You can merge / combine / concatenate BASIC programmes on a Commodore computer. It’s often useful to develop shorter chunks of code and put them together for a larger app. Sadly there’s no built-in command that lets you do this, even though the C128 user guide hints that the CONCAT command can do this (if … Read more
In this 7-part series I’ll show you how to create an In-App Purchase in iOS 7 with Xcode 5.1. The course will run you through everything from setting up your product in iTunes Connect, creating a custom shop class for easy re-use, making “first contact” with the App Store and how to deal with its … Read more
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
In this series I’ll show you how to create Popovers on iPad. They’re fairly easy to create once you get the hang of the inner workings of the UIPopoverController. I’ll show you how to create basic Popover in code and in your Storyboard, and we’ll discuss how you can retrieve data from a Popover when … 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
In this screencast I’ll show you how to make an iPhone storyboard display as an iPad storyboard in Xcode 5.1’s Interface Builder. Under the hood a UIStoryboard is just an XML file, and with a small tweak we can make Xcode display it like an iPad or an iPhone. This is a good strategy if … 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
