VICE
Emulating the Commodore VIC-20
Les Pounder takes a trip back to the 1980s to discover which computer Captain Kirk was using when he wasn’t at the helm of the USS Enterprise.
Credit: https://vice-emu.sourceforge.io
Les Pounder is associate editor at Tom’s Hardware and a freelance maker. He blogs about hacks and makes at
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VICE has a Smart Attach option under File. With smart attach we can point VICE to a file, be it a BASIC program, tape, disk or cartridge image and VICE will detect and load the image.
B ack in 1980 we eagerly anticipated The Empire Strikes Back, and Commodore announced its new eight-bit home computer the VIC-20 (also known as the VC-20 in Germany and VIC-1001 in Japan). It was powered by a MOS Technology 6502 running at 1.108MHz (PAL) or 1.02MHz for NTSC and came with 20KB of stock RAM, upgradeable via cartridge-based expansion units.
Marketed as the “Friendly Computer” the VIC-20 was a departure from the all-in-one Commodore PET (see LXF276). Instead, for $300 ($1,000 in 2022 money) we had a “breadbin” case that used existing TVs as screens – something synonymous with the 1980s computing scene. The VIC-20 was meant to be part of our home. It was sold via supermarkets and toy stores as a rival to the booming video game market. Commodore made the bold move to hire William Shatner (of Star Trek fame) to be the VIC-20 spokesman. Shatner extolled the virtues of the VIC-20 in a highly popular ad that described it as “The Wonder Computer of the 1980s”.
The VIC-20 was marketed to be more cost-effective than the PET and was aimed squarely at the dominance of the Apple II. The VIC-20 and PET shared compatible BASIC ROMS along with the data cassette.
By 1985 the VIC-20 was long in the tooth, Since the unveiling of the Commdore 64 in 1982, many people were migrating to the C64 for its larger memory and growing games library. But the VIC-20 formed the foundation for a range of “breadbin” Commodore computers, including this author’s first computer: the Commodore 16.
Emulating a VIC-20
The VIC-20 is a design classic. Sure it may not look great by today’s standards, but for 1980s tech this bread bin was an icon!
The Commodore VIC-20 is easy to emulate thanks to Versatile Commodore Emulator, or VICE for short. We used VICE all the way back in our first retro emulation feature (LXF267) to emulate the VIC-20’s successor, the Commodore 64.