For new users - make a post or say hello

[Soloman]

Welcome neighbors from Germany!

[jochwat]

Hello, everyone! Joe here from the corn / solar panel fields of Northern Indiana, USA.

As a pre-teen in the beginning of the 1980s, my Dad wouldn't splurge on a home videogame console. Too expensive for a box that would just make an already "husky" boy sit around in the house even more than normal. But when I saw that the local K-Mart was promoting the Vic 20, a real computer, for only $88! I showed my parents the newspaper ad, they discussed it, and Dad and I went to go pick up the machine. He saw they also had a "Commodore 64" on sale for $249 and asked, would you rather get this one? That seemed like a lot of money, and I was happy just to be getting the Vic, so I said, nah, the $88 one is fine.

Eventually the Vic 20 was indeed upgraded to a tape drive, then a floppy drive, then to a C64, then an Amiga 1000, and then a 2000HD, and a 3000, until finally the writing was on the wall and I've been in Windows-land ever since.

But recently I found a Facebook Marketplace ad selling a couple of Vic-20s. One works well, the other has a video issue but works outside of that. Grabbed a Penultimate+ 2 cart, a SD card drive, a video cable, and a joystick, and downloaded a bunch of books. I guess this is one way to be 13 again! Amazed what you folks out there are making for my first computer these days. Tetris was a fun surprise, for sure. Can't wait to dig into more fun stuff.

-Joe

[Lechuck]

Great story, Joe,

Welcome to Denial!

Yes, you are right, I guess that, for many of us, this is like being 13 again

Cheers

[orion70]

Being thirteen again is the reason why I keep coming back here on a regular basis. Welcome!

[Orangeman96]

Me too! I am just getting back into my VIC-20 nowadays.

[ibaldachini]

Hi, I'm Igor from Italy.

I have my Vic 20 from far 1982, probably like you!

[orion70]

Benvenuto Igor! Glad to have another Italian fellow in the friendly forum . Have fun!

[c=razy]

My first post to the forum.

I've been into C64 my entire computer using life but just acquired my first VIC-20.

A very clean and 100% functional unit with gold badge and PET style keys made in the USA.

Also had some boxed games with Jupiter Lander being one of them.

Inside was not only all the documentation as expected but also this receipt for $20.50 from September 30th 1982.

The address on the receipt was the same address I acquired this lot from at an estate sale.

Jupiter Lander Receipt from September 30th 1982

[srowe]

Welcome to the forum.

I think it's nice when you get these pieces of information that give you a little bit of the history of an item. I'm sure $20 was quite a bit of money to someone in 1982.

Simon.

[batkins]

Hi!

Retired IT guy now reliving my younger days with Commodore computers namely VIC-20, 64, Amiga. PET is probably going to happen at some point.

Enjoying the modern twists!

[aussiekraut]

Well, not a new member as such but a quiet one

I'm a retired IT support tech, sys admin, networking engineer and software developer who hates computers these days...except those old machines that got me into this IT mess in the first place

My first exposure to computers was the PETs we had at school back in 79, maybe 80. There were a few 3008s, one 3016, and the crown jewel was the 3032 with two floppy drives. Due to a chronic lack of funds, I didn't get my first computer until early 1984, when I picked up a Vic, a Datasette, two cassettes and all that packed into a sports bag at a sale for a whopping DM450, not cheap at the time but affordable, considering a similar C64 would have set me back a grand more, albeit with a 1541.

Fast forward 40 years, and the VIC is long gone (faulty character ROM or something) and with it, all my old software, source code, extension cartridges and the "Super Expander" box with six expansion slots, and I could put the monitor on top. These days, I have two VICs, one soon to go, a TheVic20, a Commodore Pi (Breadbox case, KeyRah adapter, RasPi 2, running Combian) and, of course, VICE on all my computers. Yes, I know, for somebody who hates computers, I have a lot of them around There are also a C64, another Commodore PI booting into C64, a C16, a Plus 4 and an Amiga 500. There are more but that'll do

[mingle]

Well, not a new member as such but a quiet one

Glad to see you finally plucked-up the courage! Sounds like you spend more time with computers that you realise!

Cheers,

Mike.

[aussiekraut]

Well, not a new member as such but a quiet one

Oh yes, I do. There are four active ones in my study/man cave alone but I am in the process of cleaning up and selling here and there. I also have way too many old 8- and 16-bit computers I am slowly separating from. There is one thing I have way less than those old machines and that is space There are some in the cupboard in my study, some on a shelf in the garage, some in my brew shed and even in my wife's study cupboard. You can definitely tell the difference between a five-bedroom and a three-bedroom house

[Damocles]

Hello everyone. Please excuse lengthy post but I've finally managed to get an old login of mine working again so I could revisit this place as it's been a while since I was last around. Won't make that mistake again, I promise. At the bottom of this page is my introduction post I put up when I first joined back in 2007. It saves me having to type it all up again. A fair bit has changed since i wrote all that, specifically i'm now more of a Mac person these days, even though I do have a Windows laptop for when I need one.

I'm looking to get back into coding on the Vic 20 again properly, even though, really, I've never actually left directly. I've been making remakes of Vic 20 games for a few years now using Gamemaker, and I've also toyed with coding for the machine itself by using the fantastic TRSE multi-platform development system that I'm sure a lot of you have heard of and used. You have to code in Pascal for that, however, and I've recently had a strong urge to just get better at original 6502, as I only did half a job back in the early 80's, when I first encountered the Vic.

I'm going to try using Kick Assembler this time, as I can develop on the mac, and I'm playing with IDE65XX for the editor, as I can use that on Mac too, and don't have to faff about between the laptop and my Mac then. I know I'm going to need a lot of advice to get going with this as my old brain doesn't quite process stuff as well as my teenage-self, for sure.

Jeffrey, if you're reading, I did send a message to you on itch about getting my account reset, but shouldn't need that now I've got back in with this one. Thanks.


My old login was Xerra, or Xerra_, and this was my introduction post back in 2007. Cor, I was young then, at a glorious 38 years old. I'm 55 now.
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Looks like this is the place to say "Hello" if you've just signed up to these forums so here I am. I found this place quite by accident as I was doing a little reminiscing (spell?) this evening after playing a rather good clone of an old Vic 20 game called Rockman which I absolutely loved. More on that in the appropriate forum, I guess.

Anyway, my name's Tony and I first owned a Vic 20 in what must have been around 1983 or somewhere close which I inherited from my grandad when he got himself a C64. Being a typical teenager at the time I was never allowed to have the machine in my bedroom and had to rely on using the living room telly to use it as long as none of the other family members wanted to watch TV or use the living room for anything else - most frustrating when you lived with two pain-in-the-butt sisters

Anyway one condition of actually being able to keep the Vic in my bedroom (after this had gone on for around six months) was to prove to my mother that I could learn to do something clever with the machine which involved learning how to program. And, like many other people here, I suspect, that's how it all started. I wrote a simple little platform game called "Brother John" that involved a monk running along floors and jumping over fireballs to get to the bell at the top of the screen. It was real minimalist stuff and had very little colour because, once I had the machine to myself and started improving on the basic game, I had to use it on a black & white TV so didn't bother using colour as I couldn't see it.

From there I grew addicted to many of the great Vic games and got myself a 16k expansion as a present the following Xmas so I could play the really good ones. Classics that come straight to mind are Rockman, Omega Race, the Scott Adams cartridges (mum used to love these too and used to nick the computer to play them with her friends), Envahi, Matrix, Revenge of the Quadra, Myriad, Quakers, Space Freaks etc etc. I can't believe I still remember so many of them.

Many a great Friday evening would be spent - after school and doing my evening job to support my hobby - browsing the Mastertronic range in my local 7-11 to see what was new and worth buying.

I went on from there to start working on 6502 assembly language - which I never fully developed unfortunately - and got to a level where I would write programs mostly in basic and usually stuff routines in the cassette buffer (832-911 if I remember correctly) to do the speedy stuff such as scroll routines etc. I still remember grinning like a muppet when I tried to load in some code which i'd saved directly to tape from the memory location and wondering why it didn't work when it loaded back in. The cassette buffer was being used - der!

It was in 87 that I got my Commodore 64 finally - I had to pay half the cost of it and wait for a sale and it was my birthday and Xmas present for that year - our family was very hard up. I started programming that straight away by converting some of the better stuff I had done on the Vic such as a really powerfull 8 * 8 UDG designer as it didn't take long to realise that most of the code was compatible (and would even load in on the tape player) apart from switching over most of the poke command numbers and having more control over background/foreground colours - as well as a bigger pallette. 6510 machine code was almost identical too - in fact I can't even remember the differences but I think it may have been a slightly larger stack size and a couple of extra commands for shifting bytes left/right.

After that I left home and eventually went to the Amiga (I was an out & out Commodore man and hated other computers with a vengance even though, ironically I was lent a 16k Spectrum once and learnt a little bit of programming on that just for a change) which I'll never forget as long as I live. I ran a bulletin board for a few years, lived through all the stages of modems (Internet and Broadband were way in the future in these days) and even freelanced for CU Amiga magazine for a few issues as I had a lot of good contacts back then. Great years

Eventually I went to a PC as did mostly everyone else as Commodore crashed and burned and the Amiga died. But I've never forgotten the Vic as it was my first computer and I learnt so much and had so many wonderfull years with it.

Great to see I'm not the only one with some great memories and I'm glad to be here.

[Endurion]

Hey thar!

I've got this forum recommended by CBMWarrior from Forum64. I never had much contact with a VIC20 back then, only a friend had it. So my knowledge is very restricted and mostly of the C64.

I'm a developer by passion, and beside a lot of Retro Remakes for PC I also wrote a Retro IDE (C64Studio), that supports most Commodore machines and also a few others. I also released a few games for C64. Most of them can also be seen/downloaded from my homepage (https://www.georg-rottensteiner.de) or itch.io.

Maybe one of these days I see what to get out of the VIC20!