Did you know that there’s a way to “listen” to a Datasette Drive, even though it’s not meant to play back the latest top twenty mixtapes? I’ve recently acquired a Commodore Plus/4 with 1531 Datasette. I remember having one of those in the eighties (with an adaptor to connect it to my C64 back then). … Read more
ZoomFloppy is an ingenious contraption by Nate Lawson which lets you connect real Commodore disk drives via USB to modern computers. It allows you to read and write old floppy disks from drives like the 1541, 1571, 1581 and several others. ZoomFloppy itself is a board with a USB connector (which also acts as the … Read more
Thanks to BASIC 7.0’s powerful commands we can load and save arbitrary sections of memory to disk using BLOAD and BSAVE. This was useful for dealing with machine code as well as raw image data. Both commands work on the C128 and Plus/4, but sadly the C64 was lacking in this area. BLOAD and BSAVE … Read more
Did you know that the Commodore computers had a built-in clock? It wasn’t an exact science, and it didn’t show the date, but it was able to display a 24hr clock. It did this by counting how many seconds your machine was switched on, accessible in two variables TI and TI$ (short for TIME). TI$ … Read more
Usually you’d attach a disk image to the VICE emulator and load one of several files from your virtual disk. Occasionally though you’ll come across single files ending in .PRG – those are the files that are contained on a disk image. Remember those weird three letter abbreviations on the right hand side when you … Read more
The C128 could run twice as fast as its predecessor, the legendary C64. All you had to do was issue the FAST command, or switch back with the SLOW command to its default speed (1MHz). One drawback of using FAST mode was that the VIC which powered the 40 column (standard) display wasn’t capable of … Read more
The C128 had various chips to display different kinds of graphics that man just stuck to the standard 40 column text display for “ease of use” and let their software handle the rest. To appreciate why these modes existed one had to understand what was happening behind the scenes. Here are the various modes and … Read more
The C64 can display two sets of fonts: either a combination of upper case and lower case letters (good for any kind of text), or a combination of upper case letters and graphics (default), known as PETSCII characters. In direct mode you can switch between the two by pressing CBM+SHIFT (i.e. The Commodore Key and … Read more
