If you could have changed one thing about the VIC...?

[Victragic]

Hi folks,

here's a question that will no doubt get me in trouble.. (apologies if this has been done previously).. I know the fun of playing with VICs is working within the arbitrary boundaries that were set by the designers at the time, but..

Imagine you were involved in the design of the VIC20, and had ONE change to the final design that Jack himself would have approved of.. what would it have been? And what would you have been willing to trade for it?

Note.. ONE thing.. I can think of several, but for me -

I would have pushed for an 8kb machine, getting rid of that 3kb hole and giving the VIC chip more available memory to access.. I'm well aware of Jack Tramiel's stipulation that 1kb chips be used, and the high price of RAM in those days, but to me it just would have opened up so much more potential..

To trade off.. well.. I never used the User Port when I had my VIC, and I guess that was the same with most beginner users, so I would have traded that...

Anyone else want to add their thoughts?

-Glen

[PaulQ]

Many of the things I can think of would call for more memory to happen, and I know very well that had the Vic shipped with more memory than it did, its price would have been out of my range...besides, for a budding programmer just learning, the entry-level Vic's memory wasn't that restrictive; it left enough room to play around with, and there was memory expansion routes that I could've taken when the memory became more affordable. I wouldn't have wanted to give up any of the ports. In fact, if anything, I would've like to have seen more. I think the one thing I would've wanted to see in the development of the Vic 20 was a second joystick controller port. I honestly don't think that would've added much to the cost of the Vic to warrant any trade-offs.

[ral-clan]

Well, the first thing that came to mind was that I'd design the VIC so that when you put in the 8K or 16K memory expansion, it didn't re-arrange the memory map. That would be BIG FIX.

But, when I think about it a little more, I would have made the VIC a 40 column machine. If it was 40 columns, it would have been accepted by a lot more people and probably been around much longer. Plus it would probably have had some decent spreadsheet and wordpro apps that would have ensured it staying in production longer than it had.

Tradeoff? I guess the user port is all that I can think of right now....shame to see that go though...

[Victragic]

But, when I think about it a little more, I would have made the VIC a 40 column machine.

Yep, 22 columns was always hard to work with.. but I guess they had the option of putting in a monochrome PET 40 column chip and rejected that because they wanted the first affordable colour computer, so the trade-off at the time would probably have been colour..?

-G

[gklinger]

This is a tough question because Jack Tramiel probably wouldn't have approved of any change that would have made the VIC-20 cost more to manufacture let alone increase the retail price and there really isn't anything that could have been removed without reducing its appeal. Kind of a catch 22. With that being said, I think it would have been amazing if the VIC-20 had a monochrome 80 column mode as well as the standard colour graphic modes.

Anyone know what the external 80 column cards cost back then?

[Mayhem]

Yeah, a larger (8k perhaps) memory size and uniform memory map, none of this block stuff, and indeed, no rearranging of it when you boosted the memory further.

[PaulQ]

Do bear in mind that a 40 column full colour display would have required more memory, which would have either raised the price of the Vic or made it virtually void of any amount of usable memory. The fact that it was quite usable on small black and white TV's made it more accessable to people without deep pockets. Many Vic 20 systems early on were comprised of the Vic connected to a black & white TV and a used Datasette from a PET user who had moved on to disk drives.

That said, its replacement (the Commodore 16) came about two to three years too late. An 8k 40 column Vic (perhaps a Vic Plus) should have been released alongside the Commodore 64.

[ral-clan]

Anyone know what the external 80 column cards cost back then?

I recall seeing and advertisement for one. I believe the price was $299 US, but this seems high so it might have been for the model that came with a full 16K or more of RAM already installed.

[d0c]

i would say the video out put should be done better.... the other stuff with the vic20 i am satisfied with....

[viznut]

I would've slipped in a video bug that allows something like Flexible Line Distance (as in VIC-II). Of course, the bug wouldn't be discovered until the 2000s, but in any case it'd allow for some really wonderful raster effects :)

[eslapion]

I thought of something I can call the NVA or New VIC Architecture.

Here's how it works. Have all the RAM from address $0000 to $2000 in a single 8K chip that is accessible on all its range to the 6560/6561. Have all the customs chips and color memory adresses located in BLK5 instead of BLK4 and the addtionnal memory area normally located in BLK5 put in BLK4.

Of course, to get the better is this new architecture, the screen should now be located at $0400 under any and all circumstances, expansion or not.

Who's willing to modify the kernal to make it compatible with such an architecture ?

I think, from a hardware point of view, it shouldn't be too difficult to implement something like that. I know that the reversal of BLK4-5 could simply be done be reversing 2 pins on one of the 74LS138 decoder chips.

With a VIC CR, picking the right chip select pins and stacking a pair of 2kx8 RAMs on top of the 2 ones already installed should do the job for the 8k covering BLK0.

Is that it ?

[Jeff-20]

I've given this some thought. I don't mind the single joy port. I actually like the 22 columns (big characters!).

I would change the cursor keys. At best, four independent keys like modern keyboards. Or at least, put UP/DOWN on different keys and the same for LEFT/RIGHT. This way the user can adjust on an axis with out holding Shift.

The function keys could have been arranged in a plus rather than in a line and be better for all sorts of applications (business and entertainment). The SMT Goupil 2 released the same year as the VIC does this without game intentions.

And if you are going to have predefined characters for UP ARROW and LEFT ARROW, you should include the other two directions! By the way, I feel lower case letters are useless. More predefined game oriented characters would have been welcome (as the card suits were well appreciated).

VIC designers should have recognized that the VIC would be more of a game machine compared to other systems on the market at the time.

[hawk]

I don't like the hole in the memory map like everybody else, but given that it was there for cost reasons, my other choice would have been to have the aspect ratio of the characters square.

[Victragic]

Re the 'New VIC Architecture'.. very easy to test this under VICE as it allows the VIC-I to access the 3kb 'hole' anyway..

Of course, these kind of discussions were probably what led to the 264 series being produced.. and we all know how well THOSE babies sold..

-G

[Boray]

Those who like more memory and a 40 column display? Why aren't you at a c64 forum???

But I do agree that it would be better if unexpanded and expanded vic would have been compatible. That could have been done by putting an extra 3k at the 3k expansion position and always have the screen there.

Another thing I would like is a screen command to set the size and position of the screen - completely compatible with the basic.