VIC 20 Elite
21 comments
·January 24, 2025harel
cbm-vic-20
I ended up typing a lot of game code from magazines on the VIC-20, and eventually learned how to write 6502 assembly code for it.
This is really nice!
wombatpm
I did the same, learning basic along the way. I got a dot matrix printer and learned how to send print statements to the printer. I wrote an essay for school and printed it out line by line using print statements. Good times.
buescher
It does require a 32k expansion which almost nobody had - I don’t remember pricing from the era but I would guess 32k of static ram (the VIC did not have a DRAM controller) would get you more than halfway to a c64
harel
I was happy I had a tape drive. 32K was rich-kid stuff. However, restriction was a great enabler of creativity, and I'm grateful for it.
mixmastamyk
I did too, and am. Unfortunately my dad bought two (another for sister) and so we had to "suffer" with black and white TV monitors. May be also why we didn't get a 64, although it may have been too early for that.
I didn't learn that assembly language programming was a thing until maybe fifteen years later, and didn't know the 20 could be programmed that way until another decade later after that. Nor that it supported a modem, etc. So feel a bit cheated.
rasz
https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/looking-for-old-pr...
In 1985 8KB 6264 = $7, 1986 same chip $4. So ram alone would be $15-30, then add pcb case and margins and we are around $100, more than VIC-20 itself was worth at the time.
buescher
I am pretty sure a C64 was under $200 by then.
nixpulvis
Elite is a masterpiece.
Just going to plug my little galos project here for fun: https://github.com/nixpulvis/galos/tree/master/galos_map. It's built for the latest version of the game, Elite: Dangerous.
tocs3
Had a Vick-20 as a kid but it did not do anything and I had no idea how to make it do anything or really any idea of what I wanted it to do. As much as I wanted to know more about computers there was no one in my (small rural) community in any position to offer any help or advice. In 8th grade my school got a bunch of computers (TRS-80s) and our first lesson was to copy the entire users manual out by hand before were could see a computer (I never saw a computer).
Anyway, as much trouble as the Internet is at time it is one of humanities greatest achievements.
metadat
Is Elite conceptually similar to Escape Velocity?
I was so obsessed with this game as a kid, and the mods were super cool too! Would love to learn the backstory behind the publisher, Ambrosia Software, about how they made so many great games in the 1990's.
card_zero
Sure, it's the original "space trader". Unlike EV, which owes its top-down interface to an even older game (Asteroids, 1979) it is however 3D. Fighting pirates is a mild test of hand-eye coordination, 3D orientation and nerve. Docking with a space station (until you buy the auto-dock device) is a severe test. Imagine you have to insert a slice of bread into a slowly rotating toaster, and if the bread touches the sides you die. Also your eyes are located in the leading edge of the bread. (This was presumably inspired by Kubrick's 2001.)
PlunderBunny
I found that docking was trivial in the BBC Micro disk version if you got reasonably close to the space station entrance, then sped away in the opposite direction (I.e. keeping the space station centred in the read view, turned around and went straight ahead to the station - no adjustments needed.
PlunderBunny
Sorry - I meant to write “…in the rear view…”
buescher
It's more a brilliant fusion of earlier text space trader games with 3D space combat. Analogous to the way that Atari's Star Raiders made a 3D space combat game out of the old teletype Star Trek games.
teddyh
Arguably, the interface of Asteroids was copied from the video game Spacewar! (1962).
AnotherGoodName
Very very distantly.
The more direct ancestor of Escape Velocity was Star Control 2.
bitwize
Yes. You have a ship and can explore the galaxy, trade goods, fight off pirate raids, etc. It was one of the deepest games available for any system during its time. There was a NES port only available in Europe; its CHR ROM was actually RAM, allowing the game's vector graphics to be drawn into it in framebuffer-like fashion for an experience that matched the computer ports.
nxobject
I wonder how relatively portable Elite is to non-6502 platforms with byte-addressable instructions – the idea of a 68k Elite sounds fun. Presumably we would need an implementation for a platform with few banking + memory mapping shenanigans, something relatively portable to memory-mapped IO, etc...
NikkiA
https://www.mobygames.com/game/1324/elite/
The original Elite / Elite+ was released on machines with the 6502, Z80, 68000, 8086 and ARM
nxobject
I stand corrected, thank you!
The Vic-20 was my first computer, so it has a special place in my heart. It was a hand-me-down from an aunt at the time when the C64 was the star of the show, and I only had 2 games for it. My only option was to learn how to program. It was so crude, that the thought of running something like Elite on it never even crossed my mind. I'm shocked someone actually went on and did that. Wow!