Realms of Quest is the "perfect" RPG for the Commodore VIC-20 that never was - well, back in the early 1980s at least. It and others in the Realms of Quest series came out after the demise of the VIC-20 in the marketplace, and I have to wonder if the VIC might not have seen extra life if ROQ and some of the other neat games designed by the programmer had come to the market back in 1982 or so. I discussed Realms of Quest 3 at length in my book A Commodore 64 Walkabout because, in my opinion, the game is that good.

You can still buy the excellent disk with full-color manual and neat artwork at Psytronik Software , but if you'd like to just enjoy it in emulation along with several other games (including the Theater of War strategy series) by Ghislain de Blois you can now do so for free. As Ghislain posted on the VIC-20 Denial forums:

"I've decided to publicly release my entire collection of VIC-20 games into a single zip archive. This also includes the full commercial version of Realms of Quest III that was released in 2009. Included with these is the VIC-20 VICE Emulator for convenience along with instructions."

You can find the entire collection of Ghislain's superb games HERE at the VIC-20 Denial forums.

Kenz of Pystronik Software and the Binary Zone interactive store just announced Zytron II will be released for PC "soon", a sequel to the C64 title Zytron - Mega Blast.

Though they focus on retro gaming, Pystronik is no stranger to PC releases or shooters. You may recall Armalyte for PC was released a while back (now available again HERE.)

Have you played the original? If not, you can find it HERE at the "Latif" link. Get your joystick and old-school reflexes ready, because you WILL die. Think of each death as a learning experience. Learn the right positions to place your ship. Learn how to hit the enemies, when to hang back, and when to barrel ahead. For example, in the wave of bubbles that hits you early on, you will need(?) to move forward (to the right) to survive - caution doesn't always pay.

Unfortunately the original file is plagued by too many cracktro screens. To get around this annoyance I will often make a snapshot file of the title screen (and of course overwrite that file when I get to the next level).

Interested in improving your skills in CBM BASIC? I have become involved in programming once more for work reasons, and my interest in programming in general has been revived. My days are generally packed with work and life distractions (and writing) though, so I try to squeeze in study when I can on the go. I read eBooks on the topic on a Kindle and use Arthur Jordison's CBM Studio or the excellent BasEdit.NET when I can find a few minutes on a PC for improving my Commodore programming skills. Both of the aforementioned tools are worth downloading since they are free, and both  make it much easier to program than typing straight into a real C64 or VIC-20 (either in hardware or emulation).

For practice I suggest using BasEdit to open up and modify a prg file for the VIC-20. You can find several files HERE. Make sure you specify 16K of expanded memory if you run them, or use PRG Starter to run.

There are many guides to Commodore programming available around the web, and some niche communities are still actively programming for the C64 and VIC-20. Games are developed and tested for the VIC-20 at the Denial forums as a sort of community effort, for example.  Most books on programming the C64 and VIC-20 (among other CBM computers) were written in the 1980s and are no longer in print. While auction sites are always a good place to look, you can also find digital copies of many of them on sites such as BombJack's or in a torrent somewhere, but they are typically in PDF format (the standard popular format that maintains the look of the original pages as scanned). This is the prefferred format for preservation or viewing on a PC display, but is not always the best for portable reading. To read them on the go, I use a Kindle Touch, but PDF format doesn't cut it for the size of my Kindle's screen. If you've tried to read books on a smartphone in PDF you'll know what I mean.  

Though not as small as a smartphone, the Kindle Touch is a bit too small to read most files in .PDF format without straining my eyes, and zooming around a page as an option is cumbersome.

You can use Calibre, a free e-book management tool to convert e-books to and from several formats. For example, if you find a certain 100 book Star Trek torrent with older Microsoft Reader (.lit) formatted files, you can use Calibre to convert them all for reading in .mobi format on a Kindle or other device like an Android tablet with the Kindle app installed. This works quite well. PDF conversion is trickier, however, and files can end up with zeroes recognized as nines or the letter O, especially with programs written out in dot matrix style. Other garbage text can clutter up a conversion as well (for example, a binder-style margin may show up as zeroes, but there should be many readable pages once you get into the meat of the books. When sitting down to type in code, you

If Calibre does a poor job of converting, and it keeps many pages as pictures even when the pages have embedded OCR'd text, I recommend using the free Mobipocket Creator (publisher version) for conversion to text. It will first convert the PDF files into HTML and images, then you "build" the ebook file, which Calibre can then can convert to MOBI as you send the files to your Kindle. Sounds complicated, and there are a few steps involved, but once you've done it you'll realize how easy it is.

Read up on your smartphone or other reading device along with me if you're dipping your toes into CBM programming, or going back after many years. In the weeks ahead I will document some of my own experiences with BASIC programs and share them with you.