Denial

The KERNAL is accessed through a jump table in RAM. You can change those jump points and switch out any KERNAL subroutine you want without having to replace ROMs.

Does anyone sell a Vic-20 style keyboard that I can plug into my PC for use with an emulator?

I remember an article, either in Compute or Compute's Gazette, that explained how to build the connector. I built one back in the day.

A hilarious video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KL5Nxew3szQ&ab_channel=8-BitShowAndTell Video takes a little monger than it should to get to the point but the payoff is worth it. Spoiler space: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ....

Most ran on the unexpanded VIC and were smaller than 3K, so there was less need for fastloaders on the VIC than on the '64.

Something I've put some thought into. Circa '81, when the VIC-20 was gaining traction, but games were scarce, Protecto Enterprises, who had Hong Kong connections and sold things like VIC-20 80-column cards, ran an ad in computer magazines offering something called an Atari Game Loader for the VIC-20...

The C16/Plus4 line was a misfire. They enhanced the color capability over VIC-II chip but stripped out the sprite capability and simplified the sound capability; it was a step backward in many ways. The C16 didn't have enough memory, and the PLUS-4 had built in software that the market didn't want. ...

The common thing, especially for games written in BASIC, was that the first program would load graphics into memory from data statements and display instructions or maybe a splash screen, then would write text to the keyboard buffer that would cause the actual game to load and run. I wrote a game th...

It sounds like the new machine will use software emulation rather than hardware. I guess that this shouldn't matter, but somehow it does.

The kernal accesses the hardware directly, and wouldn't be able to deal with different hardware. The BASIC may not be able to deal with a different memory configuration.

Is there anything to be done in a demo that hasn't been done?

A mention of the Kim-1 on this forum reminded me of this: https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/515uaYFveDL.jpg https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0810456818/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0 The book "How to build a computer-controlled robot" by Tod Loofbourrow. My library had this...

I think that a lot of people hated those joysticks, but for certain specific purposes there couldn't have been a substitute.

Do many programs use ROM entry points other than the KERNAL jump vectors? I can't imagine that many games would.

When VTEC wrote their Apple II compatible ROMs for their Laser computer back in the 80's, they disassembled hundreds of popular programs to find all of the ROM entry points in use, and managed to produce a machine compatible with about 95% of existing software (there was some disagreement about this...