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Commodore 1541 DOS Commands
The 1541 Floppy Drive was equipped with its own MOS 6502 chip and was therefore capable of understanding and executing its own commands (to format the disk, copy files, erase files, etc). The idea was...
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Reading and Writing Sequential Data on the Commodore 1541
Sometimes it’s helpful to store large amounts of data on the disk rather than keep in it memory. Consider adventure games for example: you could add room descriptions to your listing and later read it...
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How to set the text and background colour on a C64
To set the background colour on your beloved old C64 (and C128 in 40 column mode) you have to POKE the colour value into two registers, one for the background and one for the border. The poor little...
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How to switch between upper/lower case and PETSCII fonts on a C64
The C64 can display two sets of fonts: either a combination of upper case and lower case letters (good for any kind of text), or a combination of upper case letters and graphics (default), known as...
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How to load a .PRG file in VICE
Usually you’d attach a disk image to the VICE emulator and load one of several files from your virtual disk. Occasionally though you’ll come across single files ending in .PRG – those are the files...
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How to set the time on your Commodore C64 / C128
Did you know that the Commodore computers had a built-in clock? It wasn’t an exact science, and it didn’t show the date, but it was able to display a 24hr clock. It did this by counting how many...
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How to merge BASIC programmes on your Commodore C64, C128 and Plus/4
You can merge / combine / concatenate BASIC programmes on a Commodore computer. It’s often useful to develop shorter chunks of code and put them together for a larger app. Sadly there’s no built-in...
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How to use SD2IEC: a quick command reference
I’ve ordered an SD2IEC a few weeks ago from Nic over at http://sd2iec.co.uk. It’s an SD card reader for Commodre computers and emulates many features of the 1541 Floppy Disk Drive. I went for the...
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The evolution of Flow Control in Commodore BASIC
When I had a C64 back in the days, the only IF/THEN statement we could create in BASIC v2 was just that: IF and THEN. There was no ELSE, and everything had to be on a single line. It was the only flow...
View ArticleHow to split a long string into separate words in Commodore BASIC
Here’s a quick word splitter routine for CBM BASIC. It takes phrase and “explodes” all words into an array, removing spaces. Feel free to adopt it for your own needs. 10 rem word splitter 20 rem splits...
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How to use direct block access commands in Commodore DOS
We can access each sector’s raw data on Commodore disk drives with direct block access commands. Supported drives include the 1541, 1571, the VICE emulator as well as the SD2IEC card reader (for the...
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Thoughts about the C64 Mini by Retro Games Ltd
In Europe, the brand new C64 Mini has just been released. Although I don’t have one myself, I’ve been following the Indiegogo campaign and have watched several “unboxing reviews” on YouTube. I must...
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Working with Keyboard Input in Commodore BASIC
In this episode I’ll show you three ways to take user input from the keyboard in Commodore BASIC. The INPUT and GET commands work on all systems, while the GETKEY command only works on the Plus/4 and...
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Matching Lottery Numbers on the Commodore 64
In this episode I’m amending my previous lottery number generator to take six lucky numbers from the user to match against the randomly drawn numbers from the Commodore 64. This will allow us to...
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Lottery Statistics in Commodore BASIC
In this episode I’m adding statistics support to my previous lottery generator on the Commodore 64. I’ll add an array that is updated if my supplied numbers have been matched, and how many times over...
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How to run Commodore BASIC as a Scripting Language on macOS
Did you know you can run Commodore BASIC v2 on your Mac and Linux systems as a scripting language? It’s true – thanks to the marvellous efforts of Michael Steil and James Abbatiello. They’ve adapted...
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Flow Control in Commodore BASIC
In this episode I’ll explain the concept of Flow Control in Commodore BASIC. It’s kind of a video update of a post I did a while ago. In essence, it means that we can tell the programme to take a...
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Programmatic Loops in Commodore BASIC
In this episode I’ll demonstrate how to use programmatic loops in Commodore BASIC. I’ll show you how to use the FOR/NEXT loop (available in all versions of Commodore BASIC), as well as the DO/WHILE...
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Flashing Border Colors on the Commodore 128 in Machine Language
In this episode I’ll show you how to create the iconic flashing borders on Commodore machines. Back in the day, when the system was loading, this was a nice way to indicate that the computer is busy...
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How to write a text input routine in Commodore BASIC
In this screencast I’ll show you how to write your own INPUT routine in Commodore BASIC. This comes in handy when you want to reject certain keys from being used when asking users for keyboard input....
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