25 Nov
2007
25 Nov
'07
12:06 p.m.
Ethan Dicks wrote:
I built plenty
of add-on devices for the User Port
and the joystick
ports when I was a teenager (I got my hands on my
first C-64 when I was
15, and by 16, I owned one). How deep do you
mean
here? It's a little
tougher to find a cartridge-port proto board than
it used to be, so
building your own SCSI or IDE or Ethernet
interface from scratch
might be somewhat advanced, but hanging LEDs or
switches off of one
of the other ports is easy enough, and easy
enough
to control from
> BASIC. C64 BASIC is V2.0. There are no disk commands at
all. You need to use
OPEN and LOAD ,8,1. There's no CATALOG command,
etc. PET - at least
the 4032's I used, had BASIC 4.0. Note that I
commented only on the
BASIC, not the SID, not the sprites, not the
bitmapped graphics.
Obviously a machine with bitmapped graphics,
sprites, color, and sounds
is going to be a lot more interesting.
The C128 BASIC's, V7.0 I believe had commands for
things like graphics
and sounds. The C64 did not, and you could only get
at those features
by poking. Some things on the PET, you had to poke
- sound for
instance, but at least the disk access stuff had
built in commands.
If you have experience coding, a "better" BASIC would
of course be better. But if you're learning, the peeks
and pokes should help facilitate that.
I know next to nothing about the C128. I know that 1
of it's 3 modes was essentially a C64. So the other
modes didn't build on that (there were no hardware
sprites in the C128 modes?). 1 of the 3 was intended
for use by cpm, no?
> Then
again, if you can master the peeks and
pokes, you're better off
> writing 6502 code. I'm really partial to
the
C128 which had a built in
>> machine language monitor. Well, don't confuse BASIC with the monitor. :-)
Not having to load the
Monitor from tape made the C128 very useful as
previously mentioned for
cracking C64 software. You can't quite load a
monitor into memory and
not wipe a chunk of memory. Worse yet, if you had
to reset the machine
and then load a monitor, you would have lost the
program you were trying
to crack.
I did have a monitor on cartridge. It must have been
Commodores I'm thinking. A place I used to work had a
whole file cabinet full of C64 software...and the
tools to crack them. I think they got them off a BBS
somewhere. The story was the s/w companies would hire
the crackers to write the schemes and promise to not
release them for a specified amount of time.
The ML monitor
on PETs was nice to have - better
IMO than a blue "READY"
screen - but anyone who was serious about it gave
up one of their two or
three precious expansion ROM sockets for a better
monitor.