I can tell you: in that time, the people I knew who also owned a VIC-20 first got the datasette, and then a +3K and then maybe a bigger RAM expander - before spending any thought about a disk drive. Which means, the combination of VIC-20 + disk-drive *without* RAM expansion was *extremely* uncommon. If anything, the disk drive was bought alongside or shortly after obtaining a C64.jdxpolygon wrote:I think that's down to the individual really. [...], making a game on VIC-20 appeals to different people for different reasons, I'm sure I've seen it debated on here before.
Nothing wrong with that. But for me, that restriction makes a certain class of programs, if not downright impossible, but at least unfeasible to implement on the VIC-20: namely those which use most of the internal RAM to hold 'live' graphics data. You can still pull off some tricks, see the intro picture of my games collection for the unexpanded VIC-20, where a MINIGRAFIK picture is being shown - something, which would 'normally' require a RAM expansion -, but I did it just to show it can be done. It's not even possible to keep the picture on display while the menu is being loaded.For me it's the challenge of what can be produced from the original spec.