Month: April 2018

Flashing Border Colors on the Commodore 128 in Machine Language

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In this episode I’ll show you how to create the iconic flashing borders on Commodore machines. Back in the day, when the system was loading, this was a nice way to indicate that the computer is busy doing something rather than being dead. I’ll show you the principle both in BASIC and in Machine Language … Read more

Programmatic Loops in Commodore BASIC

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In this episode I’ll demonstrate how to use programmatic loops in Commodore BASIC. I’ll show you how to use the FOR/NEXT loop (available in all versions of Commodore BASIC), as well as the DO/WHILE loops (available on the Plus/4 and C128). Enjoy! https://wpguru.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Loops-in-Commodore-BASIC.mp3Podcast: Download (Duration: 11:33 — 10.6MB)

Flow Control in Commodore BASIC

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In this episode I’ll explain the concept of Flow Control in Commodore BASIC. It’s kind of a video update of a post I did a while ago. In essence, it means that we can tell the programme to take a different route in the code depending on a condition that’s met. We’ll explore the IF/THEN … Read more

How to run Commodore BASIC as a Scripting Language on macOS

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Did you know you can run Commodore BASIC v2 on your Mac and Linux systems as a scripting language? It’s true – thanks to the marvellous efforts of Michael Steil and James Abbatiello. They’ve adapted the original BASIC v2 as featured on the VIC-20 and C64 with additional routines so that it works natively on … Read more

Writing HELLO WORLD in Machine Language on the Commodore 128

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The Commodore 128 has a built-in machine language monitor which makes it ideal for ML development. However, most (or pretty much all) documentation on this subject is geared towards the Commodore 64, making it slightly difficult to get a head start in writing ML code for the 128. Before I forget how to do it, … Read more

Lottery Statistics in Commodore BASIC

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In this episode I’m adding statistics support to my previous lottery generator on the Commodore 64. I’ll add an array that is updated if my supplied numbers have been matched, and how many times over how many draws this has happened. I’ll also add an option to pause the programme and display the statistics before … Read more

Matching Lottery Numbers on the Commodore 64

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In this episode I’m amending my previous lottery number generator to take six lucky numbers from the user to match against the randomly drawn numbers from the Commodore 64. This will allow us to compare what the computer has drawn to the user’s input, as well as keep drawing numbers until the user input comes … Read more

Thoughts on Windows 10 Upgrade Error 0xc190020e

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My first generation Surface Pro only has 64GB of space, roughly 20 of which I’m allowed to use (the rest of it is kind of forever “lost in cyberspace” – or so it seems). It’s been running all Windows 10 updates fine until a few months ago, when Windows kept bugging me that the latest security patches needed to be installed.

I was happily running Version 1703 up to that point and never had an issue with space limitations or deferring updates. Until early 2018, when Microsoft started  aggressively forcing the Fall Creator’s Update down my throat. 

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