Commodore VIC-20 computer

physical object
Identifier
2024.38.1
Description
The Commodore VIC-20 is an 8-bit home computer released in 1981 by Commodore Business Machines. It was mainly used for office applications and games, designed to be affordable and usable by a large audience. Because of this, the VIC-20 ended up as the first computer to sell 1 million units. Games such as Omega Race and Matrix were popular on the console. Coming three years after the Commodore PET, it reuses much of its design and some software such as the BASIC interpreter and its character system, PETSCII. It has 5kb of RAM, and only 3.5kb of that RAM is dedicated to BASIC code without RAM expansions. This means many programs had to be quite small. It has a slot for ROM cartridges to run software and is also compatible with Atari’s joystick and Paddle.
Related Term
Desktop Computers (is described by)
Emulation
VICE

This is a downloadable application
To use, download the VICE zip for your OS.
Unzip it, and open the application at bin/xvic.exe to run an emulation of the VIC-20

Related people
Ted and Michelle Soldaat (donor)
Lawrence Folland (documented)
Joshua Ensley (documented)