Brendan Jones

"Once a VIC hacker, always a VIC hacker."

(JavaScript is off. Good instincts. You are reading the bloat-free edition. With JS on, this page boots a Commodore VIC-20 instead. Either way: no trackers, no cookies, no nonsense.)

Load "Bio",8,1

Somewhere around 1981, a kid in Australia switched on a Commodore VIC-20: 5KB of RAM, 22 columns, 3583 bytes free.

"Within the confines of that 3.5Kb of RAM ... we made magic happen."

I hand-assembled 6502 machine code. Knew the opcodes by heart, counted branch offsets in my head, and when the tools I wanted did not exist, I wrote them.

I wrote games: dungeons, demons, spy planes, crime capers. I tried to get Sorcery published at 16. The publishers passed; four decades later the VIC-20 Denial community patched it and shipped it for me. Best QA cycle in history.

Then a plot twist: a tie and a badge at IBM in the 90s. The 6502 forgave me.

Then twelve years flying my own bird: I founded Kestrel Defence and built the Kestrel Tactical Simulator. Air, sea, land and space, simulated on ordinary PCs. Bigger machines, same old trick: make the hardware do more than it should.

These days: Japan. Quieter, happier, still allergic to bloatware. Once a VIC hacker, always a VIC hacker. :-)

Games Directory (Load "$",8)

Everything written for a 22-column screen and a 1.02 MHz 6502
Year	Title	Field notes
1983-84	Sorcery	Six adventurers. One dungeon. Zero publishers. I was 16 when the suits passed on it. Forty years later the Denial crew patched it and shipped it for me. Longest QA cycle in history. Worth it.
1983	House of Demons	My last and largest text adventure. Horror, because comedy needs more RAM. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
1983	Spyflight	Fly a U2 over Moscow at 1.02 MHz. The Cold War, now with loading times.
1982	Fatman: Crime and Vice	A gritty caper, also answering to Viceman. The streets were mean. The RAM was meaner.
1982	Carnage of Karn	The title promised carnage. Within a 3.5K budget, carnage was delivered.
1982	Rocky Island	An island. Rocks. Adventure. We did not have focus groups.
1982	Marsh Castle	Officially lost media. If you still have the tape, we should talk. Reward: one (1) firm handshake.
1983	Qerbs	An arcade puzzle about a thing that is definitely not a certain hopping arcade character. Definitely.
1982	VIC Invaders	Legally distinct invaders from space. The lawyers never called. The high scores did.
1982	UFO Escapers	They came from outer space. They left in a hurry.

Tools I Built

"Just because it can be done, it should be done."

Adventure Compiler (1983): Why write one adventure when you can write the machine that writes them.
UPL (1983): "Utility Programming Language." Pseudo-Pascal in, 6502 machine code out. At 15 you do not buy a compiler. You write one.
Quetzalcoatl: A 6502 C cross-compiler and assembler for the PC, named after a feathered god. Released under the GPL, obviously.

This Site

Hand-made HTML, CSS and JS. No frameworks, no cookies, no trackers, no analytics, no CDNs, and no animated cut scenes shovelled down your throat. Everything loads from this folder. 3583 bytes would have been enough.

With JavaScript on, this page becomes a working VIC-20 terminal. Type HELP at the READY. prompt. Or DEMO. Or something braver.