Time Traveller: A Vic enthusiasts tale.

[freshlamb]

I wrote this a couple of years ago, it's kinda my story but I think it is quite a few others as well. Hope you enjoy.

Time Traveller: A Vic enthusiasts tale.

It is a funny thing going from 1982 to 2013. In a certain way I think I have done just that. I remember getting the Vic and spending the first night until 4am using my rudimentary BASIC skills to cobble together my first program. That was 1982. I had a few friends who liked to dabble on the Vic and one who partnered to create the first AJ & KJ game. He told me the premise and after stealing a ML scrolling routine I made what I thought he meant. I was quite disappointed when he informed me that this was totally unlike the vision he had. When I asked him to program something closer, he replied he couldn’t. Although it was the end of the partnership AJ & KJ games continued. Games were expensive, and my family was not rich. We did manage to get some very cool games on the tail end of the Vic’s demise. Choplifter, and Loderunner were simply amazing. I was terrible at video games, but I played Loderunner until I played all 24 levels. Life by the Vic was good, but I soon learned, that everyone was moving on to the 64. I couldn’t afford one, and that was that. My programming skills were getting better so I continued. I started to learn Machine Language, but it was difficult and no one (that I knew) knew it or could help understand the things I couldn’t wrap my brain around. I kept at it finishing a very difficult ML subroutine in 1992, and an all ML game in 1993. Still I continued, getting some items from a friend who was getting rid of some crap from the closet, such as a 8K cartridge and a MSD SD-2 disk drive. Soon I programmed a simple RPG. I was an isolated vic 20 enthusiast, sort of believing I was the last one, when the internet arrived and dropped me at Jeff Daniels geocites web site (having nothing to do with Geos unfortunately). So I realized there was at least one other person with this cursed affliction. I also found Vic emulators such as VICE and started moving as much of my archive to the PC as possible. The geocities website was never updated and soon was shut down. A small glimmer of hope was gone, I but I continued, working on a difficult ML project. The Denial website started around 2004 or so and I became a member, but life got interesting for a while and I just didn’t have time to dedicate to this. I sold much of my physical vic stuff, and archived the stuff on the PC. For some reason in 2010 I started to come back, and did a bit of work on my ML game. I soon managed to transfer the last of the disks to the PC. Then in an ‘on again off again’ manner, I would re-visit my vic folder, and finally in 2013 I finished the first game in about 10 years and the first game on VICE. Soon my large ML project followed (a 3K game in 4 parts weighing in at about 13000 bytes), and 3 other games. I started re-lurking the halls of Denial, but surprizingly the halls are not empty. In fact they are busy, full of life, pushing the Vic in ways no-one ever thought possible. Pushing the graphics to display far beyond the hardware specs. Creating sounds no one thought possible, even rudimentary samples! Somehow making a chip that can only access 65,280 bytes, access 8 times that, 512,000 bytes. New amazing games, and ideas. I felt hope when I saw Denial but while it is a shrine to the past, it is also a golden path to the future. Many members are so advanced, they are trying to emulate current computers and current hardware. I am still lurking in the halls of Denial, waiting to say something relevant, something worth saying. I know the time will come. I also know I am not the only one. I have travelled from the past, the future is amazing.

[gsoravil]

I very much enjoyed your write-up.

Yes, you are not alone.

I got my VIC with a datasette drive in late 1985 as a kid, when it was more or less being liquidated. I never made progress in machine code on the VIC in my early years as I only had the owner's manual and no outside resources. I mostly stayed in BASIC for many years because of this, writing what amounts to a mountain of trivial programs. Many years later I would eventually get a second-hand C64 and soon after, convinced my mom to get me the C64 programmer's reference guide I stumbled across at the mall book store (B. Dalton?). I ended up using the C64 a lot, broke my VIC trying to interface it with the outside world, then eventually got heavy into DOS, OS/2, Windows, UNIX, etc. but never lost site of my love for the VIC. In the 2005+ timeframe I decided to try my hand at writing a 6502 cross-assembler for use with the VIC, which I did, along with some interesting utilities. The most curious utility I wrote took any VIC BASIC program and wrapped it with a custom boot loader I wrote so it could be put on a cartridge. The loader would call the correct init routines to ensure BASIC was setup, it would inject the code into the correct address space, it would setup the program pointers, and it would force BASIC to run the program. A few years after that, and with years of honing my soldering skills, I resurrected my original VIC which now houses a Mega Cart, has its own 1541 drive, and a dedicated spot in my house. It still puts a smile on my face every time I power it up and use it, as well as every time I see the community release something new for it.

Greg