SyntaxBomb - Indie Coders

Quote from: bsisko on July 01, 2019, 08:20:50
BTW,  the specs say that it will boot in Vic20 mode basic.  Did Vic20 have a different set of basic instructions than the C64.

I know that the screen size of the Vic20 was smaller than the 64, but did it have sprites as well, and did it have a SID chip?

Vic 20 didn't have sprites. Some people were clever enough to simulate them in software but it wasn't practical for games, even with a 16k or 32k expansion, because it took so much memory to do it. Not to mention it wasn't very quick either.

There was no Sid chip in the Vic 20. From memory it had 2 sound registers and a white noise generator.

The instruction set was the same as the Vic 20. I'm not sure it was identical and some of the illegal op-codes were probably new to the C64 but you could port games which didn't use sprites pretty easily by just taking into account the smaller screen size and changing the screen memory location variables. A game like Gridrunner or Matrix which Jeff Minter originally wrote on the Vic 20 probably only took him a couple of hours to port to the C64 and most of that would be changing the sound routines.

Quote from: bsisko on July 01, 2019, 08:20:50
BTW,  the specs say that it will boot in Vic20 mode basic.  Did Vic20 have a different set of basic instructions than the C64.

I know that the screen size of the Vic20 was smaller than the 64, but did it have sprites as well, and did it have a SID chip?

The VIC-20 and C64 are two totally different machines hardware wise, with both being based on the MOS 6502 CPU. Note that the CPU  (MOS 6510 CPU) in the C64 has a different pin arrangement to cater for dynamic ram and rom banking. The VIC 20 used static ram.

The BASIC language was the same with the difference being the boot up greeting. The Video Interface Chip in the VIC-20 had no true bitmap graphics mode or hardware sprites, but did have two character modes: high resolution two colour and a four colour low resolution mode. You could fake a bitmap mode by redefining the character set in double height character mode with a memory expansion cartridge. The VIC chip also handled the sound using three pulse-wave voice generators with each voice having only a three octave range and a white noise channel. The three voices octaves overlapped in the middle ranges.

Most of the advanced games were released as cartridges, which could get round memory limitation issues.

I wonder if their is any chance of an Amstrad CPC version... one can dream....

Quote from: therevills on July 02, 2019, 03:45:56
I wonder if their is any chance of an Amstrad CPC version... one can dream....

Nah, to peak interest it'd have to ship with a keyboard that felt like the awesome CPC6128 as anything else would just break the feel.

The 8-bit Guy just posted a review:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxx2F4ffmeE

Quote from: Steve Elliott on December 22, 2019, 16:58:46
The 8-bit Guy just posted a review

Cool, will watch that in a minute, thanks

Just watched it and.... I'm definitely going to be buying one of these in the new year

Quote from: Qube on December 22, 2019, 23:21:56
Just watched it and.... I'm definitely going to be buying one of these in the new year

I've dropped enough hints for my mother to have one of these for me under the Xmas tree now. I'll find out in a couple of days

Yeah I'll be getting one too.

A blast from the past . I think they have them in Argos .

Quote from: Pfaber11 on December 23, 2019, 13:25:47
A blast from the past . I think they have them in Argos .

They only have the joystick.
Amazon have them at £199.95. But other retailers that the C64 site link to show them at £104, but sold out.
I would just wait until the Christmas madness has passed before getting one. But then I would sooner prefer the mega65 when they get it released.

Yes Argos are just selling the joystick and last time I looked I thought it said £109 at Amazon, they seem to have bumped up the price for Christmas.  I'm in no rush so will get mine in January sometime, when prices are sensible again.

I did some digging about too and, yeah, they are trying to make money based on Xmas desperation. Usually it seems the sites that had it sell for around £104 but they are all currently out of stock. Either they've sold them all or a lot of the retailers didn't get deliveries yet.

Well the price just keeps going up at Amazon. Now £203.26, but only £114.99 from here https://www.365games.co.uk/retro-consoles/the-c64-retro-console-uk-plug?gclid=cjwkcaiai4fwbrbxeiwaeo8_hrxo7suqjwttin6hj1trtv4riyqrlzy_fmysnfuxvkdkuqrindf7groc9aqqavd_bwe

Like I already said, it'll probably come down after Christmas - not before.