Commodore Vic-20 demo: Vici Iterum MMII

For those out there that doubt what 5KB of graphics memory, and a 1 MHz processor can do on a Commodore Vic-20 you need to watch this demo. The Commodore Vic-20 was announced by Commodore in 1980 and was also called the VC-20 in Germany, and the Vic-1001 in Japan. The CPU used the MOS 6502 processor, and memory is expandable up to 64KB. Over 300 software titles were available on Cartridge, and 500+ titles on tape. Following the PET generation, the Commodore Vic-20 used a serial interface to daisy chain disk drives and a user port for RS-232 type connections. The graphics capabilities of the VIC chip (6560/6561) were limited but flexible. At startup the screen showed 176 x 184 pixels, with a fixed-colour border to the edges of the screen; since an NTSC or PAL screen has a 4:3 width-to-height ratio, each VIC pixel was much wider than it was high. The screen normally showed 22 columns and 23 rows of 8-by-8-pixel characters; it was possible to increase these dimensions but the characters would soon run out the sides of the monitor. Like on the PET, 256 different characters could be displayed at a time, normally taken from one of the two character generators in ROM (one for upper-case letters and simple graphics, the other for mixed-case—non-English characters were not provided). In the usual display mode, each character position could have its foreground colour chosen individually, and the background and screen border colours were set globally. A character could be made to appear in another mode where each pixel was chosen from 4 different colours: the character's foreground colour, the screen background, the screen border and an "auxiliary" colour; but this mode was rarely used since it made the pixels twice as wide as they normally were. 
          The Commodore Vic-20 is a remarkable and easy to use computer the was the preprocessor to the famous Commodore 64. Enjoy this video created by Pasi Ojala and music by Anders Carlsson http://www.cs.tut.fi/~albert/Pu-239/v...