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Commodore VIC20 ROMs

Commodore Vic20

Manufacturer : Commodore | System : VIC20

Welcome to the Commodore VIC20 ROMs section of the ROM Database. Please scroll down for more sections and remember to share this page. You can also vote for your favourite system.

Commodore Vic 20 Roms Section.

The VIC-20 (Germany: VC-20; Japan: VIC-1001) is an 8-bit home computer which was sold by Commodore Business Machines. The VIC-20 was announced in 1980, roughly three years after Commodore's first personal computer, the PET. The VIC-20 was the first computer of any description to sell one million units.

The VIC-20 was intended to be more economical than the PET computer. It was equipped with 5 kB of static RAM and used the same MOS 6502 CPU as the PET. The VIC-20's video chip, the MOS Technology VIC, was a general-purpose color video chip designed by Al Charpentier in 1977 and intended for use in inexpensive display terminals and game consoles, but Commodore could not find a market for the chip. As the Apple II gained momentum with the advent of VisiCalc in 1979, Jack Tramiel wanted a product that would compete in the same segment, to be presented at the January 1980 CES. For this reason Chuck Peddle and Bill Seiler started to design a computer named TOI (The Other Intellect).

The TOI computer failed to materialize, mostly because it required an 80-column character display which in turn required the MOS Technology 6564 chip. However, the chip could not be used in the TOI since it required very expensive static RAM to operate fast enough. In the meantime, freshman engineer Robert Yannes at MOS Technology (then a part of Commodore) had designed a computer in his home dubbed the MicroPET and finished a prototype with some help from Al Charpentier and Charles Winterble. With the TOI unfinished, when Jack Tramiel was confronted with the MicroPET prototype, he immediately said he wanted it to be finished and ordered it to be mass-produced following a limited demonstration at the CES.

The prototype produced by Yannes had very few of the features required for a real computer, so Robert Russell at Commodore headquarters had to co-ordinate and finish large parts of the design under the codename Vixen. The parts contributed by Russell included a port of the operating system (kernel and BASIC interpreter) taken from John Feagans design for the Commodore PET, a character set with the characteristic PETSCII, an Atari 2600-compatible joystick interface, and a ROM cartridge port. The serial IEEE 488-derivative interface (which could use far cheaper cabling than a real IEEE-488 as was used on the PET) was designed by Glen Stark. Some features, like the memory add-in board, were designed by Bill Seiler.[citation needed] Altogether, the VIC 20 development team consisted of five people, who referred to themselves as the VIC Commandos. According to one of the development team, Neil Harris, "We couldn't get any cooperation from the rest of the company who thought we were jokers because we were working late, about an hour after everyone else had left the building. We'd swipe whatever equipment we needed to get our jobs done. There was no other way to get the work done! [...] they'd discover it was missing and they would just order more stuff from the warehouse, so everybody had what they needed to do their work." At the time, Commodore had an oversupply of 1 kbit×4 SRAM chips, so Tramiel decided that these should be used in the new computer. The end result was arguably closer to the PET or TOI computers than to Yannes' prototype, albeit with a 22-column VIC chip instead of the custom chips designed for the more ambitious computers.

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Index of: Roms/Commodore/VIC20/16kb/

Name Size Modified Rating DLs C|R|SS
320.4 KB 08/04/21266
94.6 KB 08/04/21218
302.4 KB 08/04/21202
287.2 KB 08/04/21
357
3.08 MB 08/04/21360
270.9 KB 08/04/21209
139.5 KB 08/04/21
339
242.2 KB 08/04/21247
189.9 KB 08/04/21272
241.3 KB 08/04/21201
185.6 KB 08/04/21353
416.1 KB 08/04/21272
325.5 KB 08/04/21277
67.2 KB 08/04/21280
147.8 KB 08/04/21185
425.8 KB 08/04/21212
62.9 KB 08/04/21287
125.2 KB 08/04/21
318
615.1 KB 08/04/21240
178.1 KB 08/04/21253
345.6 KB 08/04/21406
405.3 KB 08/04/21162
331.0 KB 08/04/21161
91.4 KB 08/04/21162
117.9 KB 08/04/21266
793.9 KB 08/04/21273
171.1 KB 08/04/21
291
162.3 KB 08/04/21199
210.9 KB 08/04/21265
465.5 KB 08/04/21192
446.5 KB 08/04/21179
328.6 KB 08/04/21253
397.4 KB 08/04/21241
81.2 KB 08/04/21180
263.9 KB 08/04/21263
111.8 KB 08/04/21190
435.4 KB 08/04/21201
483.9 KB 08/04/21169
222.9 KB 08/04/21283
241.9 KB 08/04/21300
122.0 KB 08/04/21217
285.2 KB 08/04/21329
133.3 KB 08/04/21327
265.5 KB 08/04/21190
511.7 KB 08/04/21218
222.8 KB 08/04/21
197
495.4 KB 08/04/21186
79.7 KB 08/04/21224
221.8 KB 08/04/21
294
186.5 KB 08/04/21162
286.9 KB 08/04/21234
516.3 KB 08/04/21226
243.9 KB 08/04/21257
53.5 KB 08/04/21219
309.4 KB 08/04/21230
509.9 KB 08/04/21250
165.5 KB 08/04/21252
278.6 KB 08/04/21280
421.1 KB 08/04/21199


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