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.
