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developersaid

Developer's Aid cartridge for VIC-20

Developer’s Aid for VIC-20

Hacked together by ops in 2019-2020

Developer’s Aid is a cartridge for VIC-20 developers to help testing and debugging software on real VIC-20 hardware.

It is based on

Programmer’s Aid cartridge
Over5 transferring program by Daniel Kahlin
C’mon Machine Code Monitor by Aleksi Eeben

START_SCREEN

Documentation

Manual for the original Programmer’s Aid

Manual for C’mon

Over5 documentation

Additional commands:

Command	Description
OLD	Recover a BASIC program
CMON	Start Machine Code Monitor
O5RCV	Receive a file from host via serial line
O5SND	Send a file to host via serial line
DIRECTORY	Display disk direcrory directly to the screen
DISKCMD	Send a disk command to the drive or read the status of the drive

Serial Hardware

File transfer between host computer and VIC-20 needs serial cable connection. VIC-20 user port has built in RS-232 interface but it uses TTL signal levels (0 to 5V) rather than normal RS-232 -12 to 12 voltage range.

VIC-1011A RS-232 adapter allows standard RS-232 devices to be connected to VIC-20. However, device can be hard to find nowadays. In addition, many modern PCs no longer have a serial port.

Fortunately, there is a simple and cheap alternative: USB to TTL serial converter.

I have tested two different converters with Linux and both work well.

CP210