Thanks for the effort, this is great! Amazing some of us still can remember some of the special SYS and POKE addresses by head:
sys 64738 (hex FCE2, reset)
poke 808,234 (disable runstop/restore)
graphics memory 0x400-0x7e8 and
$a000-$bfff basic rom memory
You could basically visualize the entire 64k in your head.
My original VIC20 manuals were in French, and I didn't even know English at the time. Still managed to learn stuff from here and there. I can't imaging what I could have done if I had something like this 35 years ago... It's really nicely done.
I can verify that it's that way (without the spaces) in the original. Sometimes you had to do it to fit all the code in two screen lines, because that was the maximum line length. So it probably became a habit for some programmers.
That's a shame :( I had been hoping to use this book with my daughter (she's been getting into coding on retro machines like our C64) but I don't think I want to complicate things with the added cognitive load of tokenizing keywords she doesn't even know yet, by hand.
Waste 5 bytes on whitespace? I could never imagine being so wasteful.
In fact, I once wrote a program that removed whitespace of other programs. It also renumbered the lines starting at 1, incrementing by 1. Why? Because the line numbers in gotos would be fewer digits.
I forget if Commodore BASIC partly tokenized programs or simply stored them as text, but it definitely stored formatting information, so there was an art to minimizing memory footprint and execution speed by entering them that way.
OMG, memories come back. My father brought a C64C back from Germany in 1991, complete with a German edition of the User’s Guide. The sample programs ring a bell. I distinctly remember a 7yo version of myself typing in code for the balloon sprite one.
Sadly, I never had the Programmer’s Reference Guide. I did, though, own „Commodore 64” by Bohdan Frelek, sometimes considered _the_ C64 Polish bible.
Very nicely done. In a similar vein, the Apple 1 manuals have been recently reproduced (though it seems you have to buy the printed copies and the PDFs are not freely available)
registered as well just to say amazing work. i did own a c64 which provided an unmeasurable amount of fun, learning and pure joy for many, many years, not just for myself and my brother but also lots of friends.
the guide looks beautiful, sharp and fresh. great job preserving it for future generations.
Thanks! It is from you that I first heard about Lulu and looks like their price is pretty reasonable (600 page A5 Hardcover only costs 20 bucks but probably a lot more for CAD). I have quite a few manuals and pdfs that I would like to convert to books.
Legally speaking, yes they would definitely be. Many old books and periodicals about retrocomputing can now be readily accessed via the Internet Archive and other efforts such as Bitsavers because no one really cares about enforcing these copyrights (and even finding the current right-owners might be infeasible), but selling newly-made hardcopies commercially is way more of a grey area, AIUI.
(There might be some ground for challenging the copyright for works that were first published before 1989 without a copyright notice. But I'm not sure that would apply to these guides.)
Writing machine language by hand on the C-64 is the closest I've ever felt to the hardware as a programmer. 3 registers, some flags and interrupts.