Micro Machines: Making Room on the VIC-20

The VIC-20 gave new owners a colourful screen and very little room to waste. Its display held 22 columns by 23 rows; an unexpanded machine started BASIC with 3,583 bytes free. A longer sentence could wrap unexpectedly, while program text, variables and strings all competed for memory.

The small screen was a constraint, but it also made results immediate: type a few lines, run them, and watch your own characters appear. On this machine, even a modest program taught careful budgeting.

Commodore's manual encouraged owners to use the keyboard's graphics characters and the POKE command to change screen contents directly. The programmer's guide went further: each character shape occupied eight bytes, and the VIC chip could be pointed at character patterns stored in RAM. That made custom symbols and simple animation possible, though those patterns consumed precious space too and let to the characteristic style of the early games.

Recommended reading: Explore Commodore's early computer industry and the people behind its C64 era in REDO FROM START (USA & Japan).