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VIC-20 Wizard of Wor?!


Jess Ragan

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http://rover.ebay.com/rover/1/711-53200-19255-0/1?ff3=4&pub=5574883395&toolid=10001&campid=5336500554&customid=&mpre=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ebay.com%2Fitm%2Fcommodore-vic-20-wizard-of-wor-proto-cartridge-%2F300950638605%3Fpt%3DVideo_Games_Games%26hash%3Ditem46120e500d

 

Holy crap, holy crap, holy crap! There's a prototype version of Wizard of Wor on eBay, and it's just ten dollars! Oh man, I hope whoever gets it would be willing to dump it.

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If you look at the pictures in the eBay listing, the ROM chip appears to be a standard ROM, not an EPROM as you would expect to see on a prototype. Are there any lists online that would show the part numbers of the ROMs on production VIC-20 carts? This could just be a misidentified production cart.

 

The labeling was certainly done with a fairly recent electronic label maker.

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You think this is fake? Aw man, that would suck horribly. I don't believe Wizard of Wor exists as a production cartridge; I've never seen one in the wild or elsewhere.

Ditto. I've been collecting VIC-20 a long time and never saw one.

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It's odd that a guy with a 99% feedback rating would risk flushing his reputation down the toilet for the sake of a joke... or a fleeting payoff. I'm wondering if the highest bidder will verify its authenticity, or just treat the cartridge as a trophy and keep it behind glass.

 

I will say this, though. I've been waiting thirty years for this game, and if this turns out to be a hoax (and it's increasingly likely at this point), I will not be a happy camper. It's too bad nobody has attempted to write a homebrew port of the game for the VIC-20, as others have done for 2600 and ColecoVision vaporware. Sadly, I suspect the machine just isn't popular enough to warrant the effort.

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I suppose the seller may have obtained it from someone else playing a bit of fun with him, but I also remember from back when I was active on Denial that someone with the same username claimed he had a very rare Space Snake cartridge that got sold before he had a chance to take a picture of it. The "buyer" even appeared on the site a few days later, only to post four times about how honest the seller is.

 

Besides, it was noted that the cartridge in the auction is wired up to such ROM banks that it won't autostart. That is perfectly fine for Basic extentions and Scott Adams' text adventures, but most action games would be wired to $A000 so you don't have to SYS xxxxx in order to start the game.

Edited by carlsson
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I tried to locate ROM number lists, but they're scattered about. Ruud has a partial list which mainly concerns hardware, not so many game cartridges. However the ROM in the auction MOS 325338-01 looks like it would wedge in a little prior to the MPU in the 1520 printer, which may be perfectly fine if MOS assigned part numbers from a common pool.

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In this thread on the Vintage Computer Forum, a couple more ROM part numbers were listed:

http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum/showthread.php?t=32691

 

Here is yet another part number list:

http://www.c64-wiki.de/index.php/MOS-Chip_Liste_(Ossi64)

 

So this ROM chip is inbetween the VIC-1112 IEEE-488 interface and the 1520 printer.

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We should take the opportunity to document all those chip numbers, just in case.

 

I have a box with quite a large number of Vic-20 cart PCBs.

I use the cases for another project ;)

A while ago I had the idea of creating a cross reference list, but haven't found the time for the project.

I posted a few MOS Rom numbers in Wizard or Wor thread on Denial forum.

Edited by 6502Dude
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  • 6 years later...

By the way, a little bit of necro posting to an old topic, but it struck me a while ago during discussions on Facebook that the C64 version of Wizard of Wor (by Jeff Bruette) was entirely (?) reprogrammed compared to the MAX version by HAL Labs. I believe most of the other early C64 cartridge games would be somewhat patched MAX games, rather than reimplemented.

 

Jeff posted a picture of his printed source code, but he never seems to have heard about any plans to port it to the VIC-20. However in an internal development memo posted by Michael Tomczyk, there is a note about a VIC or MAX version of the game, which may be one of the sources of the long lasting vaporware discussion, combined with other promotional stuff as noted elsewhere. There were several games in the spring of 1982 planned to be implemented for the VIC and/or the MAX, where the later was favored at that point though the system was delayed by another half year and never made a commercial impact.

 

Given the MAX version is considered one of the worse versions of WoW all systems combined, perhaps it was best that we were spared this from HAL Labs.

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