Comment by cbm-vic-20 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cbm-vic-20 | Hacker News Reader

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The C64 had a good game library. While the C64 does have a cartridge and tape deck port, most games were sold on floppy disks. The C64 does not auto-boot disks, so when you turn on the power switch, you are immediately met with a BASIC "Ready." prompt. You have to type in a magic incantation to start the program on the disk

    LOAD "*",8,1

The curious will wonder what else can be done in BASIC? Or what if you don't have any games you want to play? It usually starts from there. This generation of Commodore computers has an excellent beginner's programming guide [0] in the box. Want to change the colors on the screen, or make a sound? The manual shows you what values to POKE into memory to make that happen.

The Programmers' Reference Guide [1] has a good introduction to assembly and machine language, if you want to go deeper.

[0] https://archive.org/details/Commodore_64_Users_Guide_1982_Co...

[1] https://archive.org/details/Commodore_64_Programmers_Referen...

[2] https://archive.org/details/commodore-1541-disk-drive-users-...

There's another thing about the Commodore computers that is really special. The binaries for disk and tape games consisted of the machine code for the game, along with a stub BASIC program to jump into it (typically one line with a SYS command).

Meaning that the entire computer, and all its capabilities and speed, was available from within BASIC.

This was true of many home computers of the era, and even of the IBM PC if you were willing to struggle a bit, but it was emphatically not true of all of them: the TI-99/4A, for instance, had a nerfed BASIC that was not only very slow, it also prevented access to any of the system's facilities outside of the commands BASIC provided. This probably had a lot to do with its unusual memory architecture, in which only 128 words of RAM were provided to the CPU and all BASIC memory was accessed indirectly through the video chip.

But yeah, aside from cartridge-based games, every program on the C64 was a BASIC program, just one that was mostly a machine-code memory image.

Booting directly into a programming language REPL (in ~2 seconds, I might add) was a great signal that the C64 was ultimately for programming, even if all you do with it is games.

I kind of wish for a modern PC that booted in 2 seconds, directly into Python or something.

I'm looking through the user guide (0 link), and it's pretty interesting. It's fascinating how the structure is laid out in a way that lets you grasp how everything works all at once.

>While the C64 does have a cartridge and tape deck port, most games were sold on floppy disks.

In the US. While disk drives were essential there, in Europe tape was standard in the 8-bit era and even most commercial software was sold on tape.

I (a youngish adult, in the US) had a 1541 drive that broke. I was in love with the "Silent Service" submarine game, and found an ad in one of the computer magazines for a cassette version of the game that I ordered from England. It arrived in a couple weeks, and I had my favorite game again! Thank heavens the lower tech Brits!

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