By Mark Nobes, chief editor
The video clip above features an advert for the VIC-20 with William Shatner. As you will see, it's aimed at grabbing a slice of the Atari and Intellivision gaming hardware market, and is basically shoving two fingers up to them!
The VIC-20 is probably most-remembered for being the very first computer (of any type) to sell 1 million units. It was released in 1981 as a replacement for the PET, and used the same MOS 6502 CPU.With just 5kb of RAM, the limited memory was a bit of a nightmare for programmers to get around, although it could be expanded to 40kb by purchasing an add-on memory cartridge. Commodore roped in Scott Adams, an adventure game designer who founded Adventure International (with his wife Alexis), and who had already created text adventure games for the Tandy/Radio Shack computers such as the TRS-80. Five 16kb games were released on a ROM cartridge instead of on cassette, which solved the memory problem.
Public domain image of the Vic-20
The Vic-20 boot-up screen. For those with no knowledge of the BASIC programming language, seeing the word "Ready" was perplexing. I can just hear thousands of new computer enthusiasts in their bedrooms shouting "What the hell am I supposed to do now?"
The resolution of the start screen is 176 x 184 pixels with the fixed colour border as you can see.
This was a pretty basic skiing game for the Vic-20 that could be controlled with the keyboard. I remember programming a similar type of game in BASIC and this was one of the simplest types of game to program.
The VIC-20 in all its glory
A Vic-20 and peripherals at the Helsinki Computer and Game Console Museum
This is a third party clone of Commodore's1530 tape drive and it was compatible with C64, C128, PET and VIC-20.
The cover of Compute! magazine (Issue 24) from May 1982. You can see every cover of the magazine at AtariMagazines.com
This is a great photo of a Vic-20 set-up, complete with scruffy box and manuals!
A cool metallic blue one!
Wacky Waiters Game
Here is a video clip of a game called Wacky Waiters. The gameplay and commentary is by a programmer
called Eugene Evans, and it's being playing on an unexpanded Vic 20. By the way, this guy admits that whenever he's commenting on a game he plays badly, as you will see! It looks like a very frustrating game, and you get the idea of how basic games were back in the day - we still loved 'em, though!
Simplyeighties.com
