Wanted: VicMon cart or similar

[Brad]

Basically I want a machine code monitor cartridge. Something that will assemble and disassemble. I'm a bit clueless as to the state of the Vic scene so maybe there's some magic cart that does loads of useful stuff? Cheers!

[Vic20-Ian]

Vicmon is a bit limited.

Mike's Minimon cartridge is not ready yet.

WAX is available and looks good on cart or can be loaded into Vice emulator.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbP5MwXhByA

[Brad]

That looks very nice!

It's got me thinking though, about how difficult it is to make your own cartridges... to the search engine!

[chysn]

wAx was largely a response to my Kafkaesque experiences with VICmon. The newer wAx video manual playlist is here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObDbgTE ... pz7Y0RTM89. There have been many changes between the first demo and the final version of July 2020. The up-to-date documentation is here https://github.com/Chysn/VIC20-wAx/wiki.

For full VIC-20 development, you'll eventually want to use a cross-assembler like XA or Acme on your modern computer, while using a native assembler for testing and debugging. I'm confident that wAx is the best native assembler package ever released for the VIC-20, offering a wide variety of data entry tools (text, hex, decimal, binary) and shortcuts (labels and forward branch resolution), and it can be used as a complete development environment.

It's got me thinking though, about how difficult it is to make your own cartridges... to the search engine!

You've found the right place to get information on that!

[Mike]

Basically I want a machine code monitor cartridge. Something that will assemble and disassemble.

As has been pointed out by Vic20-Ian already, I'm going to offer MINIMON in cartridge form. In the develepment thread, you get an overview of its functionality; MINIMON also operates together with a RAM expansion cartridge or (with some caveats) alongside your favourite utility cartridge.

I'm a bit clueless as to the state of the Vic scene so maybe there's some magic cart that does loads of useful stuff? Cheers!

This also in response to chysn's reply: it is possible to write medium-size programs entirely in a monitor (witness Robert Hurst's Quikman, or my own port of Killer Comet), but most development for the VIC-20 done today happens on PCs. Using the PC environment is much more comfortable than the 22x23 text screen supplemented by pen and paper. Of course anything developed for the VIC-20 on the PC then has to run the gauntlet of truth on real hardware.

Not much can beat the fun though using a machine code monitor on the real iron, at a demoparty perhaps, to get things up and running out of thin air.

[Brad]

Many thanks to you all!
WAx looks the business! Good price for the cart too, shame the shipping is so expensive but I get it, I just shipped an Amiga 1200 to the USA and it was almost £100.

I'm already using cbm prg studio but I wanted to get stuck in on the real machine too. I had a VIC when I was 11 but my parents couldn't afford a floppy disk drive etc. back then so my machine code was all via pokes, and I wasn't very good at it either!

One thing I did always wonder about with all the monitor cartridges is that using one means not being able to use a ram expansion I guess? These days I can just use an emulator to magically have an 8k expanded VIC plus a virtual monitor cartridge attached but on the real machine how would devs have made an e.g. 8k expanded game?

[srowe]

One thing I did always wonder about with all the monitor cartridges is that using one means not being able to use a ram expansion I guess? These days I can just use an emulator to magically have an 8k expanded VIC plus a virtual monitor cartridge attached but on the real machine how would devs have made an e.g. 8k expanded game?

There were a number of motherboard or expansion units that gave you multiple slots so that cartridges and memory expansion could be used at the same time.