A Minimal C64 Datasette Program Loader

The Commodore Datasette recording format is heavily optimized for data safety and can compensate for many typical issues of cassette tape, like incorrect speed, inconsistent speed (wow/flutter), and small as well as longer dropouts. This makes the format more complex and way less efficient than, for example, “Turbo Tape” or all other custom formats used by commercial games. Let’s explore the format by writing a minimal tape loader for the C64, optimized for size, which can decode correct tapes, but does not support error correction. read more

Commodore KERNAL History

If you have ever written 6502 code for the Commodore 64, you may remember using “JSR $FFD2” to print a character on the screen. You may have read that the jump table at the end of the KERNAL ROM was designed to allow applications to run on a all Commodore 8 bit computers from the PET to the C128 (and the C65!) – but that is a misconception. This article will show how read more

80 Columns Text on the Commodore 64

The text screen of the Commodore 64 has a resolution of 40 by 25 characters, based on the hardware text mode of the VIC-II video chip. This is a step up from the VIC-20’s 22 characters per line, but since computers in the professional segment (Commodore PET 8000 series, CP/M, MS-DOS) usually had 80 columns, several solutions – both hardware and software – exist to allow 80 columns on a C64 as well. Let’s look at how this is done in software! At the end of this article, I present a fast and full-featured open source implementation with several different character sets. read more

Converting VisAss and F8 AssBlaster Source

If you have developed applications for the Commodore 64 in the 80s or 90s, chances are you still have your old floppy disk with the original assembly sources. If you have used the VisAss or
F8 AssBlaster assemblers, you can use a new command line tool I wrote to convert the encoded binary files into ASCII, so they can be published or you can continue development using modern tools like cc65. read more