of altering a binary can be used, I prefer to do it this way, so I can stick it in a Makefile and never have to worry about whether I patched the KERNAL or not.

This makes the BASIC memtest finish almost immediately and still report the correct number of bytes free. (Thanks a lot to iAN CooG for suggesting this!)

VICE still needs to know about this new KERNAL, so the command to start VICE becomes: