A VIC-20 With No VIC

[DrMattRegan] has started a new video series to show his latest recreation of a Commodore VIC-20. The core of the machine is [Ben Eater’s] breadboard 6502 design. To make it a VIC-20, though, you need a “VIC chip” which, of course, is no longer readily available. Many people, of course, use FPGAs or other programmable logic to fake VIC chips. But [Matt] will build his with discrete TTL logic. You can see the first installment of the series below.

Although the base machine is sort of a copy of [Ben’s] breadboard, [Matt] has a few different building techniques that are worth learning and also made some changes to the clock input. This could be useful when troubleshooting, which was necessary when the breadboard didn’t start up at first.

While the first CPU was on a breadboard, the fake VIC will be on perf board. The new VIC impostor will also output modern VGA signals.

The VIC-20 is a very popular computer to clone. We also see a lot of — sometimes incredible — restorations.

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