vax2:kurt (02/01/83)
COMMODORE 64 NEWSLETTER #1 2/2/83
This may be the first and last issue of the Commodore 64 newsletter. My
original intention had been to send UUCP mail to the people who showed
interest in my original inquirey and post occaisional messages announcing
the existance of the newsletter, but the volume of VIC and 64 related
interest seems too great to make this scheme work. There are too many people
who apparently didn't see the original request to forward information to me
for digestion, or else people don't expect netnews to function in this way.
Therefore I am returning control of the newsletter to the net. If the
volume of Commodore related stuff gets really heavy, somebody will create
a net.micro.vic.
Commodore Comments
A list of errata to the Commodore 64 Reference manual appears in a recent
issue of Commodore's journals (Power Play and something else). Most of the
errata are not very interesting. There are some contradictions that are cleared
up though (I will not list them here).
Answers to mail questions
The Commodore 64 does not use IEEE for anything. The serial interface is
handled by the serial shift registers of it's CIA chips (sort of a very fancy
6522 with parallel ports, timers, time of day clock, and serial shift
register). This scheme may or may not be sufficient to allow PCNet stuff to
run at 300 baud. I have no idea.
I have used my Commodore 64 on a new Sears (Sanyo?) Color TV and had pretty
good results. I have used it on an old B/W TV with indifferent results. I
tried my Ledex Video-100 monitor and found the horizontal wouldn't hold after
the monitor warmed up (I havn't gone looking inside for a way to adjust the
horizontal range of my monitor yet). I tried an old B/W monitor and achieved
relatively good results, although not as good as my old OSI did on the same
set. There is something about a color display that just does not look good on
a B/W TV.
The Commodore 64 is moderately compatible with PET BASIC software. This is the
limit of its compatibility. I have a disk with some PET programs on it. Some
work completely (Hamurabi -- very simple text-only game), some sort of work
(horse race -- text only with cursor control, this prints the characters with
the case wrong), some don't work worth a damn (dam buster -- graphics, some
of which don't seem to appear, pinball -- must scan the keyboard, which
is apparently not the same between the 64 and whatever machine the game came
off of.) The disk format is the same as the 4040 format, and 64 disks are
apparently interghangeable with 4040 disks although I havn't tried this.
New questions
How do you adjust the BOTTOM of BASIC pointer so you can use the graphics stuff
in low memory? There is information on shortening BASIC from the top pointers,
but nothing on moving the bottom pointers. Is this possible?
How do you change the code returned by a given keyboard key. It had been my
impression that the keys were programmable. In particular, I want to have
the '{' and '}' keys and some other keys not found normally on the keyboard.
Kurt Guntheroth
(...!decvax!microsoft!fluke!kurt)
(...!uw-beaver!fluke!kurt)