Denial

Hi all, first post here Hard to find anywhere on the net for the Vic 20 so its great to find a forum with plenty of activity!

I have had a stack of Vic-20 tape and rom game images sitting on my hard disk since they first were circulated many years ago at the start of the emulator boom. I've not really seen any more games been added and I know there still loads of games missing from the list.

I sold my original Vic-20 and games around 19 years ago as many people had done and later regretted. I managed to pick up one again from a car boot sale a while back but unfortunately I have only a fraction of the games.

I'm going to give the programs mentioned in another thread a try that convert WAV files to TAP files with the games I have that I know are missing from my game images.

Question is, is there anyone on the net who is actively building up an archive of vic-20 software? There seems to be big gaps in the games that have been archived and potentially lost in the midsts of time - even before the ones that did exist were removed from all the FTP servers. It would be great to be able to help build up a resource of all vic20 games and software for preservation and playing pleasure

I notice that games like Punchy and Pengo are missing, and also some of the more obscure games I used to play.

ftp://ftp.zimmers.net/pub/vic20/

http://www3.sympatico.ca/clarke-santin/ ... /main.html

It looks like all the games on the FTP are the same ones I have, but thanks for putting that up. The Cafe looks interesting. Last updated in December, is there any news on how its going?

Brent Santin wrote to the list a couple of months ago, saying he was going to reorganize the loose stuff and expects to be finished after the summer. I don't quite know what it means.

Apart from uploading missing software, someone with spare time on his hands should look into tracking down the copyright holders (yes, these generally still exist even if it was 20 years ago) and as much as possible get official permits for redistribution, like World of Spectrum and Lemon 64 have been up to. Not only does it work like a safety net to show anyone accusing of piracy, but it adds a level of professionalism and connects then with now.

I guess staying on good hands with Tulip (current owners of the Commodore brand and supposedly most or all intellectual properties) doesn't hurt neither, in particular as granted third party devices and software related to Commodore starts to appear for the part of the retro community who wish to spend big bucks.

A lot of the cartridges were made by Commodore (sometimes copies of arcade games with fishy licensing), and one day the whole library may have been exclusively licensed to "Rob Money From Suckers Inc." who will use their legal rights to sue the pants of anyone putting avenger.bin for download. If the VIC community gets there first, chances are higher that it would never happen, at least not full scale.