Agreed 100%, and I also ordered a spiral bound copy, it's going to be super handy to have. Thank you Mr. Daniels for putting it together, and thank you Robin for showcasing it in the video. :)
@@LeftoverBeefcake Having a hard copy is always preferable to me, saves having to juggle screens. Especially when the hard copy is so nicely put together!
Speaking as a somewhat prominent VIC-20 developer (I'm the Realms of Quest guy), I think the title of greatest VIC-20 games creator, in terms of what the machine was intended to do, has to go to Jeffrey Daniels. I just ordered his book on Amazon thanks to this video! Moreover, I also just ordered a Penultimate+2 as well. It's about time that I did.
The VIC was the first computer I owned and is where I first learned basic. Without the VIC there's a good chance I wouldn't have had a career in IT and programming. I keep promising myself to sit down and properly write something for it, some day...
Yes, definitely do a review of Jeff’s book! He put a huge amount of effort into it over a year or so, and a lot of people on the Denial Vic 20 forum contributed with suggestions, proof reading etc. I have a copy, and it’s really an impressive book that I thoroughly recommend for anyone interested in workings of the VIC 20, whether you program or not.
Definitely a neat looking book. I wish it was more clear if Robin’s is the Lulu printed one or the better quality special one. That one says message me. Then sends you to the website that says email me. That sends you to the forum that says PM. Then the PM seems to sit in the outbox since a new user maybe can’t send. It is like I’m being pranked. Well anyway. I guess I’ll order the Lulu one and see what I get! I do appreciate all the hard work on it and it looks super useful.
I recently acquired one myself. I already had a MegaCart but this is even more impressive. A must-have for any VIC-20 user that takes themselves seriously! 🏆
Managed to find a really nice VIC on eBay and the first thing I did after my offer was accepted was buy the Penultimate+2 and a video cable. Thanks for the video!
These videos make me wish i never gave away my Commodore 16 Plus. I was amazed at the time it had a built in assembler/disassembler.i didnt have the brain power to really use it but copied a couple of small routines printed in magazines at the time
D'oh! I missed the fact that the file browser is built right into the cartridge instead of having to load it separately from disk/SD card. And having it automagically select which RAM banks you need when loading software is wonderful.
Great video! I liked the Super-Expander part. I wrote a 3d renderer for the Vic-20 with it a few years ago. The formula will be useful for some optimizations. Thank you!
I'm suprised the Programers Aid Cartridge wasn't included. I liked the ability to program the function keys, plus it included Auto line number and could renumber your Basic program lines.
3:29 This looks just like a "racing game" I made back in the day. One which actually survived being recorded to tape so I still have it. Same deal with the road that shifts left and right. Conspicuous difference is that mine was Basic and the scrolling was upwards. Plus I didn't have the fancy semi-parallax background, of course. Mine had pitstops, oil slicks, and fences with only a single hole to navigate through. It ran more or less as fast as this, which is to say pretty typical for a Basic game and certainly not a speed you could reasonably label as challenging.
10:07 I've got the Penultimate, but Daniels book was new to me. Ordered! The VIC memory layout always confuses me, so maybe that'll help. 25:51 If you had wanted LDA 65 as zero page, would you have to create a label, like you did for $FFD2? Hopefully not LABEL = $0065. Either way, crazy. 47:52 10 PRINT maze on the KIM-1, that's cool!
It seems that yes, you need to create a label like ZP1=$65 and (I guess?) it assumes you want zero-page addressing if the label value is < $100. The documentation is really terrible, and unintentionally funny because it mentions multiple times that the assembler follows the "MOS Technology Standard". I'll link to it in a 2nd comment in case youtube censors it.
With my Penultimate Cartridge 1 I was messing with VICKIT, and ran into the same issues you did. It seemed really cool how it was integrated into the BASIC environment until I realized how broken it was. It was frustrating to see it mis-assemble things!
Excellent video as always, Robin. I'll certainly be ordering a Penultimate - and a hard-copy of the VIC-20 reference book - when I can afford it! N.B. I really need to make or buy a few modern replacement PSUs for my VIC and Commodore 64s.
Was Commodore BASIC 4.0 available for the Vic 20 as a cartridge (or otherwise) once it started being included with a the PET? Pretty neat seeing it on there.
Haha, I never thought about changing the spelling of things like color, armor etc based on pal/ntsc... but as you say, it is... imperfect. Still, funny idea.
It's hard to appreciate in this day and age where RAM prices are relatively cheap that back then every bit of RAM was potentially on the chopping block for manufacturers. A few years earlier, the bean counters over at Atari were fighting over whether to let the engineers have 128 or only 64 bytes (yes BYTES!) of RAM for the 2600/VCS. Luckily the 128 byte guys won!
The Commodore Max Machine is another example; it greatly suffered for having only 2K of RAM total, even less than the VIC-20 or the original PET, despite being released in 1982 and having a VIC-II which can easily make use of 16K of RAM just for video. Even just showing a bitmap requires 9K of RAM, or 3K for a character-based screen with custom characters. 2K of RAM shows they were clearly intending the machine to be a low-end game machine, and even then it was starved for RAM.
@@8_BitIt's no wonder that the Commodore Max flopped. Small memory machines can do really well *IF* they were designed from the ground up to utilize tiny bits of RAM, such as the Atari 2600 which has no individually addressable pixels to speak of and no character mode either. The Atari engineers were extremely clever in getting the most out of what they had, but the C-Max machine, as you say, was designed to use a lot more RAM so it was severely hamstringed with only 2K. Barely enough to do anything useful.
The font in the menus seem to be only 5 pixels tall, plus a single pixel dividing line, leading to a 8x6 character grid. Isn't that a lot of trouble to go to just to squeeze a few more lines of text on the screen?
Another excellent and informative video! Again, I envy your vast knowledge of these things and only wish I could grasp the concepts of assembly, memory maps and instructions with the same level of understanding. When they finally invent one of those mind-transfer machines, you'll be the first one I call. :) Alas.... Curious if you've ever tried the Final Expansion 3? I built one for myself a few years ago. It seemed to provided more features than the original Penultimate (at the time). Quite an amazing cartridge with similar features to the Penultimate+2 but far less user friendly and limited included software. I've always wanted someone to do a thorough video on it. It's been out for many years so perhaps not as relevant now with the release of this PU+2.
Unfortunately I've never tried the Final Expansion 3. It looks like it's not available anymore? Having a built-in SD2IEC is neat, though I think I prefer having the drive separate so I can move it between my other 8-bit Commodores.
What's the story on the joystick in this video? I haven't seen all your stuff lately. Is that a project joystick or something people can buy? Seems like with an enclosure, somebuttons and a pico board it could be done diy, but I'm curious if it's on sale anywhere.
It's a custom-built stick by a friend (and patron) of mine, unfortunately not for sale anywhere. I showed it in more detail in a previous video but can't think of which one at the moment! If I find it, I'll leave another reply here.
@michaelbuddy Big thanks to @csbruce for finding the video. Either follow his link in a reply to your comment (if UA-cam doesn't delete it) or look for the video "Printing Binary in BASIC and Assembly on Commodore 64" and check out in particular the first chapter, and the 2nd last starting at about 34:50.
Interesting that dI works for DIRECTORY on the VIC version of BASIC 4. On the PET version, and later BASICs like 3.5 and 7.0, dI is DIM and you have to type diR for DIRECTORY.
How do you get that perfect picture and also I put folders a to z and when I use the file browser and scroll down to O and the next screen is Q, P is missed out ? is this a bug....
I couldn't get past the size of the text on the VIC 20. The amount of text you could get on a C64 screen was, for me, the bare minimum. VIC 20 felt like that moment when you could get Pac Man on Atari, but then you saw what it looked like compared to the arcade game.
The 22 column screen really was the biggest shortcoming of the VIC-20, even more than the paltry 5K of RAM, as at least the RAM could be upgraded in a simple and standardized way.
About the memory configuration: Color RAM was, at least originally, only 4 bits per cell. So even though it occupies 512 addresses in memory, it's only 256 bytes/0.25K of RAM.
I've seen multiple sources say that Color RAM is 1K of 4 bit nibbles, mapped from $9400-$97FF, but only half (512 addresses) is in use at any given time. Depending on memory config, Color RAM is mapped at either $9400 or $9600. I don't really know why it was implemented that way, but it does seem to be 1024 4-bit locations or 512 "bytes".
@@8_BitAh, I thought it just moved around based on memory config like screen RAM; didn't realize it was actually switching between halves of a double-size bank that's always at the same spot. Very interesting. Thanks!
Robin, what is the primary difference in memory mapping in between the vic-20 and the Commodore 64 where the Vic can't have as much free memory for basic as the c64?
@@weedmanwestvancouverbc9266 Possibly, but it was a common design pattern for 8-bit machines of the era to have RAM low and I/O and ROM high like this. I think it was just following on from the PET architecture (which had I/O, specifically video RAM, starting at $8000) rather than a deliberate attempt to hobble.
2:43 I doubt there were ever that many 3K RAM-expansion packs in the wild, aside from the Super Expander. 5:45 "Long live on the top of the lady of Rivaria. The prince will come to you!" A bit odd, but that's what Google Translate says. 13:11 Yep, it takes 35K to hold a ten-line BASIC program! 15:21 How many Canadians actually use the "U" spellings? I never do it with "Color" and only do it sometimes with "Favorites". The problem to me is that there really isn't a glided "OU" sound there. How do you spell "Favor"? How do you pronounce "Data"? How do you pronounce "Route"? 25:22 $AD is LDA «absolute», which makes sense since it thinks that #65 is a label. The $EEEE must be what it fills in for "Error". 26:35 $1C isn't even a valid opcode. It'd be pretty much impossible to use this assembler for anything non-trivial. 58:09 What I've heard is that Commodore had a ton of 1K×4bit chips to dispose of. 59:55 What even happens if you select both 3K and 8K? Does BASIC ignore the 3K? I don't think the VIC can put the screen RAM in the expanded 3K memory, since video RAM needs to run at 2 MHz, so it's a mess.
I use the "U" spellings all the time. When I added the caption in this video for the Super Expander COLOR command I was tempted to troll everyone by putting the "U" in the examples. I pronounce the directional "route" (or router) as "root" and the cutting kind of "route" (or router) as "rowt". I pronounce DATA with a long A.
No, unfortunately; I don't think anyone's ever made a (real) VIC-20 cartridge with a snapshot feature. TheVIC20 (variation on TheC64 "Maxi") allows snapshots, if you can find one.
Hi, i got one of these off the back of your review, awesome. one thing what kind of scaler are you using as mine looks no where near as good as yours. I'm using the same brand output cable (composite) and a retro tink 2x pro, my vic20 is an old type PAL two pin PSU variant. Do some variants output better than others?
I think the older VICs with the 2-pin power do have a worse picture unfortunately. I mostly use the newer VICs with the C64 style power connector as they seem to have a better picture, and also run cooler, and it's handy to swap machines between C64 and VIC-20 using the same power supply. I use a Cloner Box Pro for recording because it directly records to USB drive with no PC involved, which I find handy.
@@MichaelDoornbos the retrotink seems to loose sync every couple of minutes resulting in a signal drop out and then comes back a couple of seconds later. Some content makes the drop out worse such as a white background or the basic screen. I’ve updated the firmware but I suspect the overall signal must be the issue. Oh and the picture lacks native contrast and brightness punch
@@TrashfordKent I have a PAL VIC that loses sync with RetroTink sometimes. There's little you can easily do about that. The contrast and brightness is on a POT inside the RF shield where the VIC chip is. Using a nonconductive screwdriver and gently turning it may yield positive results.
You guys and your weird “u” in words that don’t need it. ;) (kidding). Seriously. Great review. I’m going to get the cart and the book. I still love my Vic after so many years!!
I really do learn something new everyday, and that Canadians misspell favorite is one of those things. I thought only the Brits and other funny accent colonies spelled it wrong, but then I do hear you guys saying aboot and other weird pronunciations.
Nice video. But maybe spend a bit less actually playing the games. Show the game. But in depth walkthroughs are unnecessary. In your videos you spend alot of time actually playing the game. Like the 10 line adventure game. Couple min or so at least it seemed. Make your point. But youve started to do this quite a bit and it distracts from the videos
Difficult to make everyone happy! I chopped segments out of all the game playing, including the 10 line game, to keep it moving. I also take the time to make a chapter index for every single video so you can jump ahead to the next chapter if you're not interested in the current chapter. This video has 18 chapters. The one you're unhappy with is just over 4 minutes and covers 1) TinyMon 2) Showing a potential problem with the RAM auto-detect 3) Demonstrating how to fix that problem and 4) Actually playing the game. I deliberately put the game playing at the end of the chapter so nothing else would be missed if you skipped ahead. If a majority of viewers agreed with you then I would cut the game playing down even further, but I know a lot of people specifically enjoy watching the game playing too. I'll keep monitoring the comments to see if there's a consensus, but in the meantime I've done all the above to attempt to cater to both groups.
@@8_BitI’m sure lots of people will disagree, but I think you have the game playing about right. Enough to get a flavo(u)r of the games, but not so much it turns into a game review. There are plenty of those around on UA-cam if anyone wants to look at them.
@@8_Bit it's all good. I love your videos and want more. Just wanted to share something I noticed. Keep u the great work and yes. RuSH is the best rock band in the world!
It's all good. Between you and the 8bit guy. You two have this genre covered perfectly and I enjoy your videos and look forward to new ones. I would also like to see more of the super cpu and the cbm80 or whatever it was called. Plz keep it up and yes. RuSH is the best rock and roll band of all time!
Very nice, the VIC doesn't get enough love.
The VIC reference book is very affordable! I ordered mine and downloaded the PDF. Excellent resource, Mr. Daniels!
Agreed 100%, and I also ordered a spiral bound copy, it's going to be super handy to have. Thank you Mr. Daniels for putting it together, and thank you Robin for showcasing it in the video. :)
@@LeftoverBeefcake Having a hard copy is always preferable to me, saves having to juggle screens. Especially when the hard copy is so nicely put together!
Speaking as a somewhat prominent VIC-20 developer (I'm the Realms of Quest guy), I think the title of greatest VIC-20 games creator, in terms of what the machine was intended to do, has to go to Jeffrey Daniels. I just ordered his book on Amazon thanks to this video!
Moreover, I also just ordered a Penultimate+2 as well. It's about time that I did.
The VIC was the first computer I owned and is where I first learned basic. Without the VIC there's a good chance I wouldn't have had a career in IT and programming.
I keep promising myself to sit down and properly write something for it, some day...
Some sweet timing here! Just got my penultimate+2 this week!
Thanks, Robin, patrons, and all.
Yes, definitely do a review of Jeff’s book! He put a huge amount of effort into it over a year or so, and a lot of people on the Denial Vic 20 forum contributed with suggestions, proof reading etc. I have a copy, and it’s really an impressive book that I thoroughly recommend for anyone interested in workings of the VIC 20, whether you program or not.
Definitely a neat looking book. I wish it was more clear if Robin’s is the Lulu printed one or the better quality special one. That one says message me. Then sends you to the website that says email me. That sends you to the forum that says PM. Then the PM seems to sit in the outbox since a new user maybe can’t send.
It is like I’m being pranked. Well anyway. I guess I’ll order the Lulu one and see what I get!
I do appreciate all the hard work on it and it looks super useful.
I recently acquired one myself. I already had a MegaCart but this is even more impressive. A must-have for any VIC-20 user that takes themselves seriously! 🏆
Managed to find a really nice VIC on eBay and the first thing I did after my offer was accepted was buy the Penultimate+2 and a video cable.
Thanks for the video!
It's easy to make a composit video cable for the VIC-20 as that is what the video port is outputting natively.
These videos make me wish i never gave away my Commodore 16 Plus. I was amazed at the time it had a built in assembler/disassembler.i didnt have the brain power to really use it but copied a couple of small routines printed in magazines at the time
D'oh! I missed the fact that the file browser is built right into the cartridge instead of having to load it separately from disk/SD card. And having it automagically select which RAM banks you need when loading software is wonderful.
Oops, I should have specifically said the file browser is built in now. Yes, it's really great!
I've been waiting for this video, great list of utilities!
A dedicated VIC RAM video would be greatly appreciated.
Great video! I liked the Super-Expander part. I wrote a 3d renderer for the Vic-20 with it a few years ago. The formula will be useful for some optimizations. Thank you!
I've added to PU+3 Feature List. Favoris for French Canadians. ;D
Thanks for the demonstration, great cartridge and even very affordable, I thought it'd be like $200 or something.
I'm suprised the Programers Aid Cartridge wasn't included. I liked the ability to program the function keys, plus it included Auto line number and could renumber your Basic program lines.
The Super Expander allows function key programming as well, but the line number utilities are missed.
Glorious. Amazing music in the outro too. Thank you.
3:29 This looks just like a "racing game" I made back in the day. One which actually survived being recorded to tape so I still have it. Same deal with the road that shifts left and right. Conspicuous difference is that mine was Basic and the scrolling was upwards. Plus I didn't have the fancy semi-parallax background, of course. Mine had pitstops, oil slicks, and fences with only a single hole to navigate through. It ran more or less as fast as this, which is to say pretty typical for a Basic game and certainly not a speed you could reasonably label as challenging.
10:07 I've got the Penultimate, but Daniels book was new to me. Ordered! The VIC memory layout always confuses me, so maybe that'll help.
25:51 If you had wanted LDA 65 as zero page, would you have to create a label, like you did for $FFD2? Hopefully not LABEL = $0065. Either way, crazy.
47:52 10 PRINT maze on the KIM-1, that's cool!
It seems that yes, you need to create a label like ZP1=$65 and (I guess?) it assumes you want zero-page addressing if the label value is < $100. The documentation is really terrible, and unintentionally funny because it mentions multiple times that the assembler follows the "MOS Technology Standard". I'll link to it in a 2nd comment in case youtube censors it.
VICKIT-5 documentation: www.nemetzpower.de/Denial/VICKIT-5.pdf
@@8_Bit Well, as Tanenbaum quipped, "The nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from" :D
Jeff Daniels is a talented guy. Programmer, actor.... ;)
Love the deep dives, Robin! Thanks!
With my Penultimate Cartridge 1 I was messing with VICKIT, and ran into the same issues you did. It seemed really cool how it was integrated into the BASIC environment until I realized how broken it was. It was frustrating to see it mis-assemble things!
Yes, it's bizarre. It may be fairly useable if one can get used to all the non-standard syntax, but I'm not sure anyone would bother.
Excellent video as always, Robin. I'll certainly be ordering a Penultimate - and a hard-copy of the VIC-20 reference book - when I can afford it!
N.B. I really need to make or buy a few modern replacement PSUs for my VIC and Commodore 64s.
If you didn't like the "Favo(u)rites" menu, I probably shouldn't mention that the Dead Test has "Colo(u)r RAM".......
I want all my menus in hex please
@@MichaelDoornbos Big or little endian?
@@stevethepocket my brain is a 6502, little endian please
It’s always a great day when you post :-)
Was Commodore BASIC 4.0 available for the Vic 20 as a cartridge (or otherwise) once it started being included with a the PET? Pretty neat seeing it on there.
I just ordered "Resident Plywood Expert" business cards.
Hah, I gotta see these!! :)
I'm still waiting for the VIC-20 Ultimate cartridge.
I'd rather have the Postultimate cartridge.
I have no idea what's going on, but I'm still watching XD
Haha, I never thought about changing the spelling of things like color, armor etc based on pal/ntsc... but as you say, it is... imperfect. Still, funny idea.
AD EEEE is lda absolute. The EEEE are the bytes the assembler has reserved to fill in with a label later.
fantastic!
It's hard to appreciate in this day and age where RAM prices are relatively cheap that back then every bit of RAM was potentially on the chopping block for manufacturers. A few years earlier, the bean counters over at Atari were fighting over whether to let the engineers have 128 or only 64 bytes (yes BYTES!) of RAM for the 2600/VCS. Luckily the 128 byte guys won!
The Commodore Max Machine is another example; it greatly suffered for having only 2K of RAM total, even less than the VIC-20 or the original PET, despite being released in 1982 and having a VIC-II which can easily make use of 16K of RAM just for video. Even just showing a bitmap requires 9K of RAM, or 3K for a character-based screen with custom characters. 2K of RAM shows they were clearly intending the machine to be a low-end game machine, and even then it was starved for RAM.
@@8_BitIt's no wonder that the Commodore Max flopped. Small memory machines can do really well *IF* they were designed from the ground up to utilize tiny bits of RAM, such as the Atari 2600 which has no individually addressable pixels to speak of and no character mode either. The Atari engineers were extremely clever in getting the most out of what they had, but the C-Max machine, as you say, was designed to use a lot more RAM so it was severely hamstringed with only 2K. Barely enough to do anything useful.
I own 4 VIC-20s 😊
The font in the menus seem to be only 5 pixels tall, plus a single pixel dividing line, leading to a 8x6 character grid. Isn't that a lot of trouble to go to just to squeeze a few more lines of text on the screen?
Sexy Penultimate font! And a super entertaining video. As always.
The display must be bitmapped.
great outro
The red and blue Ten Ten game reminded me of DROD ☺️
Another excellent and informative video! Again, I envy your vast knowledge of these things and only wish I could grasp the concepts of assembly, memory maps and instructions with the same level of understanding. When they finally invent one of those mind-transfer machines, you'll be the first one I call. :) Alas.... Curious if you've ever tried the Final Expansion 3? I built one for myself a few years ago. It seemed to provided more features than the original Penultimate (at the time). Quite an amazing cartridge with similar features to the Penultimate+2 but far less user friendly and limited included software. I've always wanted someone to do a thorough video on it. It's been out for many years so perhaps not as relevant now with the release of this PU+2.
Unfortunately I've never tried the Final Expansion 3. It looks like it's not available anymore? Having a built-in SD2IEC is neat, though I think I prefer having the drive separate so I can move it between my other 8-bit Commodores.
What's the story on the joystick in this video? I haven't seen all your stuff lately. Is that a project joystick or something people can buy? Seems like with an enclosure, somebuttons and a pico board it could be done diy, but I'm curious if it's on sale anywhere.
It's a custom-built stick by a friend (and patron) of mine, unfortunately not for sale anywhere. I showed it in more detail in a previous video but can't think of which one at the moment! If I find it, I'll leave another reply here.
@@8_Bit: ua-cam.com/video/P8t6otqoz_E/v-deo.html
@michaelbuddy Big thanks to @csbruce for finding the video. Either follow his link in a reply to your comment (if UA-cam doesn't delete it) or look for the video "Printing Binary in BASIC and Assembly on Commodore 64" and check out in particular the first chapter, and the 2nd last starting at about 34:50.
How great thou art.
... I'll see myself out.
Interesting that dI works for DIRECTORY on the VIC version of BASIC 4. On the PET version, and later BASICs like 3.5 and 7.0, dI is DIM and you have to type diR for DIRECTORY.
I think that must be why I got in the habit of using CATALOG all the time, because cA was easier than diR.
Ye find ye self in yon dungeon, ye see a scroll a flask
Was the first thing that came to mind when you played your 10 line adventure.
How do you get that perfect picture and also I put folders a to z and when I use the file browser and scroll down to O and the next screen is Q, P is missed out ? is this a bug....
hmmm, i have to see if penultimate +2 can get gotten for use in vice. this seems like it makes a lot of tasks much much easier.
I couldn't get past the size of the text on the VIC 20. The amount of text you could get on a C64 screen was, for me, the bare minimum. VIC 20 felt like that moment when you could get Pac Man on Atari, but then you saw what it looked like compared to the arcade game.
The 22 column screen really was the biggest shortcoming of the VIC-20, even more than the paltry 5K of RAM, as at least the RAM could be upgraded in a simple and standardized way.
Brilliant! (explodes into petscii)
About the memory configuration: Color RAM was, at least originally, only 4 bits per cell. So even though it occupies 512 addresses in memory, it's only 256 bytes/0.25K of RAM.
I've seen multiple sources say that Color RAM is 1K of 4 bit nibbles, mapped from $9400-$97FF, but only half (512 addresses) is in use at any given time. Depending on memory config, Color RAM is mapped at either $9400 or $9600. I don't really know why it was implemented that way, but it does seem to be 1024 4-bit locations or 512 "bytes".
@@8_BitAh, I thought it just moved around based on memory config like screen RAM; didn't realize it was actually switching between halves of a double-size bank that's always at the same spot. Very interesting. Thanks!
Robin, what is the primary difference in memory mapping in between the vic-20 and the Commodore 64 where the Vic can't have as much free memory for basic as the c64?
Found the explanation near the end it's non-contiguous ram.
Yes, the VIC-20 has ROM and I/O in the $8000-$9FFF area, while the C64 continues its run of contiguous RAM all the way to $9FFF.
@@8_Bit they really set out to hobble this from the start, or just give you no alternative but to buy the c64 if you didn't like it
@@weedmanwestvancouverbc9266 Possibly, but it was a common design pattern for 8-bit machines of the era to have RAM low and I/O and ROM high like this. I think it was just following on from the PET architecture (which had I/O, specifically video RAM, starting at $8000) rather than a deliberate attempt to hobble.
What is the end music?
2:43 I doubt there were ever that many 3K RAM-expansion packs in the wild, aside from the Super Expander.
5:45 "Long live on the top of the lady of Rivaria. The prince will come to you!" A bit odd, but that's what Google Translate says.
13:11 Yep, it takes 35K to hold a ten-line BASIC program!
15:21 How many Canadians actually use the "U" spellings? I never do it with "Color" and only do it sometimes with "Favorites". The problem to me is that there really isn't a glided "OU" sound there. How do you spell "Favor"? How do you pronounce "Data"? How do you pronounce "Route"?
25:22 $AD is LDA «absolute», which makes sense since it thinks that #65 is a label. The $EEEE must be what it fills in for "Error".
26:35 $1C isn't even a valid opcode. It'd be pretty much impossible to use this assembler for anything non-trivial.
58:09 What I've heard is that Commodore had a ton of 1K×4bit chips to dispose of.
59:55 What even happens if you select both 3K and 8K? Does BASIC ignore the 3K? I don't think the VIC can put the screen RAM in the expanded 3K memory, since video RAM needs to run at 2 MHz, so it's a mess.
I use the "U" spellings all the time. When I added the caption in this video for the Super Expander COLOR command I was tempted to troll everyone by putting the "U" in the examples. I pronounce the directional "route" (or router) as "root" and the cutting kind of "route" (or router) as "rowt". I pronounce DATA with a long A.
@@8_Bit U's should become your 'thing' ;D BTW, Deadtest has a magic U too :D
Is there a snap shot, so when you get so far on a game you can load it back up again ??
No, unfortunately; I don't think anyone's ever made a (real) VIC-20 cartridge with a snapshot feature. TheVIC20 (variation on TheC64 "Maxi") allows snapshots, if you can find one.
Hi, i got one of these off the back of your review, awesome. one thing what kind of scaler are you using as mine looks no where near as good as yours. I'm using the same brand output cable (composite) and a retro tink 2x pro, my vic20 is an old type PAL two pin PSU variant. Do some variants output better than others?
I think the older VICs with the 2-pin power do have a worse picture unfortunately. I mostly use the newer VICs with the C64 style power connector as they seem to have a better picture, and also run cooler, and it's handy to swap machines between C64 and VIC-20 using the same power supply. I use a Cloner Box Pro for recording because it directly records to USB drive with no PC involved, which I find handy.
They can vary quite a bit. What is the "problem" with the picture? With certain symptoms I can help point to possible solutions.
@@MichaelDoornbos the retrotink seems to loose sync every couple of minutes resulting in a signal drop out and then comes back a couple of seconds later. Some content makes the drop out worse such as a white background or the basic screen. I’ve updated the firmware but I suspect the overall signal must be the issue. Oh and the picture lacks native contrast and brightness punch
@@TrashfordKent I have a PAL VIC that loses sync with RetroTink sometimes. There's little you can easily do about that. The contrast and brightness is on a POT inside the RF shield where the VIC chip is. Using a nonconductive screwdriver and gently turning it may yield positive results.
@@MichaelDoornbos thank you I’ll give that a try. I might get a transcoder board for my OSSC and see how that fairs
Plotting dots in commodore BASIC turned a generation off of bitmap graphics for life.
👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍
You guys and your weird “u” in words that don’t need it. ;) (kidding). Seriously. Great review. I’m going to get the cart and the book. I still love my Vic after so many years!!
I really do learn something new everyday, and that Canadians misspell favorite is one of those things. I thought only the Brits and other funny accent colonies spelled it wrong, but then I do hear you guys saying aboot and other weird pronunciations.
The Latin in Reals of Quest seems somewhat nonsensical. The sign reads "Live the supreme lady however Rivaria. And I the prince will come to you".
DOOD!
Fire really need to work on the audio
"200+ built-in games"? So you encouraging the software piracy, huh?
I gave permission for my game to be included.
Nice video. But maybe spend a bit less actually playing the games. Show the game. But in depth walkthroughs are unnecessary. In your videos you spend alot of time actually playing the game. Like the 10 line adventure game. Couple min or so at least it seemed. Make your point. But youve started to do this quite a bit and it distracts from the videos
Difficult to make everyone happy! I chopped segments out of all the game playing, including the 10 line game, to keep it moving. I also take the time to make a chapter index for every single video so you can jump ahead to the next chapter if you're not interested in the current chapter. This video has 18 chapters. The one you're unhappy with is just over 4 minutes and covers 1) TinyMon 2) Showing a potential problem with the RAM auto-detect 3) Demonstrating how to fix that problem and 4) Actually playing the game. I deliberately put the game playing at the end of the chapter so nothing else would be missed if you skipped ahead.
If a majority of viewers agreed with you then I would cut the game playing down even further, but I know a lot of people specifically enjoy watching the game playing too. I'll keep monitoring the comments to see if there's a consensus, but in the meantime I've done all the above to attempt to cater to both groups.
@@8_BitI’m sure lots of people will disagree, but I think you have the game playing about right. Enough to get a flavo(u)r of the games, but not so much it turns into a game review. There are plenty of those around on UA-cam if anyone wants to look at them.
I enjoy the balance as it is now. Just enough game play to show it, without creating lamers.
@@8_Bit it's all good. I love your videos and want more. Just wanted to share something I noticed. Keep u the great work and yes. RuSH is the best rock band in the world!
It's all good. Between you and the 8bit guy. You two have this genre covered perfectly and I enjoy your videos and look forward to new ones. I would also like to see more of the super cpu and the cbm80 or whatever it was called. Plz keep it up and yes. RuSH is the best rock and roll band of all time!