Commodore 64 Guides | Hacker News Reader

Commodore 64 Guides

pickledlight.blogspot.com

197 pointsd99kris35 comments

Wow, nice job. I spent so much time inside the Programmer's Reference Guide as a teenager. My copy was completely wore out with pages falling out.

Writing machine language by hand on the C-64 is the closest I've ever felt to the hardware as a programmer. 3 registers, some flags and interrupts.

He reproduced the entire PRG and User’s Guide by hand. I’m always amazed by the incredible things people get up to.

The PRG is such a great book and flipping through his version of it brought back some happy memories of my roughly 11 year old self.

Thanks for the effort, this is great! Amazing some of us still can remember some of the special SYS and POKE addresses by head: sys 64738 (hex FCE2, reset) poke 808,234 (disable runstop/restore) graphics memory 0x400-0x7e8 and $a000-$bfff basic rom memory

You could basically visualize the entire 64k in your head.

Good times!

It is a shame lulu couldn't do spiral bound versions. Being able to lay these flat or completely folded over was part of their appeal.

My original VIC20 manuals were in French, and I didn't even know English at the time. Still managed to learn stuff from here and there. I can't imaging what I could have done if I had something like this 35 years ago... It's really nicely done.

How come the code listings seem to have removed spaces between keyword tokens? Like, for example, on page 185 you have lines like:

> 50 IFHF<0THENEND

Which clearly, from context, are supposed to be:

> 50 IF HF < 0 THEN END

Is this a typesetting error or did the original text do it that way for some reason? Just to emphasize that BASIC's interpreter didn't care?

I can verify that it's that way (without the spaces) in the original. Sometimes you had to do it to fit all the code in two screen lines, because that was the maximum line length. So it probably became a habit for some programmers.

That's a shame :( I had been hoping to use this book with my daughter (she's been getting into coding on retro machines like our C64) but I don't think I want to complicate things with the added cognitive load of tokenizing keywords she doesn't even know yet, by hand.

Give her some credit

If us old farts got by with it as kids... she'll be fine. Though I wouldn't pass by an opportunity to make things better if possible.

Agreed completely

Just imagine it is a write-only language like FORTH.

She will blow through it same as so many of us did.

Waste 5 bytes on whitespace? I could never imagine being so wasteful.

In fact, I once wrote a program that removed whitespace of other programs. It also renumbered the lines starting at 1, incrementing by 1. Why? Because the line numbers in gotos would be fewer digits.

I forget if Commodore BASIC partly tokenized programs or simply stored them as text, but it definitely stored formatting information, so there was an art to minimizing memory footprint and execution speed by entering them that way.

Tokenized

The original did this, see: http://cini.classiccmp.org/pdf/Commodore/C64%20Programmer's%...

Or the plain text version: http://www.zimmers.net/cbmpics/cbm/c64/c64prg.txt

Both found through https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Commodore_64_Programmer%27s_Re...

Incredible. Thanks so much for this. Just wondering, do you think you’ll do the schematic at some stage?

OMG, memories come back. My father brought a C64C back from Germany in 1991, complete with a German edition of the User’s Guide. The sample programs ring a bell. I distinctly remember a 7yo version of myself typing in code for the balloon sprite one.

Sadly, I never had the Programmer’s Reference Guide. I did, though, own „Commodore 64” by Bohdan Frelek, sometimes considered _the_ C64 Polish bible.

Very nicely done. In a similar vein, the Apple 1 manuals have been recently reproduced (though it seems you have to buy the printed copies and the PDFs are not freely available)

https://www.retroplace.com/en/feature/operation-manually/162

Yes, total childhood flashback, thanks for putting in the hard work & sharing it with us!

(PS: You may know SYS 64738 but have you tried SYS 4222?)

An invaluable action for preserving heritage.

registered as well just to say amazing work. i did own a c64 which provided an unmeasurable amount of fun, learning and pure joy for many, many years, not just for myself and my brother but also lots of friends.

the guide looks beautiful, sharp and fresh. great job preserving it for future generations.

Thanks! It is from you that I first heard about Lulu and looks like their price is pretty reasonable (600 page A5 Hardcover only costs 20 bucks but probably a lot more for CAD). I have quite a few manuals and pdfs that I would like to convert to books.

Very impressive. What's the estimate cost of a print?

Lulu can be all over the place based on the number of pages, type of binding, type of paper, etc. Oh, and shipping can gouge you.

I've had some U.S. Letter hardbound books I've printed through them (photo-quality, color) that ran about $45 or so each.

You'd have to go to Lulu and work through all the steps in the post until you got to the last step to see the price.

People like this are absolute legends. It brings me so much joy to look at this and I really appreciate the hard work that went into this. Thank you!

I remember typing in the animation routine that bounces a ball once at the bottom of the screen. The ball was so bright and glowing.

Very nice! I do hope he releases the document source to allow for collaborative correcting and improving.

Registered to say, amazing effort. Never owned one but I want to read this now, strangely.

Nice work. Just recognizing a labor of love for the exemplary product is!

That is all.

Still have my spiral-bound copy on my shelf.

Aren’t these books copyrighted?

Legally speaking, yes they would definitely be. Many old books and periodicals about retrocomputing can now be readily accessed via the Internet Archive and other efforts such as Bitsavers because no one really cares about enforcing these copyrights (and even finding the current right-owners might be infeasible), but selling newly-made hardcopies commercially is way more of a grey area, AIUI.

(There might be some ground for challenging the copyright for works that were first published before 1989 without a copyright notice. But I'm not sure that would apply to these guides.)

Amazing work

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