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Comment by mattl | Hacker News Reader

,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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