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Commodore

80 Columns in Software on the Commodore VIC-20

If you have good eyesight, a well-tuned display and patience it is possible to use 80 columns in software on the VIC-20. This is really just an experiment but considering the limitations of the Vic I ...   Read More

64 Column Text Mode on the Commodore VIC-20

With a little lateral thinking and by putting the television on its side we can create a 64 column sideways text mode on the VIC-20. This article will demonstrate this and show how it is done. Previo...   Read More

Word Processors on the Commodore VIC-20

Word processing is possible on the VIC-20 and can be surprisingly comfortable despite the small screen text area. Here I will show a variety of word processors each of which handles the 22 column rest...   Read More

Getting the Address of BASIC Variables on the VIC-20

Getting the address of a BASIC variable can be useful if you want to pass data to a machine code routine or want to access the bytes of a variable directly to improve speed and reduce garbage collectio...   Read More

Saving and Loading Memory on the VIC-20

Saving and loading memory is quite easy on the VIC-20 once you know how. However, it isn't obvious how to do this and therefore this article will present a few simple ways of doing it from BASIC and A...   Read More

Basic Line Storage on the VIC-20

BASIC programs are stored in memory using a simple structure that we can investigate and manipulate. This article will show how they are stored and contains a BASIC program to go through each line of ...   Read More

Programming in Assembly with VICMON on the VIC-20

VICMON is a machine language monitor released by Commodore in 1982 and is great for programming the VIC-20. Its interactive nature means that it can often be quicker to develop via this rather than us...   Read More

Storing Machine Code in REM Statements on the VIC-20

BASIC programs often contain machine code routines but they take up quite a lot of space in BASIC. An interesting way to reduce the amount of space that they take is to store the machine code in REM s...   Read More

Visualizing Zero Page on the Commodore VIC-20

The VIC-20 is a very flexible little machine and allows us to choose which area of memory represents the screen map. One interesting thing we can do is use this to visualize a section of memory such ...   Read More

Code and Data in Display Memory on the VIC-20

The unexpanded Commodore VIC-20 only had 5K of RAM and therefore creative ways had to be found to maximize the available RAM. The display memory would use some of this memory and therefore one option ...   Read More

Double-Width C64 Style Font on the Commodore VIC-20

The C64 used a fatter double-width font because the video quality of early VIC-IIs wasn't very good. Therefore they had to make the C64's font fatter than the VIC-20's. However, this fatter font look...   Read More

Walnut Creek CD: C64 Images

The Walnut Creek CD has a number of images on it from the 1980s and this article displays a selection of the Commodore C64 images that can be found on the CD. The quality of some of these pictures is ...   Read More

Terminal Programs for BBSing on the Commodore VIC-20

The VIC-20 introduced many people into the world of BBSing, but only a few of the many terminal programs that were available for the Vic have survived. They each have their own pros and cons and here ...   Read More

SUBLEQ on the Commodore VIC-20

I have created a SUBLEQ Virtual Machine for the Commodore VIC-20. SUBLEQ is a computer architecture that has only one instruction: SUBLEQ. The instruction stands for SUbtract and Branch if Less than ...   Read More

Sweet 16 (The 6502 Dream Machine) Ported to the VIC-20

Sweet 16 was created by Steve Wozniak to reduce code size and make it easier to handle 16-bit pointers and arithmetic for his Apple Integer BASIC. He wrote it around 1977 and referred to it in an arti...   Read More

Position Independent Code (6502) on the Commodore VIC-20

If we are writing 6502 machine code and want to to create a routine or program that can be placed in any location then we have to create Position Independent Code (PIC) or make the code relocatable. H...   Read More

Adding Basic Stubs to Assembly Language on the Commodore VIC-20

To make machine language programs more friendly it's nice to add a Basic stub which contains a line with a SYS statement to start the code. This is easy to do on the VIC-20 and the process gives you a...   Read More

Hand Assembling to Machine Code on the Commodore VIC-20

I quite enjoy designing machine language routines on paper and then hand assembling them. For many people this would have been their only option until they got a more advanced machine language monitor...   Read More

Tokenize/De-tokenize Commodore Basic Programs Using petcat

petcat is a utility provided with the VICE Commodore emulator that you can use to convert Basic source code contained in ASCII text files to .PRG files or vice versa. It is also able to convert ASCII ...   Read More

Changing Screen Dimensions on the Commodore VIC-20

To make the most of the limited amount of memory on the VIC-20, we can increase and decrease the screen size depending on our program's priorities and what we want to achieve. If we increase the size ...   Read More

Moving the Picture Origin on the Commodore VIC-20

The VIC-20's VIC chip provides a simple yet flexible video display and one of the features that can be quite useful is the ability to alter the picture origin on the screen. This feature allows us to ...   Read More

Spreadsheets on the Commodore VIC-20

The VIC-20 had a number a spreadsheet programs released for it which despite the limited resources of the Vic could actually be quite usable. The two best known are SimpliCalc and PractiCalc, but ther...   Read More

40 Columns in Basic on the Commodore VIC-20

There are a number of programs that allow you to use 40 columns of text from Basic on a Commodore VIC-20. This can be useful as by default the Vic's screen is 22 columns by 23 rows. They are supplied...   Read More

Transferring Files to and from CP/M .D71 Disk Images Using ctools

Using Vice to emulate a Commodore 128 running CP/M works very well, but it isn't easy to get CP/M files directly onto and off a .D64/.D71 disk image. The easiest way to do this under Linux is to use c...   Read More

Creating a TTY Simulator in Assembly Language on the VIC-20

The Vicmon machine language cartridge is an excellent tool for exploring the Vic-20. This article and its associated video will show you how to use it to create a simple program that will change the n...   Read More

Beginning Assembly Programming on the Commodore VIC-20

The Commodore VIC-20 is a great machine to learn an assembly language on. It was released in 1981 and was the first computer to sell one million units, which contributes to its popularity today. The ...   Read More

My Top 10 Commodore 64 Demos

There are so many great demos for the Commodore 64 and the demo scene is still thriving. Surprisingly there are even new effects being created for this machine. I have spent many hours going through ...   Read More

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