Commodore VIC-20

The VIC-20 was an 8-bit home computer released in Japan in 1980 (under the name VIC-1001) and in the US and Europe in 1981. The unit was designed to very user-friendly, and was marketed in toy shops and department stores in addition to traditional authorised dealers. By 1982, it was the best-selling computer of the year, with 800,000 machines sold and in 1983, it became the first microcomputer to sell one million units. A total of 2.5 million units were sold before it was discontinued in January 1985.

Games

Because of its low-resolution display and small memory compared to some other home computers of the time, the VIC-20 was primarily used for games and educational software. However, there were also many productivity applications made for the machine, such as spreadsheets, home finance programs and communication terminal programs. There were approximately 300 titles available on cartridge and another 500 available on cassette tape. Titles on cartridge included Gorf, Sargon II Chess and Cosmic Cruncher, whilst one of the most popular cassette games was Blitz, which sold tens of thousands of copies, and remained in the top ten computer games listings for six months.

There were also many magazine and books available that offered programming tips and type-in programs for the VIC-20, along with public domain and freeware software distributed via user groups and on online services such as CompuServe and BBSs.

Technical Details

List many other video game consoles at the time, the VIC-20 had a cartridge port that could be used for plug-in cartridges with games and other software as well as for adding memory to the machine. Port expander boxes were available to allow more than one cartridge to be connected at a time.

The VIC-20 used a MOS 6502 CPU running at 1 MHz and had 5 KB of RAM, which netted down to 3.5 KB on startup. However, the RAM could be expanded by using plug-in cartridges, with cartridges available in several sizes: 3 KB, 8 KB, 16 KB, 32 KB and 64 KB.