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The VIC-20 was my first computer. Nothing like working hard on a program only to hit the memory limit. I read that manual from cover to cover. It was wonderf

The VIC-20 was my first computer. Nothing like working hard on a program only to hit the memory limit. I read that manual from cover to cover. It was wonderful that practically everything you could want to know about your computer was in one book. You can find it and others at archive.org: https://archive.org/details/VIC-20ProgrammersReferenceGuide1stEdition6thPrinti https://archive.org/details/VIC-20ProgrammersReferenceGuide1...

mixmastamyk 9y ago
Same here. Just added an anecdote the other day: My dad was quite prescient for the time and bought me and my sister VIC-20s with little black and white matching TVs. I have great memories of typing in games from magazines and hacking the random sentence generator in BASIC and loading/saving programs to cassette tape over many minutes. Ten minutes to find and load a program! The sentence generator was quite hilarious, my friends and I added all the bad words a group of 12 year-olds could think up and put them in the DATA lines. Hours and weeks of fun and laughs, haha. I'm a bit jealous other people discovered assembly language on the thing, didn't know it existed at the time. Had the whole thing with Datasette, Manuals, and tapes in the original box in mint condition until around 2001-ish… until I finally sold and trashed everything to backpack around the world, sigh.
bayofpigs 9y ago
That 2.5K limit is what inspired me to learn assembly and also the mindset of writing compact code.
ams6110 9y ago
> Nothing like working hard on a program only to hit the memory limit Mine was a TI-99/4a. The "+" symbol was obtained by SHIFT =, as on most current US-layout keyboards. But if you hit the FCTN key instead of the SHIFT key, it immediately rebooted the machine. It was easy to do that because the FCTN key was immediately below the right SHIFT key. Was so frustrating to lose hours of work that way. First lesson in save early, save often. Of course saving was to cassette tape, which took several minutes, so you tended to delay doing it. EDIT: Also, the quote (") was obtained as FCTN-P, which is very close to the = key. I think that might have been even more dangerous. http://mainbyte.com/ti99/keyboard/keyboard.html http://mainbyte.com/ti99/keyboard/keyboard.html
- endgame 9y ago
  And ESDX arrow keys. What was up with that?
stevesimmons 9y ago
Ah memories,... The VIC-20 was my first computer too, as a 14 year old in 1983. Programming in Basic exhausted the 3583 bytes of RAM too quickly. So I spent all my pocket money on the VicMon 6502 assembly language cartridge ($84 I think it cost, about $250 today). That summer holiday, I copied out the entire ROM disassembly into old school exercise books (I couldn't afford a printer!), and reverse engineered the floating point math routines. Then I wrote 6502 assembly programs, including: - a text to speech program, using phoneme production rules I found in a 1976 IEEE paper "Letter-to-sound rules for automatic translation of english text to phonetics" - a 3D graphics toolkit, that drew antialiased lines, circles, cuboids onto a pixel-addressable display. The VIC-20 only had a 22x23 character display. I remember having to fill the screen with ASCII chars 0 to 255, then forcing the video to use doubleheight 8x16 pixel characters with char data in RAM rather than the video ROM. Then the graphics primatives were written into these characters by bitwise operations. I had to write my own arithmetic routines as the 6502 could only add two 8bit numbers. There was not even a multiply instruction! Ah, happy days!
adamredwoods 9y ago
My first computer love, too. Then Commodore 128, then Amiga 500. Then it all goes downhill as I started experimenting with overclocking PCs...

mixmastamyk 9y ago

Same here. Just added an anecdote the other day: My dad was quite prescient for the time and bought me and my sister VIC-20s with little black and white matching TVs. I have great memories of typing in games from magazines and hacking the random sentence generator in BASIC and loading/saving programs to cassette tape over many minutes. Ten minutes to find and load a program! The sentence generator was quite hilarious, my friends and I added all the bad words a group of 12 year-olds could think up and put them in the DATA lines. Hours and weeks of fun and laughs, haha. I'm a bit jealous other people discovered assembly language on the thing, didn't know it existed at the time. Had the whole thing with Datasette, Manuals, and tapes in the original box in mint condition until around 2001-ish… until I finally sold and trashed everything to backpack around the world, sigh.

bayofpigs 9y ago

That 2.5K limit is what inspired me to learn assembly and also the mindset of writing compact code.

ams6110 9y ago

> Nothing like working hard on a program only to hit the memory limit Mine was a TI-99/4a. The "+" symbol was obtained by SHIFT =, as on most current US-layout keyboards. But if you hit the FCTN key instead of the SHIFT key, it immediately rebooted the machine. It was easy to do that because the FCTN key was immediately below the right SHIFT key. Was so frustrating to lose hours of work that way. First lesson in save early, save often. Of course saving was to cassette tape, which took several minutes, so you tended to delay doing it. EDIT: Also, the quote (") was obtained as FCTN-P, which is very close to the = key. I think that might have been even more dangerous. http://mainbyte.com/ti99/keyboard/keyboard.html http://mainbyte.com/ti99/keyboard/keyboard.html

endgame 9y ago
And ESDX arrow keys. What was up with that?

stevesimmons 9y ago

Ah memories,... The VIC-20 was my first computer too, as a 14 year old in 1983. Programming in Basic exhausted the 3583 bytes of RAM too quickly. So I spent all my pocket money on the VicMon 6502 assembly language cartridge ($84 I think it cost, about $250 today). That summer holiday, I copied out the entire ROM disassembly into old school exercise books (I couldn't afford a printer!), and reverse engineered the floating point math routines. Then I wrote 6502 assembly programs, including: - a text to speech program, using phoneme production rules I found in a 1976 IEEE paper "Letter-to-sound rules for automatic translation of english text to phonetics" - a 3D graphics toolkit, that drew antialiased lines, circles, cuboids onto a pixel-addressable display. The VIC-20 only had a 22x23 character display. I remember having to fill the screen with ASCII chars 0 to 255, then forcing the video to use doubleheight 8x16 pixel characters with char data in RAM rather than the video ROM. Then the graphics primatives were written into these characters by bitwise operations. I had to write my own arithmetic routines as the 6502 could only add two 8bit numbers. There was not even a multiply instruction! Ah, happy days!

adamredwoods 9y ago

My first computer love, too. Then Commodore 128, then Amiga 500. Then it all goes downhill as I started experimenting with overclocking PCs...