My original VIC 20 machine that I had in the 80s still works as well, but a few things have been replaced along the way. I still have the same 24K expansion cart that my Dad built 40 years ago and it also still works.
Do you mean specifically the Frogger game? Or in general? - If you mean in general, it hopefully does sound very close to the original VIC 20. I actually reversed engineered the VIC chip schematic from photos of the silicon chip, so the sound emulation is based on what I worked out from the reversed engineered schematic. Some of my discussion on that is covered here:
That's awesome! I had access to an electron microscope at my last makespace and always wanted to decap a simple chip for reverse engineering. A close friend of mine did that with a SID and recreated it in verilog with good results, which I always found fascinating. Great work on the VIC20 side! And yeah, my VIC20 was never the most stable machine, crashing frequently but I also had a bunch of janky expansion boards attached so ymmv...
I'm also using the knowledge gained from reverse engineering the VIC chip to contribute to a soon to be released VIC chip replacement device called the PIVIC, powered internally by a Pico 2 chip.
Sounds cool! Similar to the SID project, assuming you're also aiming for pin compatibility.
I'm curious why you choose the pico platform over something like TinyFPGA which could be near 100% gate level compatible over a pico with software emulation. I bet the < $3 ICE40 has enough gates?
I haven't really looked at the pico2 yet, maybe it's one of those new hybrid arm+fpga designs and you'd have the best of both worlds?
EDIT: sadly no CPLD/FPGA on the pico2 front, at least according to [1]. Pico2 does add a new RISC-5 core (as a coprocessor? I only skimmed...) So I guess you'd have to do a bunch of timer interrupts to keep things in your emulator clock aligned if you're going pin compatible.
For a couple of reasons: The first is that there are already a couple of projects using FPGA to create a VIC chip replacement, e.g. Victor by Jon Brawn, and FATVIC by Thomas Lövskog. The main trigger to try a Pico 2 version was when I saw sodiumlightbaby's OCULA project for the Oric. The ULA in the Oric is the equivalent of the VIC chip in the VIC 20, i.e. the main custom chip. When it dawned on me that he was using the Pico 2 for the OCULA, I thought, "Hey! Why not try the same thing for the VIC chip?". So we've been collabing on it over the past 12 months. I think you're right though, that devices like the Victor that use FPGA will be able to get closer to 100% compatibility. The PIVIC will be an alternative that might not be 100% compatible but is very close and would suffice for most.
Yeah, the PIVIC is pin compatible, and the same size as the original chip, so no overhanging bits. The PCB is as big as the original VIC chip.
JVIC (the libGDX version of JVIC) actually started out as mainly an Android project 10 years ago, but I didn't release it at that time. It was only a few months ago that I decided to add the html platform as a target, tidied it up in general, and thought it was time to release it. Given that this html version can be installed as an app on android phones, I'm not sure I need the android target anymore :D. It avoids the whole play store / app store process.
Back in the 80s, I was lucky that my father was an electronics design engineer, so he built a 24K expansion cartridge for us. I agree that there were some great games for the unexpanded VIC 20 though, such as Rockman. I loved that game. So many levels for a small game.
Yeah, that one is a great online emulator. I've played around a bit with that one. I have fond memories of the BBC Micro from my school days, especially the game Castle Quest.
How does it handle being run on a mobile phone? My main focus with JVIC was to try making it as easy as possible to use on mobile devices, although I'll admit that my testing has only been on Android so far. I haven't tried it on iOS yet.
Yeah, it was very difficult, but a lot of fun. We used to book the school library's BBC Micro out after school and spend an hour or two each day trying to beat it. I still remember working out how to use the torches to guide the little men to walk into the room with the spider, and how to escape from the prison cell. - I'd love to try porting this game to the VIC 20 at some point. Same cpu, but the VIC's graphics are more limited. Still, with some of the tricks that people use in some of the games and demos for the VIC, maybe something similar could be achieved. Pitfall for the VIC 20 is really impressive, graphically, given its on the VIC 20:
Exactly the same story with me. I got my VIC 20 when I was about 10, in the mid 80s, and that is how I learnt how to program and how I knew what I wanted to do as a career.
Add me to that list, though my Commodore machine was a PET 2000. In fact, I was young enough at first that all I could do was remove lines from other people's basic programs and see what happened. It all grew from there.
I probably started the same way. I remember spending forever typing in BASIC games from magazines and books from the local library. They never worked straight off, so a bit of "debugging" was usually required, i.e. spot the typos.
Interesting, did similar. But there was no information available to me about working on them for a living in the early 80s. Only the movie Wargames, which while cool didn’t seem like a realistic path, nor did it pay. Didn’t figure it out until a full decade later.
Maybe at 10 years old, I wasn't thinking much about working, but the VIC 20 started me on the programming path, with an IBM PC being our next home computer a few years later.
In what way did it crash? What browser and device did you try running it on? - There might be an issue where its possible to start typing before the program load sequence has finished, e.g. where it has queued a "RUN" command for when the disk load has finished, but if you start typing before that, it might interfere with that RUN. I have an idea on how to fix that, if this is the issue. Just need to ignore key presses until all program load commands have been processed.
I hope they can get access to the materials collected by "The Art of Sierra" team. That team went around collecting hundreds of documents including many original background paintings and then completely failed to produce the intended art book.
"The Art of Sierra" was started something like 15 years ago and it's been 9 years since their last facebook post. The project is totally dead but they still have all that priceless memorabilia.
Yes, certainly, and any gaps could be filled in with what the NAGI project provides: https://github.com/sonneveld/nagi. NAGI is a fan-made AGI interpreter created by Nick Sonneveld. He disassembled the Sierra's original AGI interpreter and then used that to create equivalent C source code. It is interesting to compare what he came up with to the actual original AGI interpreter source code from the SQ2 disk. Nick had to make up appropriate names for things, as he obviously didn't have the memory map, but it is easy to see the equivalent functions etc when you compare equivalent modules.
