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Wanted: VicMon cart or similar

Posted: Mon Mar 29, 2021 5:38 am
by Brad
Basically I want a machine code monitor cartridge. Something that will assemble and disassemble. I'm a bit clueless as to the state of the Vic scene so maybe there's some magic cart that does loads of useful stuff? Cheers!

Re: Wanted: VicMon cart or similar

Posted: Mon Mar 29, 2021 8:01 am
by Vic20-Ian
Vicmon is a bit limited.

Mike's Minimon cartridge is not ready yet.

WAX is available and looks good on cart or can be loaded into Vice emulator.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbP5MwXhByA

Re: Wanted: VicMon cart or similar

Posted: Mon Mar 29, 2021 8:48 am
by Brad
That looks very nice!

It's got me thinking though, about how difficult it is to make your own cartridges... to the search engine!

Re: Wanted: VicMon cart or similar

Posted: Mon Mar 29, 2021 5:15 pm
by chysn
wAx was largely a response to my Kafkaesque experiences with VICmon. The newer wAx video manual playlist is here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObDbgTE ... pz7Y0RTM89. There have been many changes between the first demo and the final version of July 2020. The up-to-date documentation is here https://github.com/Chysn/VIC20-wAx/wiki.

For full VIC-20 development, you'll eventually want to use a cross-assembler like XA or Acme on your modern computer, while using a native assembler for testing and debugging. I'm confident that wAx is the best native assembler package ever released for the VIC-20, offering a wide variety of data entry tools (text, hex, decimal, binary) and shortcuts (labels and forward branch resolution), and it can be used as a complete development environment.
Brad wrote: Mon Mar 29, 2021 8:48 am It's got me thinking though, about how difficult it is to make your own cartridges... to the search engine!
You've found the right place to get information on that!

Re: Wanted: VicMon cart or similar

Posted: Mon Mar 29, 2021 7:47 pm
by Mike
Brad wrote:Basically I want a machine code monitor cartridge. Something that will assemble and disassemble.
As has been pointed out by Vic20-Ian already, I'm going to offer MINIMON in cartridge form. In the develepment thread, you get an overview of its functionality; MINIMON also operates together with a RAM expansion cartridge or (with some caveats) alongside your favourite utility cartridge.
I'm a bit clueless as to the state of the Vic scene so maybe there's some magic cart that does loads of useful stuff? Cheers!
This also in response to chysn's reply: it is possible to write medium-size programs entirely in a monitor (witness Robert Hurst's Quikman, or my own port of Killer Comet), but most development for the VIC-20 done today happens on PCs. Using the PC environment is much more comfortable than the 22x23 text screen supplemented by pen and paper. ;) Of course anything developed for the VIC-20 on the PC then has to run the gauntlet of truth on real hardware.

Not much can beat the fun though using a machine code monitor on the real iron, at a demoparty perhaps, to get things up and running out of thin air. :mrgreen:

Re: Wanted: VicMon cart or similar

Posted: Tue Mar 30, 2021 1:16 am
by Brad
Many thanks to you all!
WAx looks the business! Good price for the cart too, shame the shipping is so expensive but I get it, I just shipped an Amiga 1200 to the USA and it was almost £100.

I'm already using cbm prg studio but I wanted to get stuck in on the real machine too. I had a VIC when I was 11 but my parents couldn't afford a floppy disk drive etc. back then so my machine code was all via pokes, and I wasn't very good at it either!

One thing I did always wonder about with all the monitor cartridges is that using one means not being able to use a ram expansion I guess? These days I can just use an emulator to magically have an 8k expanded VIC plus a virtual monitor cartridge attached but on the real machine how would devs have made an e.g. 8k expanded game?

Re: Wanted: VicMon cart or similar

Posted: Tue Mar 30, 2021 1:21 am
by srowe
Brad wrote: Tue Mar 30, 2021 1:16 am One thing I did always wonder about with all the monitor cartridges is that using one means not being able to use a ram expansion I guess? These days I can just use an emulator to magically have an 8k expanded VIC plus a virtual monitor cartridge attached but on the real machine how would devs have made an e.g. 8k expanded game?
There were a number of motherboard or expansion units that gave you multiple slots so that cartridges and memory expansion could be used at the same time.
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