The Vic I chipset wasn't a piece of garbage.. It had a tone generator (though not a SID chip) and you could get a lot of performance out of it's display if you bothered to go to assembly language. I still remember it beating the crap out of my old atari console games for graphics. The only thing bad about it was that 22 column display which someone even fixed with an 40/80 column adapter add on which kinda turned it into a commodore Pet computer. I remember using it with a vicmodem at 300 baud to access compuserve and getting trashed by all the Apple ][ owners and TRS-80 owners who didn't believe the thing could get online at all. The vic modem plugged into the user port on the computer (rs 232 edge connector) and I rememeber my parents killing me because my first telecom bill from them was $300 because I stayed on for too long..
