VIC-20 VS. CoCo

[bluejay]

Now that I have a VIC-20 and a chance to get a CoCo 2, it wonders me; what would you rather use, a VIC-20 or a CoCo 2? The CoCo seems to have better graphics than the VIC, but it doesn't have composite output, as far as I know. The cursor keys seem terrible in both system, with the CoCo 2's keys being slightly better. The CoCo's bright green screen kinda hurts my eyes, and I can change the VIC-20's screen color, but not that the default colors are bad. Anyways, what do you prefer?

[linville]

The CoCo, of course! ?

The graphics are easier to program. The colors...well, you get used to them, mostly...

The mod for composite video is fairly simple and usually available. YMMV, but it is doable.

And, of course, the 6809 is sooooo much better than the 6502...

Note, that there is a _slight_ chance that my analysis is somewhat biased! But be sure to check-out our podcast...

The CoCo Crew Podcast

[+save2600]

Use how? If just for playing games, the Vic-20. In the end though, neither. I'd rather game on a C64 or TI.  

[Casey]

If you are going to be a BASIC programmer, hands down, the CoCo has a much better version of BASIC than the VIC 20.  The CoCo's BASIC has commands that support sound, color, and graphics that the VIC's BASIC just doesn't have.  If you are going to mainly play games, the VIC probably has the better library of games than the CoCo.  The 22-column VIC display is a bit more irritating to me than the 32-column CoCo display, but the green background of the CoCo is more irritating than the VIC. 

[imstarryeyed]

Vic 20 hands down, that computer is great.  I think it was one of the only systems at the time that had all 4 screens in Donkey Kong.

 

Someone correct me if I am wrong but I think the Vic 20 and Atari 8 bit Donkey Kong is the only home console version to actually use the birthday cake item?  I tried most of my youth to find an arcade machine that had the birthday cake or the even more odd and rarer telephone prize.

I had read How to Win at Donkey Kong as a kid and saw these odd prizes and went looking for arcade versions, I think MAME has a birthday ROM version.

 

 

 

The Vic 20 has a charm for me that is hard to put into words. I think its the, I am amazed they can do that with so little RAM thing, or maybe because it was my very first computer I owned... haha.

 

[jhd]

 

I grew-up with a Coco, and I would still recommend the Vic-20 for games. If nothing else, there is a much larger software library and significantly better joysticks. 

 

The Coco has better underlying hardware, but unless you are wanting to write your own software, that makes little difference.  

[AtariLeaf]

Most of the best games on the coco are on cassette or floppy. 90% of the games on cart are bad to horrible with some notable exceptions. Problem is so many coco 1/2 games play so slow and choppy they just haven't aged well. I remember a bump n jump clone called color car action that played at what amounted to about 7 or 8 frames a second. There's a speed up poke but it's a cheat. Rampage played choppy with 2 players on screen too.

 

For me doubleback is the best cart game on the system. Its a weird system for me because i have incredible nostalgia for it and had a massive collection but never played it. I had to admit to myself that the games just didnt age well or have the replay value of say, a 2600

Edited October 29, 2019 by AtariLeaf

[bluejay]

1 hour ago, AtariLeaf said:

I had to admit to myself that the games just didnt age well or have the replay value of say, a 2600

I have to agree on this. I have three cassette games that'll work on my VIC-20 because the others need more RAM thank 3.5k, and the games all suck, and the only reason I play them a lot is because my 2600 is in my room along with my broken crt, and I'm too lazy to take it out and set it up in the living room. I have my vic and c2n ready to go. Oh, did I mention that I have a habit of getting addicted to terrible games?

[JamesD]

On 10/28/2019 at 1:57 PM, bluejay said:

Now that I have a VIC-20 and a chance to get a CoCo 2, it wonders me; what would you rather use, a VIC-20 or a CoCo 2? The CoCo seems to have better graphics than the VIC, but it doesn't have composite output, as far as I know. The cursor keys seem terrible in both system, with the CoCo 2's keys being slightly better. The CoCo's bright green screen kinda hurts my eyes, and I can change the VIC-20's screen color, but not that the default colors are bad. Anyways, what do you prefer?

It depends on what you want to do.
If you want to program, EXTENDED COLOR BASIC on the CoCo 2 wins hands down.
If you want to play games, the VIC has a better cart library, but the CoCo has a lot of good tape & disk games.
Since you already have a VIC I'm sure you are familiar with it's game library.
You can see a lot of the games that are available for the CoCo here:
http://www.lcurtisboyle.com/nitros9/coco_game_list.html

Some of the games I like for the CoCo 1/2:
Zaxxon
Time Bandit 
Donkey King  (Donkey Kong clone with all 4 levels)
Rommel's Revenge (Good Battle Zone clone)
Pooyan
Sea Dragon
Lancer (I thought this Joust clone felt the most like the arcade)
Dungeons of Daggorath (this one takes some practice)
Galagon (Galaga)
Lunar Rover Patrol (Moon Patrol)
Robotack (simplified Robotron game play)
Speed Racer

Demon Attack
Mega-Bug
Project Nebula (a Star Raiders knock off)

There are a lot of others

[Mr SQL]

The VIC-20 and the CoCo are awesome machines, why not get them both?

 

Tons of great VIC-20 games, my favorites are the ones that fit in 5K and the Scott Adams adventures!

 

The VIC achieves particular retro awesomeness by having really big letters with a screen 22 characters wide, the CoCo comes close with it's 32 character display.

 

Both have an excellent full featured Microsoft BASIC; the lack of graphics commands on the VIC is made up for by the accellerator hardware whose registers you can POKE.

 

Both are true color computers - the VIC is very colorful mixing multiple colors and shades on screen to great effect. The CoCo has 9 color semigraphics, but less control over text colors.

 

And the original CoCo does have some tricks if you don't like the default green text screen - you can get an Orange screen or a Black screen as shown in these two Text Adventures, Temple of the Lost Ark from Saint John Gallery and The Parlog Building from the Rainbow 4th book of Adventures: 
 

 

Here's a preservation site for the CoCo with many interesting games to enjoy:

 http://www.colorcomputerarchive.com/coco/Disks/Games/

 

 

[bluejay]

Now I got my CoCo 2, and I personally think the CoCo 2 is better. Mine is the later one with the full travel keyboard, so it's pretty satisfying to type on, although not as much as the VIC's. The BASIC is much better(boo vic-20 poke commands!), and Dungeons of Daggorath is awesome. The green screen turned out to be fine for me. However, it does suffer from some problems, as it doesn't have av output, and the ccr-81 recorder is plain annoying, and it never works.

BTW, before anybody tells me how simple an av mod is, I will not mod anything, no matter how much it improves the capabilities of the machine, unless it was designed to be upgraded(e.g. Floppy drives on IBM PCs)

[JamesD]

Don't forget to use
POKE 65495,0
to put the CoCo into high speed mode when you are using BASIC.  Just remember to turn it off by typing 
POKE 65494,0
before you try to save your program. Not sure that it matters on the CoCo SDC, but it does with cassette, and the regular floppy drive.

[BassGuitari]

VIC-20 vs. CoCo...man, I dunno. They complement each other so perfectly it's hard to say. Every weakness on one system is a corresponding strength on the other.

 

The TRS-80 is probably the better programming machine, for all the reasons already detailed by others.

 

The VIC-20's graphics are typically much lower-res, but are also refreshingly colorful compared to the sparse 4-color palettes of the TRS-80.

 

The controller situation is, at least superficially, a win for the VIC-20 since it uses digital Atari-compatible joysticks as well as paddles; the goofy little TRS-80 joystick works great for paddle or trakball style games but is generally ill-suited to games that would have been designed with digital controls in mind--and just looking at the thing, only Radio Shack could have come up with it. But, fortunately, the Kraft-designed Deluxe Joystick is way better, and being either centerable or free-floating, essentially obviates the need for separate joysticks and paddles. And you can connect two on the CoCo rather than just one on the VIC.

 

Arcade games often run faster and more smoothly on the VIC-20, while the TRS-80 Color is better at text-based games and adventures (even if for no other reason than its superior text resolution). But as JamesD said, there is the high-speed POKE to help things along. Conversely, neither system is particularly bad at any game genre (IMO).

 

The VIC-20 has licensed "A-list" games; the TRS-80 Color has store-brand versions that aren't aren't as colorful and are occasionally hamstrung by goofy, convoluted control schemes, but are still a lot of fun.

 

The VIC-20 has a way better cartridge library that's way more fun to collect. No qualification there--that's a stone-cold fact. The software itself is better than Radio Shack cartridge titles (several of which are still very good, don't get me wrong), and like Atari or Colecovision cartridges, came in a veritable rainbow of shapes and styles. For the most part, only Radio Shack produced or sold CoCo cartridges, and so there aren't nearly as many, and they have kind of a uniform look (for which there is also much to be said). BUT...I give the CoCo the edge when it comes to tape/disk games, especially when we get into the 32K/64K stuff.

 

The TRS-80 Color has more RAM, but isn't really expandable (I mean, it is expandable, but you're practically modding the system at that point), where as the VIC-20 had all kinds of RAM cartridges.

 

Both systems enjoyed wide and varied third-party support and have readily available and easy-to-use SD solutions so you don't need to track down cassettes and disks. They're both quirky, interesting, sort of odd-duck systems. They both have some great exclusive software.

[JamesD]

The CoCo can come with 64K of RAM, and there are some interesting upgrades on the way.
More RAM, run in high speed mode all the time, and there's already the CoCo VGA which gives a really clear display as well as adding some new features.
And then you can also drop in a 6309 cpu which several games have had some optimizations written for.
Machines with socketed parts are easy to modify.
If you want to play arcade games with an Atari type joystick, there are adapters.
 

[eightbit]

Personally I love both machines. They each have something to offer that the other does not. I would recommend owning both. There is no "this one is better than that one" contest with these in my own personal opinion. I wouldn't want to do without either machine!

[AtariLeaf]

I did end up reaquiring doubleback, clowns and balloons, and color baseball to play on a 16k coco 2. I do enjoy those games but looking at the cart catalog theres not much there for me. 

 

Someday I may either upgrade this one to 64k or get a 64k coco 2 and a coco sdc but that's about as far as I'd go. I can't see doing the big coco collection I used to have. I just simply don't play it enough

[carlsson]

So size wise, I understand the CoCo line has somewhere around 130 carts (going by this listing and adding some margin) while the VIC-20 should have at least some 220 carts, low count (somewhat outdated list). It was already said the cart library is better on the VIC, possibly because it has less RAM and publishers saw the requirement to put out software on cartridges but also because to me it seemed like a more "open" format, simply more major publishers. Tapes might be almost equal, I count ~750 tape games on the CoCo and ~890 tapes all categories on the VIC. Obviously the CoCo line were more advanced machines, often disk based which also reflects on the ~50% higher price which makes me think perhaps those should be compared to other brands/models than the VIC-20.

 

Personally I briefly owned what turned out to be a boxed CoCo 2 with the worst keyboard I ever have encountered, including ZX-81, Spectrum and you name it. I understand that the CoCo 1 is considered to have a horrible keyboard, so perhaps my specimen was worn out beyond belief. I powered it on twice, I think it came with some baseball cartridge and then I sold it again as it was just collecting dust in my closet. While I don't use my VIC-20s as much as I used to, at least they get regular use and being my first type of computer to use, it holds a biased position in my heart though I'm willing to admit its shortcomings when those are fairly pointed out.

[jhd]

 

The cartridge numbers are skewed in the Coco's favour as that includes numerous non-game titles that few people today would care about such as Color Scriptsit (a word processor), Audio Spectrum Analyzer, Personal Finance, Videotex (a terminal emulator), etc. 

 

I am less familiar with the Vic-20, but looking at the above list, a far greater proportion of the total number of cartridges listed are games. 

 

 

[MarkO]

 

8 hours ago, carlsson said:

<< BIG SNIP >>

 

Personally I briefly owned what turned out to be a boxed CoCo 2 with the worst keyboard I ever have encountered, including ZX-81, Spectrum and you name it. I understand that the CoCo 1 is considered to have a horrible keyboard, so perhaps my specimen was worn out beyond belief. 

<< SNIP >>

The CoCo 2 was first available with what is called the "Melty Key" Keyboard.. Later Tandy made a "Full Travel" Keyboard that was modified for the Dulex CoCo and CoCo 3. 

 

The Mylar Membrain can "degrade" and cause issues...  This might be what happened to yours..

 

( I own Three, CoCo 3s, Four, CoCo 2s and Two, CoCo 1s, and all their keyboards seem to be in working order..  )

 

MarkO

Edited December 11, 2019 by MarkO

[bluejay]

Never owning a computer with a melted keyboard, I have no idea whether mine is a melted or full travel, but it is a bit mushier than the VIC-20's.

[BassGuitari]

On 12/11/2019 at 9:18 AM, carlsson said:

I understand that the CoCo 1 is considered to have a horrible keyboard...

Slightly OT but I wonder where this came from. It seems to be an opinion that snowballed in recent years. Granted, the CoCo 1 keyboard isn't, and was never better than the full-travel CoCo 2/3 keyboards, but it's fine enough. Provided the unit is in proper condition, the key action is fine, the keys are responsive, and the key placement makes sense. A little more aural/clicky-clacky feedback would have been nice, I guess, and admittedly it does feel slightly strange at first when you're used to other keyboards, but the way the CoCo 1 keyboard gets bashed based on that seems unnecessary and harsh to me.

 

It works, it's functional, and it's relatively comfortable--what else do you want from a chiclet keyboard? ?‍♂️

 

(But for the sake of this thread...the VIC-20's is better. )

[AtariLeaf]

13 hours ago, BassGuitari said:

what else do you want from a chiclet keyboard? 

 

I guess to not be a chicklet keyboard in the first place ?

[BassGuitari]

On 12/16/2019 at 4:57 AM, AtariLeaf said:

I guess to not be a chicklet keyboard in the first place ?

I mean, sure...but if you're going to have one, you can do a whole lot worse. The CoCo 1 keyboard is unbridled luxury compared to stuff like the PET 2001, Timex 1500, MC-10, or Aquarius.

 

Or flat membrane keyboards like the Timex 1000 or Atari 400.

 

 

[AtariLeaf]

11 hours ago, BassGuitari said:

 

 

Or flat membrane keyboards like the Timex 1000 or Atari 400.

 

 

Yea I do not understand the decision to use something like that. Some people like them but that's a big reason I'd want an 800 over a 400  - real keyboard 

[JamesD]

The White CoCo 1s included the "melted" keyboard, which feels a lot like a laptop keyboard.  It's almost exactly like the keyboard on a Gateway I had.
The CoCo 2 has at least the melted keyboard or better on every machine.