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Commodore 64 Guides
11–20 of 37 posts
Re: Commodore 64 Guides
#12registered 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.
Re: Commodore 64 Guides
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Re: Commodore 64 Guides
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: Commodore 64 Guides
#15He 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.
Re: Commodore 64 Guides
#16Yes, 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?)
Re: Commodore 64 Guides
#17How come the code listings seem to have removed spaces between keyword tokens? Like, for example, on page 185 you have lines like: > 50 IFHF Which clearly, from context, are supposed to be: > 50 IF HF 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?
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.
Re: Commodore 64 Guides
#18How come the code listings seem to have removed spaces between keyword tokens? Like, for example, on page 185 you have lines like: > 50 IFHF Which clearly, from context, are supposed to be: > 50 IF HF 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 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.
Re: Commodore 64 Guides
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Just imagine it is a write-only language like FORTH.
Re: Commodore 64 Guides
#20It 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.