What do you love or hate about the VIC-20?

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eslapion
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Re: What do you love or hate about the VIC-20?

Post by eslapion »

Mike wrote:
Bobbi wrote:Is a VIC-20 with no VIC-1 still a VIC-20 though? ;)
To cite eslapion, if you completely remove the VIC-I - it is not a VIC-20 anymore.
Oh boy! It seems I committed the crime of blasphemy here...
One application I would really find interesting was access of a SD card not over IEC but directly, in a RAM-link like approach. You'd have a controller on the cartridge, which accesses files or disk images on the SD card, but instead of using the standard IEC routines for transfer it would provide dynamically generated transfer routines (something like CPU emulated DMA) in the I/O 2 or I/O 3 address ranges to pump the data between SD card and VIC-20 RAM. That would allow for data transfer rates in excess of 100 KB/s! This application was hinted at during the first phase of GCart 2011 development, sadly that project did not take off ground. :(

I think it would be a nice feat to do video streaming from a SD card with suchalike cartridge to an otherwise unchanged, stock VIC-20. :wink:
Well, the bit shifting bug was fixed in the W65C22N and AFAIK, SD cards do support serial transfers. Perhaps if you replace the VIA responsible for the user port PB lines with one of these, you could directly access an SD card from the VIC-20.
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Re: What do you love or hate about the VIC-20?

Post by norm8332 »

eslapion wrote:Well, the bit shifting bug was fixed in the W65C22N and AFAIK, SD cards do support serial transfers. Perhaps if you replace the VIA responsible for the user port PB lines with one of these, you could directly access an SD card from the VIC-20.
Just thought Id throw this out there regarding serial SD access even though its off topic: SPI - Serial Peripheral Interface bus (synchronous serial communication)

The SPI mode is an alternative operating mode that defined to use the MMC/SDCs without a native host interface. The communication protocol of the SPI mode is a little simple compared to its native operating mode. The MMC/SDC can be attached to the most microcontrollers via a generic SPI interface or some GPIO ports. Therefore the SPI mode is suitable for low cost embedded applications with no native host interface is available. There are four different SPI modes, 0 to 3, depends on clock phase and polarity. The SPI mode 0 is defined for SDC. For the MMC, it is not the SPI spec, both latch and shift operations are defined with rising edge of the SCLK, but it seems to work at mode 0 at the SPI mode. Thus the SPI mode 0 (CPHA=0, CPOL=0) is the proper setting to control MMC/SDC, but mode 3 (CPHA=1, CPOL=1) also works as well in most case. A pull-up on the DO cannot be omited, or some cards will fail initialization process.

REF: http://elm-chan.org/docs/mmc/mmc_e.html

Norm
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Re: What do you love or hate about the VIC-20?

Post by Bobbi »

Is the W65C22N pin-compatible with the original VIA out of curiousity?
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Re: What do you love or hate about the VIC-20?

Post by Mike »

Eslapion, your reply is missing the full quotation of the paragraph following my first statement:
Mike wrote:To cite eslapion, if you completely remove the VIC-I - it is not a VIC-20 anymore.

This can be argumented for with two observations: first - the VIC-20 is the only micro that has been built with the VIC-I as video chip. There exist some other appliances - notably at least one arcade cabinet with a, IIRC, space invaders clone; and it was also intended for use in medical equipment. It's quite possible those other uses went by a different bond-out option. Second - all the programs/games/tools you see around here won't anymore work on that remnant of a VIC-20. The rest of eslapion's statements, namely also replacing the CPU, RAM, ROM, I/O, glue logic for faster components - to keep what? The mainboard? Really? - can only be dismissed as badly made hyperbole. Even a PC running VICE with xvic is more of a VIC-20 than taking the original hardware and going down that path.
I took the freedom to rephrase your "ideas" a bit.
eslapion wrote:Oh boy! It seems I committed the crime of blasphemy here...
I'm taking back the designation as "badly made hyperbole". You're just talking plain bullshit.

Maybe your trolling attempts are better left at the forums of 6502.org. They seem to be a better match for your concoctions.

Oh, and this one:
eslapion wrote:Well, the bit shifting bug was fixed in the W65C22N and AFAIK, SD cards do support serial transfers. Perhaps if you replace the VIA responsible for the user port PB lines with one of these, you could directly access an SD card from the VIC-20.
You just don't have the slightest clue what I was talking about.
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Re: What do you love or hate about the VIC-20?

Post by Mike »

Bobbi wrote:Is the W65C22N pin-compatible with the original VIA out of curiousity?
Yes. See over at: http://www.westerndesigncenter.com/wdc/w65c22-chip.cfm, and to quote from there:
WDC wrote:• The W65C22N is plug replacement of NMOS 6522 devices with current limiting resistors on output ports.
... and maybe even more important:
WDC wrote:• The W65C22N IRQB is an open drain output that CAN be Wire-ORd, unlike the totem-pole output of the W65C22S (some customers have had to use a diode in series with the IRQB output when using the W65C22S in their systems that had Wire-ORd interrupts).
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Re: What do you love or hate about the VIC-20?

Post by Bobbi »

Good to know - thank you Mike!
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Re: What do you love or hate about the VIC-20?

Post by Boray »

That the expansion ram is kind of fragmented is not 100% bad actually, because you can put things like toolkits, or the new "maxi-edit" or SJLOAD in those different locations, for example in block 5 or in the 3K ram expansion, and they will be more or less protected from other programs and you can restart them with a sys later. If all ram was one continous block, that would be a lot harder to do.
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eslapion
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Re: What do you love or hate about the VIC-20?

Post by eslapion »

Mike wrote:To cite eslapion, if you completely remove the VIC-I - it is not a VIC-20 anymore.

This can be argumented for with two observations: first - the VIC-20 is the only micro that has been built with the VIC-I as video chip. There exist some other appliances - notably at least one arcade cabinet with a, IIRC, space invaders clone; and it was also intended for use in medical equipment. It's quite possible those other uses went by a different bond-out option. Second - all the programs/games/tools you see around here won't anymore work on that remnant of a VIC-20. The rest of eslapion's statements, namely also replacing the CPU, RAM, ROM, I/O, glue logic for faster components - to keep what? The mainboard? Really? - can only be dismissed as badly made hyperbole. Even a PC running VICE with xvic is more of a VIC-20 than taking the original hardware and going down that path.
The idea is to have a VIC-20 or close cousin thereof which still allows you to use simple programs for access to the user port, joystick port, etc... a faster machine which generally remains compatible for hardware projects.

XVic will accelerate your software but the main feature of the VIC-20 being to be able to do hardware stuff easily is completely lost.

Also, claiming that ... all the programs/games/tools you see around here won't anymore work on that remnant of a VIC-20. is the same as claiming that all software designed for the VIC-20 will not work on a C64 and that's... false.
I'm taking back the designation as "badly made hyperbole". You're just talking plain bullshit.

Maybe your trolling attempts are better left at the forums of 6502.org. They seem to be a better match for your concoctions.
Anyone who thinks differently than you is wrong and bad and talking plain bullshit... :roll:

... and trolling too apparently...
Oh, and this one:
eslapion wrote:Well, the bit shifting bug was fixed in the W65C22N and AFAIK, SD cards do support serial transfers. Perhaps if you replace the VIA responsible for the user port PB lines with one of these, you could directly access an SD card from the VIC-20.
You just don't have the slightest clue what I was talking about.
... just read the reply from norm8332...

You didn't have the slightest clue what I was talking about, now did you ?
:roll:

You mentioned accessing an SD card through IO2 or IO3 ranges. Of course, doing the same through an improved VIA by the user port is COMPLETELY missing the point. How inadequate of me... :roll:
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Mike
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Re: What do you love or hate about the VIC-20?

Post by Mike »

eslapion wrote:Anyone who thinks differently than you is wrong and bad and talking plain bullshit... :roll:
Once again, eslapion: I am not going to discuss your view of my mind setup here.
You mentioned accessing an SD card through IO2 or IO3 ranges. Of course, doing the same through an improved VIA by the user port is COMPLETELY missing the point. How inadequate of me... :roll:
Yes. You completely missed the point, indeed.
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Re: What do you love or hate about the VIC-20?

Post by Mike »

Boray wrote:That the expansion ram is kind of fragmented is not 100% bad actually, because you can put things like toolkits, or the new "maxi-edit" or SJLOAD in those different locations, for example in block 5 or in the 3K ram expansion, and they will be more or less protected from other programs and you can restart them with a sys later.
On the C64, you have a similar situation with the "open" memory range of $C000..$CFFF - located behind the BASIC ROM at $A000..$BFFF and before the I/O area at $D000. Lots of tools use that area.
If all ram was one continous block, that would be a lot harder to do.
Maybe not *that* hard. It's always possible to raise the start of BASIC (43/44) or lower the roof (55/56) during initialisation of such a toolkit. For two examples worth, MINIGRAFIK raises the start of BASIC, the DOS wedge lowers the roof. In the latter case, the code is fully relocatable, so only a few bytes are reduced at the top of usable RAM.

That protection however is lost after a reset, unless you'd take extra precautions with an autostarting cartridge image in BLK5 to recover 43/44 and 55/56 for the tool - but then you could just put the tool into BLK5. ;)
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Re: What do you love or hate about the VIC-20?

Post by cvga »

I was only 12 years old or so when I got my Vic-20. I was trying to talk my mom into purchasing it while we were at K-mart when some guy approached us, introduced himself as a high-school teacher and told her that it would be a great purchase. He was convincing enough that she bought it. I had to save some money to buy the tape recorder and later I would sell a bunch of Atari 2600 carts to purchase a disk drive (and shortly after upgrade to a Commodore 64). Here's what I loved about my Vic-20, which I still have...

BACK THEN:
1. It was affordable. We were relatively poor and I could save up and buy one piece at a time. If we would have been forced to buy the computer, disk drive and a monitor as a package, I would have never gotten one.

2. I loved playing the Scott Adams adventure series games. I bought Voodoo Castle and The Count back in the day and thought they were awesome. I got to meet Scott Adams a few years ago. He is a really nice guy.

3. I learned how to program. Basic was pretty easy to learn and I loved that I could create my own programs. My dad loved to play the lottery so I wrote a program to pick numbers for him. It was the only interest I can recall him having in the computer :)

TODAY:
4. It's still fun to play and collect games for! I have a ton of carts including what I think is the only known version of Blackjack. I keep my Vic-20 hooked up and still play it from time-to-time.

5. The mega-cart. Makes playing games easy!
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Re: What do you love or hate about the VIC-20?

Post by Bobbi »

I have been meaning to contribute to this thread:

Back in 1982 I think the main reason I chose the VIC was the keyboard. I could have gone for a Spectrum but the VIC looked like a real computer and that was very important to 11 year old me. The main thing I hated about the VIC back in the day was that almost as soon as I finally got my hands on one (Xmas 1982) the C64 began its rise to dominance. The VIC-20 was the poor relation from the beginning and the butt of many jokes about its small memory or screen.

In 1982:
- Loved the keyboard and the physical look of the machine
- Loved that it was a computer cheap enough that I could get one
- Loved the Scott Adams adventures
- Loved learning BASIC and later 6502 (with the Programmers Aid)
- Loved playing with graphics and sound using the Super Expander
- Hated that I didn't have a disk drive, any memory expansion beyond 3K Super Expander and that I couldn't use more than one cart at a time
- Hated that my friends had newer and bigger machines and laughed at my VIC-20

Today:
- Love the keyboard and look of the machine still!
- Love that it was the machine that started my programming career
- Love that I can *still* learn new things from playing with the VIC-20
- Love the SD2IEC and that I can now download all the software I never had and easily copy it to the VIC!
- Love playing with the WiModem, BBS and the Internet
- Hate the way the memory map moves all over the place with different memory expansion
- Hate how slow the IEC port is due to shift register bug
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