1st, happy holidays!
2nd, I was just watching John Wick 3 and noticed a CBM machine and took a pic. I googled it and apparently the Vic20 was used in John Wick 2. I had missed that one, but here is a snapshot from JW3.

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65Org16:https://github.com/ElEctric-EyE/verilog-6502

Nice... and apparently driving an original IBM Monochrome display no less, which wouldn't work out of the box.

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Regards, KM
https://github.com/floobydust

Gotta love the cigarette smoke and rotary phone. A must for any real computer setup.

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Cat; the other white meat.

Also properly vintage is the placement of the monitor off to the side of the computer. I've never understood that. It's terrible ergonomics, yet a computer desk was very commonly presented that way.

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WFDis Interactive 6502 Disassembler
AcheronVM: A Reconfigurable 16-bit Virtual CPU for the 6502 Microprocessor

Hah, nice observation. I believe her cig was of primary concern.... I mean if you're a director and put that kind of detail into a shot, no doubt they would have thought this through.

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65Org16:https://github.com/ElEctric-EyE/verilog-6502

A colleague of mine in the past used to joke she chain-smoked her way through many a debugging session—back when corporations allowed employees to smoke inside the building. It was true. She'd be hunched over the terminal with a hard copy of the source code next to her looking more like a coal-fired steam locomotive than the expert programmer she was. She was a very dear friend, but I couldn't stand the second-hand smoke, so we seldom worked together. But I will say her stuff always worked and worked well.

Alas, all that heavy smoking got her and she died from lung cancer at the relatively young age of 59.

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x86?  We ain't got no x86.  We don't NEED no stinking x86!

And driving it at 40 columns, no less! Clearly that VIC-20 has a custom video adapter.


You need access to the back of the VIC-20 to insert cartridges. A serious power user would have a VIC-1010 expansion unit to allow using multiple cartridges (such as RAM expansions, peripherals, and a ROM cartridge) at the same time:

The cartridge slot was at the right of the VIC-20, as you face the front; the expansion unit thus extended well past the right edge of the VIC-20 itself. (This was to avoid blocking other ports on the back of the VIC-20.) These old systems could use quite a lot of desk space.

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Curt J. Sampson - github.com/0cjs

The video system of the VIC-20 is surprisingly flexible. It was common for custom "drivers" to be written to get more than the standard 22 columns. I don't know if they hit 40, but I think they got close.

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Cat; the other white meat.

Indeed:
40 Columns in Basic on the Commodore VIC-20



Although that's using a tiny font rather than tiny pixels...

But see also (all from the same article)




And there's a video

Yep. It's really an amazing (and often overlooked) machine.

Over on the Denial forums, one of those guys even managed to get "hi-res" out of it with a relatively simple internal mod.

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Cat; the other white meat.

As other have pointed out, systems that reworked the use of the existing video display hardware were able to generate 40 colums. I've personally used, in an emulator, a couple of systems that do this.

However, the 40-column mode you see on the screen looks very different from any of the 40-column modes I've used on the VIC-20, and I don't think you could get a screen display that looks like that out of an unmodified VIC-20.

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Curt J. Sampson - github.com/0cjs