#commodore vic 20

Baseball is a very basic baseball game for the Commodore VIC-20. No reliable release year, publisher, or author information seems to be available, which makes it difficult to place properly within the system’s library. What is clear from the game itself is that it is a very small and underdeveloped attempt to represent baseball through a simple diamond, a few counters, and minimal player interaction.

The screen shows the essentials: inning, balls, strikes, outs, and a simple base layout. In theory, that should be enough for a stripped-down baseball game to work, especially on early home-computer hardware. In practice, though, the game gives very little back to the player. Scoring is almost impossible, and the only run I managed to get felt more like a fluke than the result of a clear strategy.

The same problem goes the other way. The computer never felt especially dangerous either, so the game becomes less a tense pitcher-versus-batter contest and more a slow exchange where neither side can do much. For baseball to work even in a very simplified form, there needs to be some feeling of pressure, risk, or momentum. Here, that barely comes through.

dont exist anymore.

Commodore was responsible for introducing low cost computers to generations of people with it's Vic 20 and C64, and taught countless people with Commodore Pets in classrooms. Now all their assets are just names split between different businesses.

Atari brought gaming home, and some of the first 8 Bit computers as well. Now their name is just a stain on the box of Plug and Play consoles.

Compaq was responsible for the first ever IBM clones, bringing upon the dawn of the modern personal computer and at much cheaper prices than IBM. Now they're a defunct subsidiary of HP.

Tandy was huge in the 8 Bit era, and they popularized a graphics processer that was so much better than any prior graphical solution on MS-DOS computers so much that it became known as Tandy Graphics and Sound, even though it wasnt made by them. Now Radio Shack entirely is gone.

eMachines is pretty much the entire reason computers are mostly cheap now, their aggressive pricing against the market's competition forced the entire industry to cut their prices. Now all they are is a footnote in Apple documentaries about brands that copied the iMac G3.

And like, you'll never have brands like this again. There's no such thing as an "iconic" computer anymore, theyre all reskins of eachother. Commodore had the Vic 20, the C64, the 128, the Amiga, all icons. Atari had the 2600 console and the 400 and 800 computers. Tandy had the TRS 80, Color Computers. Compaq had their portable series. eMachines had the eOne. All icons in their own right, all unique, all special.

I cant think of a tech brand today that anyone would notice was gone. But these. These were special to people. And now theyre gone. Nothing remains.

Here's an early model Commodore VIC-20 Computer that found it's way to the Wisconsin Computer Club. Not sure it works or not yet as of this writing. The early models placed a good chunk of the power supply onto the main board (under the black metal parts) rather than in the external power bricks Commodore employed later. While not super unusual, there are far fewer of these early machines left out there today.

So pretty