website/content/museum/rca-cosmac-vip.md

---
title: RCA Cosmac VIP
categories:
- Computers
params:
  name: Cosmac VIP
  company: /companies/rca
  company_name: RCA
  tabs:
  - photos
  - adverts
  - hardware
  - software
  - emulators
  - links
  - docs
  photos:
  - title: COSMAC VIP
    subtitle: ''
    text: Picture courtesy of www.worthpoint.com
    image: null
  - title: COSMAC VIP
    subtitle: ''
    text: ''
    image: null
  - title: COMPLETE SYSTEM
    subtitle: ''
    text: Picture courtesy of www.worthpoint.com
    image: null
  - title: MOTHER BOARD
    subtitle: ''
    text: This is quite a simple electronic layout.
    image: null
  - title: MOTHER BOARD - TOP VIEW
    subtitle: ''
    text: ''
    image: null
  - title: MOTHERBOARD
    subtitle: ''
    text: Picture courtesy of www.worthpoint.com
    image: null
  - title: IN USE
    subtitle: ''
    text: Someone courageous enough to test the Cosmac VIP...
    image: null
  - title: FAMILY
    subtitle: ''
    text: |-
      "Cosmac VIP. The computer for the whole family."

      They indeed seem to have a lot of fun !
    image: null
  adverts:
  - title: 1980 ADVERT & PRICE LIST
    subtitle: ''
    text: |-
      **Price list**

      **VP-111** Low cost microcomputer **$99**\
      **VP-114** Expansion kit for VP-111 (3 KB RAM, I/O port and connectors) **$76**\
      **VP-711** Original VIP microcomputer **$199**\
      **VP-44** On board RAM expansion (4 x 2114 RAM chips) **$36**\
      **VP-590** Color board **$69**\
      **VP-595** Simple sound board (256 programmable frequencies) with speaker **$30**\
      **VP-550** Super sound board (Synthetiser with two sound channels **$49**\
      **VP-551** Super sound 4 channels expansion **$74**\
      **VP-570** 4 KB RAM memory expansion board **$95**\
      **VP-580** Two players keypad **$20**\
      **VP-585** Keypad interface board **$15**\
      **VP-560** Eprom board for two 2716 EPROMS **$34**\
      **VP-565** 2716 EPROM programmer with software **$99**\
      **VP-575** Expansion board with 5 expansions sockets **$59**\
      **VP-700** 4 KB Tiny Basic **$39**\
      **VP-701** Floating point Basic (cassette) **$49**\
      **VP-710** Game listings **$10**\
      **VP-720** Game listings II **$15**\
      **VP-601** Keyboard 128-character ASCII **$69**
    image: null
  hardware:
  - title: ASCII KEYBOARD
    subtitle: ''
    text: This is not the "official" ASCII keyboard sold by RCA, but rather a keyboard intended for the Netronics Elf II computer, which was very similar to the Cosmac VIP.
    image: null
  screenshots:
  - title: UFO
    subtitle: ''
    text: ''
    image: null
  - title: BLITZ
    subtitle: ''
    text: ''
    image: null
  - title: INVADERS
    subtitle: ''
    text: ''
    image: null
  - title: PONG
    subtitle: ''
    text: ''
    image: null
  - title: BLINKY
    subtitle: Pac-man clone
    text: ''
    image: null
  - title: BREAKOUT
    subtitle: ''
    text: ''
    image: null
  - title: KALEIDOSCOPE
    subtitle: ''
    text: Hmmm...this program is quite similar to the one built-in the RCA Studio II game system...
    image: null
  - title: TANK
    subtitle: ''
    text: ''
    image: null
  emulators:
  - title: CHIP-8 emulator
    url: http://myweb.worldnet.net/~winter/chip8/chip8.htm
    platform: MS DOS
    text: MS-DOS emulator bundled with games
  - title: TinyELF for MacOS
    url: http://www.tinyelf.com/
    platform: Apple
    text: Emulation of 1802-based computer now on Mac OS X
  - title: RCS Elf Emulator
    url: http://www.elf-emulation.com/emulator.html
    platform: Unix / Linux
    text: Elf, Elf II, Super ELF and Studio II emulator (Windows compilation also available)
  - title: TinyELF for PalmOS
    url: http://www.cosmacelf.com/tinyelf.htm
    platform: Other platform
    text: Emulates an Elf computer on PalmOS systems. The Elf is quite similar to the Cosmac VIP.
  links:
  - title: Bill's Home Page
    url: http://incolor.inebraska.com/bill_r/rca_cosmac_vip_brochure.htm
    text: Bill has scanned a nice brochure of the Cosmac VIP dated 1977.
  - title: The RCA COSMAC Yahoo! Group
    url: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rcacosmac/
    text: Yahoo! community devoted to preserving information on the VIP
  - title: www.cosmacelf.com
    url: http://www.cosmacelf.com/
    text: excellent site about 1802 based systems
  - title: www.elf-emulation.com
    url: http://www.elf-emulation.com
    text: Informative website dedicated to the Elf systems emulation
  docs:
  - title: RCA COSMAC VIP - INSTRUCTION MANUAL FOR VP-111
    url: null
    cover: null
    text: |-
      **RCA COSMAC VIP - INSTRUCTION MANUAL FOR VP-111**\
      written by RCA

       compiled/archived by Rob Donald\
       type of document : PDF\
       size : 4,9 MB\
       source : www.old-computers.com
  comments:
  - author: Jason Panosh (Alfredton, Australia)
    date: Monday 4th August 2008
    text: |-
      The Cosmac VIP was our first computer and my brother and I spent many hours programming it and having fun. Living in Australia, my Dad had it shipped from the US (via my Uncle) and we assembled one weekend.

      My brother learned the assembly language and he hacked the video subroutines and created some pretty interesting effects. I am sure it was not too good for the monitor, but one effect was to get the top of the display to fold back in itself (at least that is what it looked like). The he made a terrain type routine that looked like the ground curving onto the screen from the top and disappearing off the bottom.

      We added RAM to the board, we had one of our friends burn the CHIP8 language into a ROM and also had the ROM dual boot into two different load states (I think one had the CHIP8 loaded and the other didn’t). We got hold of the ASCII keyboard but never really did anything with it, it was a pretty cool keyboard and used a membrane rather than keys. Very hard to use as there was no tactile feedback at all.

      I used to take the Cosmac and a monitor to school and we would play it during recess. One of the games I wrote was a car racing game and to work around my limited knowledge of sprite collision detection I would draw one frame with the cars on it and test for collision, then draw another frame with the cars and scenery which did not detect for collision. As you can imagine, the scenery frame flickered quite a bit, but overall the game went pretty well and all my friends were pretty impressed.
  - author: Mario (Switzerland)
    date: Sunday 14th February 2021
    text: One of the CPU''s I''m very fond of is the CDP1802 by RCA. I had bought this RCA Integrated Circuits data book (I \*loved\* to read this kind of books) and there was that IC that at first I didn''t understand what it was doing (most of the others were from the TTL 74xx series), until it dawned on me that this was an entire computer in a single IC. One of the landmark events of my life...
  - author: Shane Doyle (Australia)
    date: Tuesday 17th July 2012
    text: I too imported a Cosmac kit from the US (to NZ at that time) in the early 70s, and built it. Great fun programming this thing in hex code !
  - author: Mike Dalgleish (United Kingdom)
    date: Thursday 18th June 2009
    text: I designed vehicle traffic counters using the 1802 back in the late 70''s. I''m now trying to find any Cosmac kits or evaluation boards. Please $ me a line at md @ md46 . com if you have news of any 1802 stuff. Mike
  - author: Kevin P. Kilburn (USA)
    date: Wednesday 14th September 2005
    text: This probably doesn't qualify as useful info, but it's a bit of nostalgia for me. This is one of the first computers I actually saw in person and played around with. My father was in the process of opening a video/computer store called Computavid. His friend made a "coming soon" advertisement on this computer and he played it on a TV in the window of the store. This was back in 1980-81 and I was only 12 at the time. I found it to be absolutely amazing and it sparked my interest in computers. I wanted a computer like this, but my father ended up buying me a TRS-80 Model I system. Later when he began selling Commodore 64 computers in his store, I got one for Christmas. I still have it.
  - author: Adnane (ALGERIA)
    date: Wednesday 9th April 2003
    text: |-
      First, I would ask a question about the CDP 1802 microprocessor : What's the meaning of the instruction which is writen in hexadecimal (68H)?\
      \- Is there a software to simulate the work of the CDP 1802 microprocessor during the execution of it's 91 instructions?

      Thank you very much
  related:
  - /museum/rca-superelf
  oc_id: 543
  source:
    url: https://web.archive.org/web/20230601001718/http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=543
    date: '2023-06-01'
---

The Cosmac VIP, originaly named VP-111, is a typical hobbyist "single-board" computer sold as a kit. You had to build it yourself ! The system uses a RCA CDP-1802 microprocessor like the [RCA Studio II](/museum/rca-studio-ii/) video game system. In fact the Studio II is very similar to the VIP and can be considered as its video-game version. But the VIP is also somehow an improved version of the original Cosmac Elf board system, described in Popular Electronics magazine, august 76 and the following months. The CDP-1802 CPU was also used as the heart of the Voyager, Viking and Galileo probes ! Until recently the 1802 was quite popular (for alarm systems for example) thanks to its CMOS technology ideal for low power systems.

The Cosmac VIP has a most basic hexadecimal keyboard (16 keys). The language stored in ROM is called CHIP-8 and is only 512 bytes long ! It consists of 31 instructions each of which is two bytes (or four hex digits) long. It's a kind of simplified machine language. 16 one-byte variables are provided. Subroutine nesting and machine language inserts are permitted. CHIP-8 was quite popular at that time (Telmac 1800, ETI 660 and DREAM 6800 used it) as it allowed to program video games easily. CHIP-8 was not only used in the late 70's and early 80's. It was used in the early 90's on the HP48 calculator because there was no programming tools to develop fast games on it. Then, a better version of CHIP-8 appeared: SUPER-CHIP. This interpreter has all the CHIP-8 features, as well as and some new ones like a 128\*64 resolution (source : David Winter).\
RCA also sold Tiny Basic, a simple Basic interpreter, as a 4K ROM on an expansion board.

With this system, basic functions are : type programs into RAM from the hex keyboard, save and load programs on tapes, display memory bytes in hex on CRT, step through RAM contents and examine microprocessor registers. Wow.

The Cosmac VIP is equiped with a sound chip and a real-time crystal clock. The sound produced can be heard through the tape output connector. It was delivered with some documentations (CHIP-8, machine language) and listings of 20 video games !

To the left of the hexadecimal keyboard are a reset switch and LED indicators for power-on and cassette operation. Memory add-ons, expansion port and parallel interface are pre-wired on the motherboard but have to be implemented as options. With the I/O interface, you could connect interface relays, sensors, printers or ASCII keyboards.