Anders' Open letter to the VIC-20 demo scene

History and Preservation Issues

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Boray
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Post by Boray »

Seems this thread starts to be crowded with demo coders! Well, if any of you felt a bit offended by my letter, then I do appologize. It's not my business telling people what to do or not to do. Do what you like. That is what I do... ;) Making a program for the unexpanded vic is at least making a program that all vic owners can run... (rather than just 80% of them).

I guess I am like a veterane car owner that never would put a modern caravan behind the car...

Btw, I saw three 16K carts on ebay last week... ;)

/Anders
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Witzo
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Re: Anders' Open letter to the VIC-20 demo scene

Post by Witzo »

Jeff-20 wrote:In reaction to the letter posted on his site,
http://home.worldonline.se/boray/datorm ... etter.html
Came across this thread and found the link gone. But it's still on the Wayback Machine:
http://web.archive.org/web/200406221158 ... etter.html

Interesting thoughts.
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highinfidelity
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Post by highinfidelity »

This is old stuff, although perhaps still good for some chat.

So it was Boray who actually wrote the letter, huh?

He's quite correct about nobody having a floppy drive back then. It was something that came later to homes, with the C64 and beyond.

In turn, however, I never owned a memory expansion, nor did any of my schoolmates who owned a VIC. It was awfully expensive, and we kept our little money for other things like cart games, tapes etc. That's also because everybody (no one excluded) had a Datassette instead.

I also think that a retro program written in emulation is quite nonsense, but what can you do? This is common practice with the Atari 2600 too, and some of those games show problems when ran on the actual hardware, which is ironic but again what can you do? From one point of view, I'm grateful that so many people even bother to keep these cute machines alive, it was something I couldn't even dream of back then!
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Post by FD22 »

Interesting.

I got my VIC in 1982, with a C2N and the 8K RAM expansion. Over the next three years, I added a Stack 4-slot motherboard, 16K expansion, and a bunch of utility and game carts (as well as building a few gadgets myself) and never got a 1541 until I upgraded to a Plus/4 in late '85.

At the time, I wrote thousands of line of code (BASIC to begin with, 6502 later) and it all went to cassette. I didn't need a disk-drive, and the number of products for the VIC that made use of (or required) a disk-drive at that time was practically zero, so it wasn't an issue.

I became a very quick typist on the Commodore keyboard; writing code on the machine was as natural as writing with a pencil on paper. The keyboard was comfortable, and after a few weeks of owing the VIC my muscle-memory synced to the layout so that typing ceased to be a conscious 'thinking' activity and instead became instinctive.

After leaving the VIC (and Commodore) behind in '87 when I moved to the Atari ST and PC, disk became the definitive storage medium, and the ANSI keyboard layout replaced that of the VIC - and even though I now have re-acquired all my original (and more) VIC hardware, it is still a difficult exercise to return to typing on that, now, non-standard layout. Worse yet, I have found that if I -do- spend a few hours using the VIC keyboard until it's familiar again, it screws-up my muscle-memory for the PC keyboard - asterisks, brackets and a few other symbols aren't where I expect them. ;)

Which is why I do all my VIC 'retro' development using Notepad++ and DASM, and the testing in VICE. Because the PC environment is now the comfortable, familiar one, with faster more powerful tools and an emulation platform that isn't perfect but is close enough that I can do 99% of my testing there before switching to the real hardware at the end. I can achieve more, faster, in this way - and even do things that are simply not possible with the real kit, like write a complete OS ROM replacement.

If writing space- and cycle-efficient code for a 30-year-old obsolete platform isn't 'retro' just because I'm not authoring on the actual hardware itself, it might pay to remember this - most of the big software houses of the time didn't write on the actual hardware either, but used cross-assemblers on minicomputers, because the tools were faster and more powerful. So arguably there never was a 'real' retro era at the time, outside of the small bedroom-coder / sole-trader business model, because the bigger names (Imagine, Ultimate, Melbourne House, Bug Byte etc.) did what we do today - use the best tools for the job and squirt the code to the target for testing.
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Post by Boray »

Interesting to see some new replies to this old thread. And interesting to see my own homepage from 2004!
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Post by eslapion »

I have to strongly agree with this letter.

Its not too unlike something I posted recently about the message in Robotic Liberation about memory expansion.

I too, had a memory expansion for my VIC-20 loooong before I ever got my hands on a floppy disk drive.

In fact, I got my 64 a few months BEFORE my first 1541.

Back in 1983, when I got my VIC, only a month later, I got an 8k expansion and every neighbor I knew that also had a VIC also had an 8k or 16k expansion.

Only the president of the local VIC-20 club had a disk drive. Absolutely nobody else had one.
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Post by Jeff-20 »

I will admit I enjoy telling people that a program I made is only 3.5k. I also admit sometimes thinking that cross development is a bit like "cheating", but but I can't argue with the stunning products.

Honestly, I think everyone is free to put whatever restrictions they want on themselves. If it's all right with you, it's all right with me. I enjoy the diversity.
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Post by Kweepa »

Jeff-20 wrote:I will admit I enjoy telling people that a program I made is only 3.5k.
I agree with this statement :)
Also, I never had a memory expansion or a disk drive for my VIC - they were too expensive in the UK. If I remember correctly, 16k was 175 pounds - about as much as the VIC itself!
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Post by Vic20-Ian »

I like Jeff Minter's old comment, forgive if misquoted:

"if you can't write a playable game in 1k you are not a programmer"
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Post by Boray »

Kweepa wrote: Also, I never had a memory expansion or a disk drive for my VIC - they were too expensive in the UK. If I remember correctly, 16k was 175 pounds - about as much as the VIC itself!
In Sweden, the 8K expansion costed less than the tape drive!
http://www.sleepingelephant.com/ipw-web ... .php?t=570
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Post by Jeff-20 »

In that case, I would still rather save my work than retype over 16k of code! :D
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Post by eslapion »

Jeff-20 wrote:Honestly, I think everyone is free to put whatever restrictions they want on themselves. If it's all right with you, it's all right with me. I enjoy the diversity.
Its one thing to purposely choose to impose restrictions on yourself. In fact, its great!

Its another one altogether to choose to impose limits on yourself that clearly do NOT represent what most people had back then and then call "impurists" other people and even throw insults because they have elected to impose limits on themselves that DO represent what the majority of people were using.

In this specific case, demo coders on the 64 scene know that most people who used a 64 in the 80s also had a 1541 drive but very rarely had memory expansions assume that was the same on the VIC-20. Some of them who choose to create demos for the VIC then flame at people who create demos with a different setup.

On the VIC scene it was the complete opposite. Nearly everyone had memory expansion, mostly 8k or 16k but very few used the 1541. Just about everyone was using a tape drive.

If you want to be a purist and rightfully brag about it then at least be an honest one. Don't use a 1541 for your demos. ... and don't flame at people who create demos which require an 8k or 16k expansion.
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Post by tokra »

Time to sort out things a little.

The note "We send fuckings to all who suggested that we should start using ram expansions" is from Robotic Liberation, probably the best VIC-20 demo around. This is a trackmo-demo that loads its parts from disk while the rest of the demo is continuing to run - a technical feat in itself.

I always understood the message more like a sarcastic wink to the scene not as an insult. Just to show what's possible even in 5K with dynamic loading. In fact there is a version of Robotic Liberation that requires a 16K expansion and does NOT load from disk, so more people can actually run it. I suspect a person disrespecting RAM-expansion altogether or thought of them as "impure" would not have produced such a version.

I did myself put a message in my last years demo readme.txt:

"FUCKINGS TO:

people who don't recognize VIC-20s with RAM expansions"

because disrespecting either using or not using RAM-expansion or any other expansion is just plain silly. You have an old computer most people would call obsolete and you do something new and fun with it - who's to say you are "wrong" and really what's the point? If you had fun doing it and showing it around you find people who like what you did - great! Anyone who thinks of your work to be "lame" or "impure" just because you used or didn't use some sort of expansion is just missing the point of having fun with retro-computers altogether, I think.
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Post by rhurst »

I recall buying the 3k RAM expansion -- which was really cool because it added nearly double BASIC memory and kept my limited understanding of VIC's internal the same for POKEs and PEEKs. And that RAM expansion was immediately useful for loading a tinymon utility for machine language programming, leaving the stock memory alone.

After getting the VICMon cartridge, I whined for an 8K RAM expansion thinking that would be the balls. To my disgust at the time, it "screwed up" BASIC internals -- my friendly computer became insane to me. And cassette loading was so slow with suspect reliability, what's the point of having more memory when it sucked so badly? I quickly lost interest in doing anything with it, and would later sell the memory cart right after buying a C16 with a diskette drive (although I recall its tape loading was a bit quicker, no?)

Today, I can overlook and appreciate VIC RAM expansions -- mostly with emulation, but also now with Mega-Cart and a uIEC/SD drive. Very friendly to use, with very fast loading times. So why not? I still appreciate stock VIC 20 programs, particularly Jeff's, but the convenience of extra RAM to make VIC programs shine a tiny bit more certainly make for a difference.
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Post by eslapion »

tokra wrote: The note "We send fuckings to all who suggested that we should start using ram expansions" is from Robotic Liberation, probably the best VIC-20 demo around.
This message is not very nice to start with but in fact, it is absolutely nothing compared to the incredible flurry of insults that were posted by other members on Pouet and other demoscene related sites and addressed to people we know here who created demos for the VIC.

Virtually all these unpleasant (to say the least) messages were oriented towards the fact that these demos were created for a "non-original" configuration of the VIC-20. This, all the while a VIC-20 with no ram expansion but using a 1541 disk drive was to be considered "original".
...there is a version of Robotic Liberation that requires a 16K expansion and does NOT load from disk, so more people can actually run it. I suspect a person disrespecting RAM-expansion altogether or thought of them as "impure" would not have produced such a version.
As Mike pointed out, this version came out later after many people indicated to Viznut that far more people had ram expansion on their VIC-20 than 1541 disk drives.
I did myself put a message in my last years demo readme.txt:

"FUCKINGS TO:

people who don't recognize VIC-20s with RAM expansions"
A few years ago I suggested to democoders to include a similar message:

"Losers can't afford ram expansion!"
rhurst wrote:After getting the VICMon cartridge, I whined for an 8K RAM expansion thinking that would be the balls. To my disgust at the time, it "screwed up" BASIC internals -- my friendly computer became insane to me. And cassette loading was so slow with suspect reliability, what's the point of having more memory when it sucked so badly? I quickly lost interest in doing anything with it, and would later sell the memory cart right after buying a C16 with a diskette drive (although I recall its tape loading was a bit quicker, no?)
No. The C16 tape drive isn't any faster than that of the VIC-20.

No. The speed of the tape drive doesn't change in any way wether you have ram expansion or not on the VIC-20 but it may take longer to load/save your programs if they are larger (which is made possible with the use of a ram expansion). Reliability is also exactly the same unless your datasette had misalignment or tape speed problems but then again this would cause problems regardless you have a ram expansion or not.
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