Sadly the Commodore machines don’t offer a routine to locate or set the current cursor position via BASIC. There is however a Kernel routine named PLOT which can do this in Machine Language.
Here’s how we can utilise it.
Getting the Cursor Position
. 01300 38 sec . 01301 20 f0 ff jsr $fff0 . 01304 8e 00 14 stx $1400 . 01307 8c 01 14 sty $1401 . 0130a 60 rts
This snippet sets the carry flag, calls the PLOT routine at $FFF0 and returns the cursor position in the X and Y registers. We’ll put them in a safe place into $1400 and $1401 to use.
You can call it from BASIC with
SYS DEC("1300")
PRINT PEEK(DEC"1400") : rem row
PRINT PEEK (DEC("1401") : rem coumn
Setting the Cursor Position
. 01310 18 clc . 01311 ae 00 14 ldx $1400 . 01314 ac 01 14 ldy $1401 . 01317 20 f0 ff jsr $fff0 . 0131a 60 rts
Call it from BASIC by POKEing your desired coordinates into $1400 and $1401, then call SYS DEC(“1310”).
This snippet will do the reverse of the above: populate the X and Y registers from our safe place and then call PLOT. We clear the carry flag first, because it decides if the position is read (carry clear) or set (carry set).
PLOT should work fine on the C64 and Plus/4 as well but I didn’t get a chance to test it yet.