8-Bit Book Club: "Programming The Commodore 64: The Definitive Guide" by Raeto Collin West

[@baardbi]

I absolutely love these videos. I wish you offered a full Commodore 64 programming course. You would be an excellent teacher.

[@matthewlister3755]

Right? I'd buy that course on Udemy or wherever it was sold in 0.02 seconds. I took a 6502 assembly course on Udemy and had a blast.

[@baardbi]

@@matthewlister3755 Me too. Gustavo's Atari 2600 asm course.

[@matthewlister3755]

@@baardbi the best! I had practically zero programming experience prior to his course, just a tiny bit of the Arduino IDE. Gustavo made me feel like I could do anything on a system that is notoriously difficult to code for. One of the best teachers I've ever had in my life.

[@KaneAndTheHumanRace]

@Matthewlister What did you find to be the most interesting part of the 6502 course you took, and how long did it take to complete the course?

[@rogersmith1643]

This book was responsible for my 35 year IT career. It got me from knowing nothing about programming in year 11 at school, to dux of the Computer Science course in year 12, and going to University to study Computer Science. Definitive Guide....I salute you!

[@voodoorabe]

I ve got the German Version, it was my guiding light through programming my c64. Great Book.

[@walliswizard]

I'm lucky enough to own both of those books by Raeto as physical copies, thanks to a friend recently giving me all of his C64 and Vic20 hardware and books. Raeto was, like Jim Butterfield, a great author.

[@TomRogersOnline]

He's still around.

[@csbruce]

10:23 COMPUTE! certainly had a distinct typographic style. 12:16 Japan, South Korea, Mexico, and much of Latin America also used NTSC. 14:18 The AND operator is tricky to describe clearly and accurately, since it's both a Logical and a Bitwise operator, simultaneously. This is why -1 is the logical 'true' value, since -1 = $FFFF as a signed int16, the bitwise opposite of $0000. 14:27 The C128 and Plus/4 fixed the ASC("") problem. 15:43 That banana-shaped character is called a "parenthesis"! Like "SPC(", the PRINT# token, et al., includes the '#'. I thought that SPC() just repositioned the cursor with PLOT $FFF0, but the ROM listing does show that it prints Cursor-Right to the screen and Space to any other device. TAB() works the same way as SPC(), except the current cursor position is read and the number of spaces to advance is calculated. They presumably did this because Cursor-Rights are faster to print to the screen than spaces (though slower than PLOT $FFF0). Similarly, if you PRINT a number, it prints a Space or negative sign before the number and a Cursor-Right after the number. The tokens for all of the functions could have included the opening parenthesis for their argument. This would have taken a little more ROM space, but would have made all programs a little bit shorter and faster to parse. 17:55 In 38 years of programming, I don't think I've ever drawn a flowchart, except maybe on a test that demanded a flowchart. In general, I write the data structures in the target language and then write the function prototype and content as comments describing what every block within a function will do when the code is written, and then write the blocks of code. This approach doesn't waste any effort on stuff that doesn't end up in the final program. 20:00 The CHRGET routine skips past spaces quite quickly. 23:30 The CIAs waste a bunch of registers on the TOD clock which was really never put to use. In principle, BASIC could have used it for TI$, but that would have required changes from the VIC-20 ROM and would align poorly with the numeric TI variable. At least they have a bug-free hardware shift register, though that wasn't put to use either until the C128. 36:02 What app makes that noise? Or was it an old phone?

[@NuntiusLegis]

I don't agree the TOD clock is a waste. Many books say the interrupt clock (TI/TI$) can be off about half an hour per day while the CIA TOD clocks are quite accurate. I started programming a clock with configurable timer-presets, alarm that can be used on either the first or second time zone, and some other functions I always missed; running in an emulator window, this shall replace the meager clocks that are built into Windows or Linux on my PCs. It is based on TI$ though, so I will add some code to read one of the CIA clocks every hour to put TI$ straight.

[@wlorenz65]

If you find C64's AND operator strange then wait until you learn how it's implemented in Python, where (1 and -1) != (-1 and 1)... This is because you can write x = None or default then which saves you an if and a second assignment.

[@NuntiusLegis]

@@wlorenz65 It is an advantage of the C64-BASIC that the logical operators also work as bit-wise operators; this allows for masking single bits which is often necessary to control chip registers. On the Apple II, the logical BASIC operators don't work bit-wise, thus chips can only be controlled precisely in machine language.

[@AndyPetrie]

Another great video Robin. Your videos about The C64 and others, convinced me that in my retirement I need to revisit programming the Commodore 64. Alas this book along with my 150 computer collection had to be sold as there was no room for them in our new home ( I did sneak 3 Amiga's and my Sinclair collection into the moving van). My Commodore 64 vanished years ago and I miss the bread box keyboard... WOW never thought of this, 2022 marks 50 years working with computers every day...... Now I feel old :-(

[@JohnnyWednesday]

Started watching your book series recently - very much enjoy it! it's fascinating to study the thought processes and to get a feel for the storm of BASIC and microcomputers in the 80s

[@pinkpuff]

"DEEK" and "DOKE" nearly made me spit out my coffee LOL

[@BillAnt]

OKIE-POKEY ;D

[@Sultaneous]

@20:00 "Crunching" Hey Robin, here's another CBM glitch where you can't use crunching: Normal example: 10 x=128 20 ?x and 128 30 ?xand128 Failure example: 40 ?st 50 ?st and 128 60 ?stand128 . The reason is a bug? in how Basic parses it; it parses line 60 as: print s tan d128 instead of as : print st and 128 so for example printstan(90) will work, printing out a value of 0 for s and -1.99520043 for tan(90)

[@patrickdemets6018]

Thanks for this video Robin! A good indication of how much juicy material is in this book is how many times you said "Oh! I should do a video on that!" I discovered this book late in my Commodore journey as well (around 2010), but I've had my "Reference Guide" and "Mapping" since they were first published. These three also form my own programming trifecta. But there are also many other very interesting books and authors: the ABACUS series, Hampshire, COMPUTE!'s Toolkit duo (BASIC and Kernal), and so on. And let's not forget our very own Transactor magazines.

[@8_Bit]

I only very recently learned about the Toolkit books and have now acquired them. There will be a Book Club video on them coming later this year. They're fantastic! I have several of the ABACUS books; I find them uneven, perhaps partly because a lot of them are translated, but there's no doubt their heart is in the right place and there's lots of good info in them. re: Hampshire, is it the Nick Hampshire "Revealed" books? I've got VIC Revealed but actually didn't realize there were at least a couple C64 Revealed books too. I better find those :) Thanks for the comment Patrick!

[@patrickdemets6018]

@@8_Bit Yes, Hampshire also wrote "Advanced Commodore 64 BASIC Revealed", "Commodore 64 ROMs Revealed", "Commodore 64 Kernal and Hardware Revealed", "CBM64 Graphics", "VIC Graphics", "PET Revealed". Very interesting. I have the first three I listed, but haven't read them in detail (yet). You're right about the ABACUS books. Now that I think about it, they were spotty and uneven. They covered in great detail some obscure aspects but left whole swaths of more mainstream topics unexplored. Perhaps they figured they would rather cover niche topics. Not a bad approach, actually.

[@OldSkoolCoder]

This is a great video to accompany a great Book, thank Robin :)

[@misterjib]

Watching this on my lunch break. Despite being a very interesting topic I find Robin's voice and the sound of the page turning quite ASMR inducing, I got so relaxed I almost dozed off. I've actually listened to 8-bit show and tell a number of times when I can't sleep at night, something about the pace and tone is sort of hypnotic. Anyone else get this - or is this just me?

[@NuntiusLegis]

Before Robin gets too worried: I find his way of talking pleasant as well, but don't feel any danger of dozing off because the interesting content rather puts me in the mood to get active.

[@misterjib]

@@NuntiusLegis Robin shouldn't be worried, credit to him for the steady, measured presentation style, he communicates very effectively. You know the kid at school who would sit at the back of the class, a bit vacant and staring out of the window day-dreaming? Well, that was me. haha!

[@BillAnt]

Beware of cool, calm, and collected people with a soothing voice, so was Jeffrey Dahmer. lol jk

[@kookoon]

Love the video. I was enthusiastic by all those books explaining how the "computer magic" worked.

[@sammy61187]

Thank you Robin for the link will be reading this for sure!!

[@bcostin]

I loved that book back in the day, as well as Mapping The C64. All of the COMPUTE press C64 and VIC-20 books I had were really good.

[@mathom31]

Another good video. "Programming the VIC" by Raeto Collin West is just as valuable for us VIC-20 programmers. I used the C64 version to track down and correct an error in the VIC version. The program you show at the beginning of chapter 5 contains a typo in the VIC version but the two versions are close enough that it was easy to find the error. Strangely, the error even caused the "automatic proofreader" to show the error but it still slipped through into the printed book.

[@TheHighlander71]

The comprehensiveness of this book reminds me of the "Indispensible Hardware Book" about PC's I've read. It seems like an indispensible book for the Commodore 64. It's a shame that there are only a few copies available and they are all very expensive. Perhaps I will own a copy for myself in the future.

[@TimStCroix]

C64 programmer's reference guide, this book, and Mapping the C64. The holy trinity.

[@BCThunderthud]

I used to have a book on 6502 assembly language which I never used for programming but it was absolute magic for making me fall asleep.

[@3vi1J]

I was moving on to the Amiga by the time this was released, but this would have been an awesome book to have a few years earlier. Thanks for sharing!

[@Okurka.]

In school I usually wrote the program first and then made the flow chart as we had to include it.

[@desertfish74]

My goodness that mapping the 64 book i wish I had that in the eighties when hacking in my 64, I discovered the online version of it only last year or so

[@stevethepocket]

I just spent way more time looking through parts of this book than I planned to. I like how he touches on raster interrupts and some of the tricks it can do. Though I noticed what I'm pretty sure is an error: he talks about TVs alternating lines, resulting in 30/25 frames a second, and then goes on to claim that they have 262/312 lines. This is at best misleading and confusing. I'm pretty sure the reduced line count is the result of systems like the Commodore forcing the CRT _not_ to alternate lines between frames, resulting in a potentially 60/50fps picture and the visible scanlines you wouldn't get when you were, say, just watching TV. That would be a fairly important distinction if you're doing raster interrupts, because you have to perform them on every frame.

[@vcv6560]

I discovered the VIC-20 form of this book was published first along with Dan Heeb Tool Kit Basic on the same 'casual bookstore visit' in Jan. 85. I was so impressed I got it even though the 64 was my main computer by that time. A copy of this title I had to find used years later. I agree this C64 one was little discovered as it came out after a couple of years of Compute! & Gazette and a bunch of 64 specific books.

[@vcv6560]

Hey seeing the Days Between Dates (19:39, pg 100) fly-by brought back a memory, a program (Basic extension) in the VIC book that DIDN'T get reprised in the C64 form. A Matrix Inversion. I copied it right from the tome. A little slow but so important for me (1985-86).

[@williammckeever4790]

I have to agree with you, by 85 I already had about a dozen books on programming the 64 so was getting much pickier when it came to buying any new books. The fact that the books I was buying were pretty pricy here in Canada back then didn't help matters. Of course at that point in time we didn't have the internet to check out book reviews to help with our choices. I remember walking through book stores back then and skimming through books and something had to just stand out for me to want me to lay down all that cash to buy it.

[@mikekopack6441]

I remember having a copy of that book late in my c64 ownership back in the late 80's/early 90's. GREAT book!

[@IkarusKommt]

I like how every Commodore-commissioned book calls it a "computer".

[@MrBrianms]

I remember that a person called Grace invented the SUBROUTINE in the 1950's it shortened the main program. The limited memory of computers produced an environment of innovative exploration. I have fond memories of programming listings from magazine publications. I was using code for my own programs on the ZX81 (1982) & BBC model B (1984-1985). The ZX81 only had 16K and the BBC model B only had 32K. The programing course you are looking into is bringing back some good memories. Thanks.

[@IkarusKommt]

What kind of programs could there be written for a ZX or BBC?

[@vbrigham]

Wish I would have had those books in the 80s. I started learning on the vic 20 user manual. Then the 64 user manual, and finally I bought programmers reference guild.

[@TRONMAGNUM2099]

Wow I must get my hands on this book.

[@mikeloewen612]

I have his first book (actually stole from school library)for the PET/CBM. didn't know he made this one then immediately got it. A true encyclopedia.

[@mikegarland4500]

At 27:27 it shows a little program for PEEKing to show output onscreen for a short BASIC program in memory. Why does it say for "line" 2052 that 0 is equal to 1 + 0*256? My math skills might not be all that advanced anymore, but that seems like the output would be a 1 instead of a 0. Was that a typo, or am I missing something else?

[@8_Bit]

That's actually referring to bytes 2051 and 2052 combined. The two 8-bit values combine into a 16-bit value that's the line number. The 1 comes from location 2051, and the 0 from location 2052. The comments should be combined: "this line number is 1 = 1 + 0 * 256". It would have been clearer if the "1" at the end of the 2051 comment were moved to the beginning of the 2052 comment.

[@princeofdenmark9142]

I looked it up for a physical copy - £165! Thanks for the link to the free pdf!

[@pookiewookie7679]

Lulu Publishing is selling it new for only €20

[@markclark3747]

I used to have that book. I loved it.

[@remicaron3191]

What was that with the phone ringing I had to get up and see if it was mine. lol

[@Matt-so3nm]

There’s an equivalent book for the VIC-20. I wonder if it’s as good as the 64 one. It looks quite tricky to get ahold of. Perhaps it took him a while to get the VIC-20 one done and hence later release for the 64 edition? 😁

[@8_Bit]

Yes, I still haven't managed to get a copy of the VIC-20 one. I do have the PET/CBM book he wrote, which is also very detailed; they must have all been huge undertakings and kept him very busy writing for several years in total.

[@JeffSmith03]

Has anyone disassembled the MicroScope code to see if it really dumps 0-255, and the author was mistaken about only showing "up to 255" bytes?

[@phlogicali]

I had to smile, when I saw that West wrote about the „German GWERTZ style“ keyboard on page 159. A nice pun. 🙂

[@baardbi]

I thought it was QWERTZ.

[@mikegarland4500]

Did you ever finish this book's follow-up video? I didn't see it in the list. I too found this book to be invaluable, but I have it in .pdf format only and thinking about buying a printed copy if I can find a decent deal on it. It's really informative, although a bit advanced at times for my 'comfort'. Oh, a post on lemon64 in 2012 says that Raeto West suffered a serious mental breakdown and disappeared. I'm sorry to hear that; I'm sure he was a huge boon to the C64 programming community back in the day.

[@8_Bit]

I did tackle two more chapters in this follow-up video but there's still more to go, sometime. kzbin.info/www/bejne/qZ61p6mcf9uBipY

[@jgoemat]

My commodore keyboard was NOT reliable. Every year or two I would have to go to radio shack and buy a new one because a key stopped working right.

[@DavidYoud]

That is my favorite programming guide. I need to track down what's different in the revised edition (guess I should check archive.org).

[@8_Bit]

As far as I can tell, the Revised Edition just adds a new introduction, which is a handful of pages of West's thoughts about new Commodore 64 developments since the first edition (the 64C, a little bit of info about the 128) and another 5 appendices, 4 of which are about GEOS. So... not much.

[@NuntiusLegis]

@@8_Bit GEOS kills the C64 feeling anyway; I know it is clever coding and quite an achievement on the C64, but I never liked it. IIRC I got a cracked copy in the 80s, tried hard to like it, then formated the disk to put it to better use.

[@richardperritt]

It's a familiar book. I just can't remember if I had a copy or not. I had many. I agree in that it's quite a good, detailed book. Is this the same Raeto Collin West from big - lies . org?

[@NuntiusLegis]

Uh, at least he claims to be the same who wrote the books on computers on the bottom of the page. If so, the poor guy must have gone mad.

[@TomRogersOnline]

Same person, yes.

[@Gooberslot]

26:44 Why does Basic store the numbers as ASCII? That just seems wasteful, both in ram and computation cycles.

[@pomakis]

This book actually answers that question quite well (on pages 142 to 144). BASIC keywords are stored as single-byte values with the high bit set. This makes it easy for the interpreter to identify what's a keyword and what's not. If numbers, etc., were encoded in binary this easy distinction wouldn't be possible.

[@NuntiusLegis]

It should be reprinted, like some other great C64 books (Butterfield, Leemon). I found a physical copy of the German (my mother tongue) version of this one, but it has annoying translation errors and truncations. And I don't see myself digesting a huge book like this on a screen.

[@btizef2008]

I have this same book in my hands as I'm watching your video. weird lol. Mines the black cover version with red text though. Was a bargain for the last owner as they bought it for 30p from Oxfam 👍 Its a fantastic book.

[@doktor6495]

Hi Robin! Thanks for sharing this book series video with us! VERY VERY INTERESTING! The book is really great! Do you know a book that is as good but more for the hardware/repair side? I know this one "Commodore Trouble Shooting & Repair Guide from Robert C. Brenner". Do you know more? Greetings, Doctor64!

[@8_Bit]

The only other one I have is "Troubleshooting & Repairing Your Commodore 64" by Art Margolis. But I don't know if it's much better, I'm really not very knowledgeable about the hardware side, sorry!

[@Sinistar1983]

I can't wait to restore mine, I definitely want to make new games.

[@JesusisJesus]

What do you need? Where do you live?

[@Sinistar1983]

@@JesusisJesus possibly a new PSU, the machine seems to operate, but no screen is displayed.

[@alphahr]

My problem is that it's been since 83 that I did BASIC on the 64. Now here in 2021 I want to re-learn Commodore BASIC. I wanted to type in a few utilities and discovered that embedded in the program listing were actions or entries I couldn't identify and so it left me lost. I searched thru many of my books and was still left scratching my head. here is an example : 100 print"{clr}[]";chr$(142);chr$(8);:poke 53281,1:poke 53280,1. I have no idea what to do with the things in the various brackets. What book should I be looking for?

[@8_Bit]

Check out Appendix B of the book, page 567-568, which describes these symbols. For example, symbols like {clr} mean to hit the CLR key, which is Shift+Home.

[@garytallowin6623]

I had these books at the age of 8/9 :D

[@DAVIDGREGORYKERR]

Why can't programs not be saved to tape as Base64 so when loaded it is loaded and decompressed into memory.

[@JeffBoen]

The thing I remember most from this book was the Print@ function it included. I used that in just about every program I wrote afterward. EDIT: Heh! I actually wrote that comment when starting the video, not realizing you'd specifically call it out at 33:48.

[@saganandroid4175]

Robin can you find out how many editions there were of this book?

[@8_Bit]

As far as I know there are two. This one's the original, and there is a revised edition from 1987 that adds some GEOS information and almost nothing else.

[@brianwild4640]

trivia Did you know the 64 was cheaper to produce than the vic20

[@anjinmiura6708]

Yup, more required reading! BTW, Robin, on theC64mini, I have an interesting problem and I wonder if it's actually a problem with the Super Snapshot ROM. When I have a *.D81 image mounted along with Super Snapshot and try to load a BASIC program from disk, it says "searching for..." and then freezes. It doesn't happen when I tell Super Snapshot to disable and it doesn't happen when I have a *.D64 image mounted. Any idea about that?

[@8_Bit]

Try toggling the fast load option in TheC64 menu (button C, I think, the speedometer) and see if that makes a difference. If that doesn't help, try the >TD command in BASIC. The Super Snapshot fast loader is probably getting confused over the 1581 file.

[@anjinmiura6708]

@@8_Bit Thanks! Will try that out! Follow-up. The fast load option did not help but the >TD definitely worked. That's just a command-line version of what I had been doing. So it's the ROM code not liking the 1581? Sounds like a next new video! "Robin fixes the Super Snapshot to work with 1581!" You'll have that out in about what? 5? 6 minutes? (Heh... kidding!)

[@anjinmiura6708]

Heh.... just completed printing out the entire book at the office. :) Now I just need a big binder!

[@anjinmiura6708]

@@8_Bit So... how would you renumber a BASIC 2.0 program? I have tried loading more advanced versions of BASIC and performing the renumber operation then saving but resulting BASIC code is no longer executable even though it "looks" correct when listed. Also, if I were to key in a BASIC program in a text editor and use a tool like "DirMaster" I am unable to paste the program there. I can create like an SEQ file but that's not usable as a BASIC program. So I'm not sure the right or best way to go about these things. UPDATE: I just came up with a way. With DirMaster, I acquire the source code with a copy-paste where I open the BASIC program, select all the text, then copy. I then use paste to insert it into my favorite text editor Notepad++. (Sure wish there was a C64 BASIC formatter for it.... maybe I'll try to create one) From there, I insert a few spaces in front of all lines and create new numbers in front of the old numbers. All of the lines should look like "100 10 A=1" (PASS #1) where 100 is the new line number and 10 is the old one. (PASS#2) I then read through each line of code looking for line number references (GOTO, GO TO, GOSUB or THEN) where I find the line number in the "old" column and then update it with the number in the "new" column. Then I delete the "old" column and I have successfully renumbered the BASIC program. Select-all and copy. Then I run "VICE" and have it mount the disk image I'm working from. (THEC64-drive8.d64) and enter the command to save it (SAVE"RENUMBERED",8) and when it's complete, I can unmount it and insert this USB drive back into theC64mini. I wonder if there is or could be a C64 utility which renumbers BASIC programs? Seems like there should be. If it weren't for VICE allowing me to paste from a text file into the Virtual Machine console, I'd have had to re-enter each line individually.

[@8_Bit]

@@anjinmiura6708 Besides manually renumbering, there have been quite a few renumber utilities over the years. There's one in Super Snapshot if you activate BASIC PLUS, then it's RENUM. Check out the manual for the specifics: archive.org/details/Super_Snapshot_V5.2_Operating_Manual/page/n35/mode/2up If you want to program BASIC 2.0 in a text editor on a modern computer, check out the "petcat" command line tool included with VICE: vice-emu.sourceforge.io/vice_16.html#SEC328

[@wlorenz65]

You tried to flip that page with the "diet calculator" very quickly so that we cannot read it. But it was not quick enough for me 🍨🍰🍪🎂🍩🍦 😉

[@tenminutetokyo2643]

Beware them there diabeters.

[@saganandroid4175]

I was not impressed by Sheldon Leemon's Mapping The C64.

[@davidbrydon3969]

"Programming The Commodore 64: The Definitive Guide": Step 1: Throw the C64 into the trash Step 2: Rejoice

[@WowplayerMe]

Oh great, just what we need....more lamers!!!

[@desertfish74]

No u

[@williammckeever4790]

What??? This is very useful information Robin is sharing with us, what is lame about that?

[@WowplayerMe]

@@williammckeever4790 It's a joke. Someone once accused Robin of creating "Lamers" by presenting information like this to viewers instead of people discovering this stuff on their own. This channel happens to be my favorite on all of YT regarding the Commodore computers. I was making light of the situation.