meysamm hallward yaleanah
Viola Mathenia
Continuing in the theme of "how I got started", a couple of days ago,Iwroteabout how my first computer was a VIC-20 and it was basically impossible to kill it short of physically hurting it. Even when we initially didn't have a power supply for it, we hit Radio Shack and got a cord that would fit. This was a very bad idea. The machine was designed for 9 VAC, and the straight-through cord jammed 120 VAC directly into it. It didn't die. It did, however, blow its fuse, as you would expect. Much later, after that was replaced and we got the actual power supply, everything was fine.
Still, that machine and its manual were the very first step. What came next was the VIC-20 Programmer's Reference Guide. I still have the original book, tattered and taped together. Just like the original manual, it isn't in particularly good shape, but I keep it around for nostalgia purposes.
The best part about this original artifact of mine is the price tag showing its origins. Check that out: not only was it purchased at a toy store (for that's how these things worked back then), we obviously got it for a steal: just 97 cents! The recommended price printed on the back is $16.95. Clearly, they weren't moving, and Toys 'R' Us wanted to get rid of them, and I benefited.
There are all sorts of interesting parts to this book. It tells you all of the useful memory locations in a list, in addition to talking about them in prose. This way, you can find things like what location in memory controls the screen's border color, or the background color. You can figure out which locations drive the different parts of the sound chip.
The book actually goes way beyond anything that I could have ever wanted to do with the machine. It covers the 6502 opcodes if you wanted to do assembly hacking, it talks about how many clock cycles each one takes, and all of that other stuff you'd need to know. Then, right before the back cover, there's a giant fold-out with the machine's schematic!
My canonical example for something that went completely over my head at the time 30-something years ago was this one page which showed you how to do a "true note scale using frequency modulation". It was just a program which would throw a bunch of bytes at the right registers at the right time, but apparently it could sound pretty nice.
The author of this segment of the book had a little fun and injected an Easter Egg of sorts. That's the part I never understood. I'd try to type the whole thing in as shown, and would get a "?SYNTAX ERROR" for the first part. Check out this picture of the page to see why.
Yep, that's right, it's invoking the muse before the music is made. I had no idea what that was back then, and it always kind of bugged me, until years later I could come back and put it all together.
I also occasionally hide goofy thingsin my writing, so I can't really fault them for that. My only note on the matter now is that maybe it could have had a "REM" in front of it. As it was, having that there with the error clipped out was mighty confusing: why didn't it work on my machine? What did that word mean? Did they just misspell "music"? Was I missing some kind of cartridge?
Does anyone know where Duane Later is these days? Duane wrote the three type-in games from the VIC-20 manual (Tank vs UFO, Killer Comet and Rocket Command). Beyond a few entries on some websites, I cannot find anything else.
Anyone know where he ended up after Commodore?
The 'tag' on this website calls it 'VIC-20', but the VIC20 user manual (Personal Computing on the VIC20) -20%20User's%20Manual.pdf calls the VIC either VIC20, or VIC 20.The front cover is ambiguous due to the usage of the C= Commodore logo, but the first mention on page 3 definitely calls it the VIC20 with no space or hyphen, as does the subsequent mention on the table of contents page III. However, then page V calls it VIC 20 twice!
In 2021 it seems many sites have settled on the usage of "VIC 20" which is annoying as it is less efficient as a search term than using "VIC20", as "VIC 20" is treated as 2 words, and VIC-20 varies in search usage.
Stickers from the actual machine show 'VIC20' for the English language version and 'VC 20' for the German version. The ones with the C= Commodore logo and the are ambiguous, as is the monochrome version.On the balance of probability it still looks to me like 'VIC20' is the most true name.
In general I'd say VIC-20 would be the most consistent spelling. To start with, Commodore's own technical manual gives a good base, as here was no reason to enhance/mangle it for marketing purpose or textual handling.
Next, the VIC-20 was first introduced in Japan as VIC-1001. This hyphenated spelling not only precedes the use of VC-20, but it is also used for all products related to the VIC, like VIC-1540 and, not at least, all cartridges, like seen here:
While next to any possible spelling has been used over time, including, but not restricted to Commodore produced items, VIC-20 seems to be a safe choice when producing new material or reffering to existing without the need to play graphical games.
According to my US programmer's manual and user's guide it's VIC-20 with a hyphen here. I'm sure that if I dug, though, I could probably find a place where Commodore accidentally omitted the hyphen in the books, since I have a feeling that even within Commodore there wasn't a single "canonical" name.
Sorry if this is a stupid question, but is there a database of VIC-20 games with scans of cartridges, tapes, disks, boxes/manuals/paperwork, as well as a rarity guide? I've found lists of carts with accompanying rarity information, but not so much on scans.
I've had a VIC for a couple years now (a minty CIB rainbow logo version) but I kind of forgot about it. I think I want to start collecting for it a bit and was hoping to find a good source of info on its games.
In the mid-80s I moved on from the VIC-20 to a Spectrum (the Amstrad derived +2). For some reason coding on the Spectrum never really interested me. The BASIC seemed ugly to work with after CBM BASIC so coupled with the lack of listings or things to try out they all combined to stifle my interest.
The Spectrum manual I had was also very dry and lacked the excitement of creating something interesting to try out, unlike the aforementioned VIC-20 manual. I should check out earlier Spectrum manuals, perhaps Alan Sugar is to blame somewhere along the line, find it hard to believe that a generation of Spectrum coders were inspired by anything resembling the +2 manual.
So, thanks to this site I was able to track down a scanned copy of the Vic-20 manual and immediately jumped to the Flying Birds bit. A little bit of rose tint nostalgia on a murky Friday evening almost 30 years later.
I was about 5 years behind you on a Commodore 64. Same problem no way to save. Copied and reworked several programs, but I had an added frustration. Our whole area would lose power about 5-10 times per week. No warning. No pattern. So I started over a lot.
While I do agree that any software of a given size should have some manuals, nothing prevent US the community to have a collaborative manual. There is enough wiki online manuals for the many games out there (like all the Minecraft one).
Just consider that Asobo charged you $10 less than they would have had they written a manual. And now all five of you that wanted a manual can spend that $10 a get your PDF. As others have said: Problem solved.
However this shows some disrespect to clients, as they do not have any point of reference other than ask questions on forums. It is like buying a new car - Mine came with beefy manual that I glanced on couple times for things like setting up home coming lights or remote gate control integration. But I could probably figure this out in some other way. That is not the point. I could go without manual but some other, maybe much older guy or simply not very technical person, would struggle.
Point is that quality and complete products do come with some sort of source reference in form of a manual. XP, P3D both have very comprehensive documentation, they had them right away on release.
Example on something as basic to operate as default xp11 c172 is covered on 50 pages:
Someone mentioned FS2000 printed manual. This was my first boxed FS edition that I got on Christmas when I was a kid. It essentially was a big spark in my aviation passion, as it contained tons of useful aeronautical knowledge in general, not only related to operating FS2000. This showed passion, respect and dedication of team behind FS2000 - you could really feel their spirit and get inspired by reading this. It was something like 250+ pages.
The actual sim though is not where the real complication lies, it rests with each aircraft and the systems within it. The aircraft flight manual is really what people need to study, the rest you can pick up from online YouTube tutorials.
Yep, mean world syndrome (kill XP at all cost) - keep trying to get over it.
As for default acft performance in MSFS - you are probably referring fuel burns, engine powers (closer to space rockets) turbine characteristics, prop drag and dozen other stuff carefully modeled by asobo - these are super accurate in MSFS indeed You could literally google TBM POH and enjoy it like the real deal You better stop dreaming.
It instead puts question on why asobo did not produce any good docs on their end. But think we got some answers by now - we are simply in early access stage of the platform, they just forgot to mention it.
Everyone seems obsessed with whether or not there is, or should be a hard copy book, and moaning about how impractical that would be. True - it would - If only there were another method of providing written information on a computer
I have mentioned it elsewhere. They already have a full documented HTML manual and tutorial in FSX that covers everything from basic flight manuals to each instrument, navaids, autopilot, and so on - They just need to edit that and include it. To not do so is lazy.