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Comment by wuliwong | Hacker News Reader

Our first computer was a Commodore 64! I loved it. But it is funny, I only dabbled in programming with it. I don't even know what language it was? I remember making the computer print my name over and over and having to add ",8,1" at the end of the command. I remember hacking the code of the game Telengard so my character would get millions of experience and gold. I was only like 10. But there were some cool games, I think it was contemporary to the original Nintendo. I remember California Games, Pool of Radiance, Pit Stop, Super off road. Oh the memories.

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The C-64 booted into Microsoft Basic by default. The ",8,1" was part of the LOAD command. 8 is the number of the device, 1 tells Basic to load the program to the address where it was originally saved from.

It was contemporary to the original Nintendo. The NES even used a CPU that was based on the C-64/VIC-20 6502 CPU. The 6502 was designed by MOS Technology (a Commodore company).

Yes.. and there was a very similar command (,8,0 maybe?) that instead formatted the disk. In my case, the disk contained several of my first programs.

Several years later, not having learned my lesson, I tried out the fdisk command on my win98 machine. It apparently worked as advertised.

,8,0 would load from device 8 to memory location 2048. I think formatting was done with the OPEN command.

Yeah. You would use 8,0 for BASIC source, and 8,1 for assembly. I think.

In fact you could skip the ,0 part and just type LOAD "FILENAME",8 for BASIC applications.

Thanks! It's easy to see a ten year old non-native English speaker make that mistake..

Similarly, the Apple II used a 6502. Even the Atari 2600 used a 6502.

The c64's CPU was a 6510 which is also based on a 6502.

LOAD * ,8,1

... The only C64 command I remember now. Which if I am remembering correctly, meant load the first program (usually a game in my case) off the terribly unreliable, usually at least partially corrupted 5 1/4" disk.

I remember disks where load * ,8,1 would load a list of addresses to load other programs from; I think this was done by making the default program do nothing but print the addresses of other things on the disk.

forgot the quotes:

LOAD "*",8,1

And that just reminded me that the doubt quote was "SHIFT+2"! (unlike English US keyboards)

How about sys 64738 (cold start/reboot) - useful in many ways!

,8,1 was for loading stuff from disks IIRC.

8 = device number (disk drive). If you had multiple drives (up to 4) you would use, 8, 9, 10 and 11.

the ,1 meant load this file to it's defined start address, which was held in the first 2 bytes of the file. It could be omitted in most cases.

In fact, the ",1" was usually used for "autorun", which was achieved by setting the address to load into low enough that it would overwrite the program counter used by BASIC, or a few other approaches that also involved messing with low memory.

All of which had the result of "tricking" the interpreter into handing control directly over to the loaded program instead of returning to the command prompt.

" If the secondary address isn't specified or is specified as 0 (e.g. LOAD "FILE",8), the file is saved/loaded from the BASIC memory area (which, on the C64, starts by default at $0801). If the secondary address is specified as a non-zero value (e.g. LOAD "FILE",8,1), the program is loaded starting from the address specified by the file itself (the PRG header, which is the first two bytes of the file)—this form of command is more common when loading machine code programs."

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_DOS

You are right in that auto loaders can be created using this method, but the ,1 means, load this file to the memory location specified by the first 2 bytes of the file.

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