Emulate a Commodore VIC-20 on an ESP32 for $16 (In about 6 minutes!)

hey everybody i hope you're having a fantastic day i'm having a great day because i just found what i think is my new favorite esp32 board for those of you who aren't familiar an esp32 is an arduino type board a little micro controller that has a faster processor more memory wi-fi bluetooth all that kind of stuff and these things are fantastic you can do all kinds of fun stuff with this but this is not my favorite this is my favorite and this is the 16 ish dollars ttgo esp32bga which means it can hook a monitor up to it and not just a monitor a keyboard and mouse and not just a keyboard and mouse an sd card and not just an sd card sound this thing is awesome and i've only been playing with it for a little bit but i want to show you my new favorite feature we are going to turn this thing into an emulated computer and i'm sure i'm going to have a whole bunch of different projects for this thing but there are so many projects that there's no way i can cover them all in one video so i just want you guys to know that this board exists and we're going to do some cool emulation with it so i've connected the vga monitor the sound a mouse and keyboard ps2 style to this thing i haven't bothered to put an sd card in there because i don't really need it for this project i'm going to take my standard micro usb cable and plug it in just kind of give you an idea of what's actually going to happen so when i plug this thing in i have it set to show the vic-20 and as you can see it boots pretty quickly into a basic vic-20 emulator and so we come down here and we have access to both the keyboard and the mouse at this point and uh we have sort of a pre-curated list of games that are free on here you can reboot the thing and you can go in here to basic and you can you know start typing in your basic you can hit the f12 key to get back out and taken to that menu you can decide if you want your joystick to be the cursor or mouse i found the cursor keys to be generally easier to use now one of the neat things about this thing is that it still has access to the internet so you can actually connect this to your wi-fi and if there's other games you want to download you can uh put in the url of the game and download it here i'll give you a link to some games and stuff like that in the description there's also this list button where you can download another sort of 70 or 71 games that he's chosen for this thing which i think is pretty sweet um so if we come up here to the uh dot dot we can actually browse the file system and go into that list of games that i've already downloaded and kind of get an idea uh for what is in here there's just a lot of stuff um in here for the vic 20. so i'm going to go back up to the original set of games and we'll pick frogger because i've hit that a couple times i at least have an idea of what keys i need to use so we're going to boot into frogger on the vic-20 and we're going to hit the menu key which is the one between the control and the windows key on the right side of the keyboard and you'll see we've got frogger and so we can just come across oh man that just popped out in time uh so i'm going to jump across the log jump across the law and let's see here bam okay so i made it across now it is a little bit more washed out on your screen than it is on mine um but overall it's a very cool authentic looking vic-20 experience as far as i remember back in the day so i'm going to show you a little bit about how to install this thing this this entire library uh made by fabrizio de victoro he made an amazing library with way more features than i can show off in this video but i hope this got you a little excited about what you can do with this board one of the coolest things is that using this board is just like using any other esp32 board so if you haven't done it you'll need to install the esp32 stuff in the arduino ide but it comes up as an esp dev module you see i'm here on com43 and i'm going to go to manage libraries and the magical one that we need to mess around with is called fab gl and as you can see here we have fab gl by fabrizio d vittorio i'm using version 1.0.5 if you don't have it go ahead and install it now the next thing you want to do is make sure that you have the esp32 dev module uh selected so that you have access to the library and you're going to go to examples and all the way down to the fab gl library and we're going to go to vga now in here there's all kinds of stuff there's stuff about the altair 8800 i'm going to be doing that there's some game stuff some vga stuff some hardware testing and all that kind of stuff the one that we're going to use for this project is the vic-20 so we're going to click that and it's going to open up a new sketch now i highly recommend that you kind of scroll through the sketch and look at it because this one in particular tells you that this sketch requires you go to tools partition scheme huge app so you're going to come up here to tools and partition scheme and make sure that it's set on huge app and it probably isn't by default so you do that and you click upload and then you are actually good to go with what i showed you in the video so i really can't say enough good things about this board uh you know if you're doing some other maker things you may not like the small number of gpio pins that are left over but you know you're using all those ports for very cool things keyboard mouse sd card vga all that kind of stuff and the fact is you can get started with this board in just a couple of minutes so um this is just the beginning of what i plan on doing with this thing in fact i kind of want to have a fleet of these things they are cheaper than a lot of regular arduinos right now so i highly suggest you snap one or five of them up if you do use the link in the description it really helps out the channel and allows me to keep buying things like this for future videos uh if you have any questions ask below i'm not an expert on this board yet but i'll be happy to help you out where i can so hey thanks for watching have a great day

Channel: AnotherMaker

Views: 11,917

Keywords: LILYGO® TTGO VGA32 V1.4, LILYGO TTGO VGA32, esp32 vga, vga arduino, esp32 keyboard, esp32 mouse, esp32 emulation, esp32 emulator, commodore esp32, vic20, vic-20, vc20, vc-20, diy vic20, diy commodore

Id: Zvvdwd4t6gc

Length: 6min 13sec (373 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 21 2021