The VIC-20 is Commodore's first home computer, introduced in Japan in 1980 as the VIC-1001 and sold in the rest of the world the following year. Priced under 300 dollars, it aimed squarely at the general public: Commodore put it in toy shops and department stores, and its American campaign was fronted by William Shatner, asking "why buy just a video game?". It is the first computer in history to pass one million units sold.
Technically the machine is modest: a MOS 6502, 5 KB of RAM of which around 3.5 are actually usable, and a 22-column by 23-line display produced by the VIC chip the computer is named after. That tight budget pushed publishers towards the cartridge, the system's main medium, and forced programmers into an economy of means that gives the library much of its charm today.
The VIC-20 served as the proving ground for what became Commodore's know-how, before the Commodore 64 took over in 1982 with a related but far better equipped design. Its software library includes arcade conversions — Gorf, Omega Race, Jelly Monsters — and Jeff Minter's earliest work, notably Gridrunner.
| Manufacturer | Commodore |
| Year | 1980 |
| Type | Computer |
| Keyboard | Mandatory |
| Controller | Optional |
| Mouse | Optional |
📷 Screenshot coming soon:
system-vic20.png
The VIC-20 is emulated by a single core, available on every board:
Netplay is not available on this system and RetroAchievements are not supported. CRT output is handled.
A keyboard is mandatory on this system: the VIC-20 boots into its BASIC interpreter, and loading a floppy or a tape means typing commands such as
LOAD"*",8,1thenRUN. A controller is still recommended alongside it for action games.
The same
vice_xviccore is also offered in the Commodore 64 system, which gathers every machine in the range. If you only play VIC-20 games, prefer this system: it is already set to the right machine.
No BIOS is required for this system: the VIC-20 system ROMs are built into the core.
Put your games in:
/recalbox/share/roms/vic20/
Accepted extensions: .20 .40 .60 .70 .a0 .b0 .bin .crt .d64 .m3u .prg .t64 .tap .zip .7z
A few pointers on these formats:
.crt and .bin are cartridge images, .prg a program loaded straight into memory;.d64 is a 5.25" floppy image from the 1541 drive;.tap and .t64 are tape images;.zip and .7z archives run without being uncompressed.The numeric extensions
.20,.40,.60,.70,.a0and.b0are the parts of a single cartridge, named after the memory address they are loaded at. When a game comes in that form, keep all the files side by side with the same base name and launch any one of them: Recalbox detects the other parts and loads them together automatically.
For a game spread over several floppies, create an
.m3ufile listing the images in order, one per line, and launch that.m3u: disk swapping is then done from the emulator menu. See the Multi-disc management with m3u page.