HELLO AGAIN!

The C64 GS console, the way the Commodore 64 should have been from the beginning! 

Hello again from me! I feel I must explain about what I‘ve been doing in recent months since my last blog entry on here.

During this time, I‘ve been continuing to think about the imminent destruction of Britain by Brexit turning it into an offshore tax haven, the “moat“ seperating Britain from the rest of Europe, as well as applying for Irish citizenship and an Irish passport.

My plans involve more studying of the book “The Machine Language Book of The Commodore 64“, as well as its follow up book “The Advanced Machine Language Book of the Commmodore 64“. Unfortunately, the text of these books is quite complicated, getting right to the heart of the C64, so that‘s why I haven‘t done any more posts about it. Apart from this, I wanted to demonstrate some examples running on an emulator, but this wasn‘t as straightforward as I thought it was, so that‘s why I haven‘t done it so far. I‘ve just had a look at two C64 emulators I installed under Windows 10, although I normally use Linux OS. I looked at C64 Forever, but found I had to pay just to get a full screen display, so I decided not to bother with that program, After some time, I managed to get WinVICE running. This was a bit dificult, because there was more than one version installed and it didn‘t even seem to appear on the Start menu. I ended up putting some shortcuts for the C64, as well as the C128, and the Plus/4 on the Desktop and it‘s now working OK.

Of course, I want to create a version of Microsoft Extended BASIC for the C64. This would probably be the 16K version, similar to the amazing Dragon 32/64 and Tandy Coco computers. I think that the most important commands, which C64 owners were crying out for, are COLOR N,N,N, to set the text and even graphics screen colours, SCREEN N, to set the display mode as text, multicoloured text (which I didn‘t even know existed when I owned a C64, thanks to Commodore‘s crappy manuals), multicolour graphics, and hires graphics, as well as LINE(x1,y1)-(x2,y2),c. It‘s a real shame that Microsoft never released a decent BASIC for the Commodore 64! Just think of how much money they could‘ve made. Unfortunately, I think Microsoft started to go downhill when they started producing Windows. I prefer their earlier work.

A very significant revelation in “The Advanced Machine Language Book of The Commodore 64“ is made on page 140, where it says “If we have added our own tokens for our new commands using the previously described vector §304/$305, a special character is no longer necessary“!! This means that new commands wouldn‘t have to be prefixed by characters such as “!“ or “@“.

Another amazing idea of mine is to convert some simple BASIC games listings from other computers into C64 BASIC. This will probably involve the use of two POKE commands to set the text cursor row as well as just the column, by using variables. This isn‘t possible using the Commodore 64 PRINT TAB(n) command, which only sets the column. Commodore‘s widely publicised way of dealing with this was to use strings of cursor up or cursor down control characters, in conjunction with the LEFT$, MID$, or even RIGHT$ command.

I think it could be an amazing experiment to get some Chimpanzees, babies, or toddlers to sit down with a Commodore 64 next to a computer running a version of Microsoft Extended BASIC, complete with instruction manuals, then see how they got on, but I don‘t think I could set this up. I think the end result would be quite predictable, though.

Thanks to everyone who‘s been visiting this blog in the meantime!