Commodore Archives

30 years after its release it’s time to re-kindle with my first computer spirit – the C64. This was my first computer which changed my life forever. Thanks to VICE we can now enjoy the little guy again on modern hardware. Here are all my notes on how to talk to him, and his other friends from the 8 Bit Age.

Reading and Writing Sequential Data on the Commodore 1541

Sometimes it’s helpful to store large amounts of data on the disk rather than keep in it memory. Consider adventure games for example: you could add room descriptions to your listing and later read it into memory – but this would double the amount of memory you really need to keep the data. Since there’s … Read more

Commodore 1541 DOS Commands

The 1541 Floppy Drive was equipped with its own MOS 6502 chip and was therefore capable of understanding and executing its own commands (to format the disk, copy files, erase files, etc). The idea was that it could operate autonomously without the attached C64 to get involved – revolutionary at the time. They were called … Read more

Commodore 64 BASIC v2 Disk Drive Commands

I must admit it’s been a while since I’ve loaded files from a C64 and the 1541 Floppy Drive – let alone save programs back to disk. Here’s a quick reference how we did things 30 years ago: Opening Files The C64 BASIC v2 did not have built-in commands for talking to the drive. Instead, … Read more