Robin, that rant against permissiveness of sloppy practices was just beautiful. People love to 'dunk on' others for being "pedantic" but no one complains when stuff works properly because someone did their work to a high standard.
Indeed! I enjoyed the rant greatly, and was an instant thumbs up for the video, particularly at this moment when I'm tutoring someone on address decoding for 8-bit systems. He wants to design and build his own little SBC, but I'm despairing that it will ever work unless he gets his act together and starts getting pedantic, rather than just guessing what the effect might be of the circuits he's showing me.
This was super interesting! I always thought "*" was universal, but after Robin explained that it was the disk drive interpreting the "*" differently, it all made sense. Still learning so much 35 years on!
Being in the UK and having used the ZX Spectrum 48K before getting a C64, I naturally used LOAD "" when trying to load a game from tape. Not having a Disk drive, I didn't know about using ',8,1' or even ',1' until years later Also, one of the best magazines made in the UK for programming was a series called INPUT - It had code for the C64 and VIC20, as well as the likes of the Spectrum (ZX80 & 48k) and even the BBC / Electron. If only I still had a working C64
I’ve been on every version of commodore since 82. I’ve also only used twin 1541’s and always used CAPS, in white, just like this. I’ve learned two things today. 😮 Okay, three things. 😂❤
@2:48 I saw that you mentioned on twitter that there's an alternate meaning for "blue angels". I had to google it! :D
The Blue Angels flew directly over my house multiple times last month (part of San Francisco's Fleet Week). Good golly they're loud! I assume you've seen the C64 game Blue Angel 69? Sounds like an old yahoo email address, but it's an actual game (Magic Bytes, 1989). @12:48 Cool, didn't know that certain key presses could skip the pause. My tape days were mostly VIC-20. I assume it worked there too?
re: Blue Angels, yes, I think it's a regional thing. We'll see how many people get it :) I only learned about Blue Angel 69 in the last couple weeks when someone mentioned that the Accolade game was fairly rare so I looked around online to make sure it had been imaged etc. The VIC-20 doesn't pause at all when it finds a file. It also doesn't blank the screen while loading. I assume the pause was added to the C64 when they found they had to blank the screen due to the VIC-II's cycle stealing which made the existing tape routines unreliable with the display enabled, but I haven't looked into that :)
Pedantic it may be, dead on accurate it absolutely is. If you are gonna sell merch based on C64 nostalgia, at least have the goddamn common courtesy to get it right. Excellent video.
The Commodore specifically was really picky with what you typed in - the pain of typing a whole page program only for something to have been typed slightly wrong and the problem doesn’t work.
The actual length of a jiffy will vary between different computer platforms but it's usually somewhere between 1/10th of a second and 1/100th of a second. On most Commodore systems it's 1/60th of a second. I've seen some people get dogmatic that a jiffy is 1/100th of a second, but it's dependant on the system hardware and/or operating system.
I knew the issue with the disk loading command right away, but did not know that about the tape command. I've known where at least a majority of my pedantry came from.. it was definitely programming on the C64 and typing in those lengthy listings. I don't think I ever entered one of any significant size without at least a few mistakes, sometimes many. 'Precise' is correct; nothing else usually sufficed. Just a side question: I keep seeing some of the same patrons repeated across multiple videos as "New Users". Are they dropping off the list and rejoining or something? 🙂
hello - can some1 help me out here? im looking for a game called grand prix from a book listing from 1982 or 1983 ?? for the dragon 32 ?? has any 1 seen this particular game from a book?? thanks............... let me know if any1 sees it thanks............
Look for the book "Sixty Programs for the Dragon 32" published by Pan / Personal Computer News Computer Library. Authors Robert Erskine, Humphrey Walwyn, with Paul Stanley, Michael Bews. On page 209 is a type-in game called "Grand Prix".
ok many thanks but this grand prix (in sixty programs for the dragon 32) i dont think is the one because its graphic based - the one i type in 1982 or 1983 was text based many thanks and bless u lots!!!!!!@@8_Bit
i was only a kid at the time but i always loaded stuff with ,8,1, then RUN. and it DID work. we had a lot of dodgy software but it ran stuff that it ran. the only thing i learned i could do differently was use L (shift) O or R (shift) U in place of load and run. And hooooooo boy did i used to p*ss off my dad by getting him to load impossible mission on tape which took almost an hour, only to play it 5 minutes and want to play pit stop on cartridge.
I'm all in to being accurate, but making a 24 minutes video about something that could be read and understood on a web page in a minute or two is stupid. But that's the way today on any other information no matter how small and quick, everything has to be done on video.
I have had discussions (some heated) about the meaning and workings of the asterisk in the LOAD command. The commodore manual says that it loads the last file loaded and if the commodore can't determine which file that is, it just loads the first file. As you said in the video. I'm glad you underlined the meaning of the asterisk.
There are too many people in the world who take a correction as an attack on their character. I think growing up learning computer programming and later going into the IT field has taught me to value corrections others might make to my work. The other edge of that sword however is that I also don't hesitate to correct mistakes that I see. So yeah...I'm with you completely. :D
Nowadays people take even greetings as an attack ;) Let them suffer from their own "unimportant" mistakes, which - surprise, surprise, suddenly become super important if it affects them, i,e. writing 1,000 instead of 1.000 is alright, no big deal, same thing, right?... unless it's their paycheck ;) No worries, Skynet will take care of them :)))
I didn't notice if you mentioned, but just like disk, you can provide the additional parameter for tape too and use LOAD"",1,1. That's not very common of course, as it loads the file into the address it was saved from so it is useful only for specific cases.
Aww, man. After twice saying that the Asterisk loads "the first file on disk", Robin corrected himself the third time. I was so excited to jump into the comments and be pedantic on a video about being pedantic, and now I have to settle for enjoying pedantry vicariously.
I have a self-made font of C64 charsets, you can create a graphics of your T-shirt. There are several undertakers for printing a customized image on a T-shirt. Do you need my font?
@@PeterMaddison2483 Oh really? It didn't work on the Commodore Amiga 500, Commodore Amiga 2000, Commodore Amiga 3000, Commodore Amiga 4000, Commodore Amiga 1200 or any of the Commodore PC machines. I don't think it worked on the Commodore PET either. 🤪
@@PeterMaddison2483that's a lie. You're a liar. Why would you lie about something so ephemeral. dopamine is free. But that doesn't mean there aren't better ways to get it.
I never thought about the type-in experience shaping me into the pedant I became. It might explain a lot. Sometimes I feel that it's like the person who writes something poorly is deferring the task of correcting them (in the readers mind) to the reader, representing a laziness. A computer will not accept this. Why should a reader? So put the effort in! I have even found myself correcting typos before hitting "send" on ChatGPT. Why should I make ChatGPT spend processor cycles first correcting my language before processing an answer? :D Thanks for being pedantic, Robin!
I am no less upset about the error on the T-Shirt, despite NEVER having typed in a program from a book or magazine. I would rather write an own program, no matter how much worse it will be. The idea of typing in pages and pages of code is just hideous to me. I also thought at the time that this was a cheap way to fill the magazine, without any use, because no one would ever do that. ;-) I guess I am protected by lucky genes providing me with a healthy dose of lazyness.
2:25 You always teach me something! I did not know of the mixed case mode in BASIC, only knew toggle between upper and lower! Perhaps they should just print "? syntax error" on the back of the shirts they've already printed. When someone calls you on your shirt (sic), you just spin around so they can read the back. :)
Those wedges the magazines eventually develop for typing in listing certainly helped. They allowed the checksum to validate the line. Made it a lot easier, but took them forever to create that utility
Interesting that you can press those other keys to make the tape load faster. I guess Commodore said to use the Commodore key so it doesn't print anything on the screen afterwards, so it was kind of a lazy implementation. In reference to the magazine, I remember typing in from Compute's Gazette and they had a program that you could use to type in the program which gives a checksum code after every line similar to what is shown in that magazine in the video with the 2 letters at the end so you could verify there were no mistakes. It helped a lot in machine language programs.
Those checksum systems definitely helped, but this particular listing I've shown still had errors anyway; it had a bug in the program they used to generate the listings and checksums.
Damn, I _wish_ a certain children's magazine had done that in their "Basic Training" column. Few things more frustrating than typing a program in _exactly as printed_ and having it not work. 😠 I swear, it turned me _off_ programming altogether until high school, when I started messing around with TI-BASIC on my graphing calculator and basic HTML on my GeoCities website. (It didn't help that I was on a PC when I started in '93-'94, and QBASIC for MS-DOS didn't have great documentation that I could find at the time. Certainly nothing like the VIC-20 and C64 manuals I've seen in more recent retro stuff.)
I'm _so_ sick of random internet commenters referring to programmers as "lazy" when something isn't implemented as those commenters, with little knowledge or experience, think it ought to be implemented. The folks who wrote the CBM KERNAL packed in a _lot_ of good features in a fairly decent design (a _very_ good design for the time) all in a fairly small amount of memory. And they wrote it fairly quickly, too. This is all the exact opposite of lazy. Certain tricks such as reading the row, rather than trying to determine an individual keypress, save both execution time and space. You're essentially accusing the author of that bit of code of being "lazy" for not making the ROM larger and slower. So maybe these random internet commenters could take a moment to consider how much they know about the code and why it was written the way it was before slinging insults?
Just a side note you can ALWAYS load the first program by adding a : in front of the asterisk. What that tells the drive OS is to use drive zero and resets the pointer, even if the drive is a single drive like a 1541. It's a leftover from the 4040 and 8050/8250 OS. So to ALWAYS load the first program from disk "load":*",8,1" will always work. The * actually means next found not first, but since inserting a disk resets the pointers when the write protect changes that's why it loads the first, usually.
Perhaps I am not recalling correctly, I thought the * was the last file accessed, not the next. I do recall the ":' used for 1st program on disk. Disk 'speed enhancers' often came with their own set/custom commands. I used Mach-5, Jiffy Dos as well as RAM drive.
I am still confused. It is not even clear to me what "first program" means . The first that was saved (the oldest)? The first in the directory? What will be loaded when that gets scratched, or replaced? And what does "next" mean, next realtive to what? The last loaded? The previously saved? Would be worth an own episode I think.
I guess I am not the only one that sees those misprints and thinks to myself, "That won't actually work". haha. Thanks! On a side note about some instructions and games including the 0: before the name. I would guess they started doing this after the Save with Replace bug was verified in the magazines and they recommended that you always use the 0: prefix. The reason is, IIRC, is that if you start your session always using the 0: when issuing commands the bug will not occur.
That's very true. Not using the drive unit specifier "0:" causes the drive to attempt to initialize the non-existent "drive unit 1". It will fail, as it should, but a very sloppy and obvious indexing bug in the DOS ROM can trigger the save-and-replace bug as well as several other less serious bugs.
Great video - these things bug me too! Since we're being pedantic, I don't like the description of the command# of 1 (e.g. ",1" at the end) indicating that the data is loaded to the memory location "from which it was saved". I think it's more correct to say it causes the data to be loaded to the memory location specified in the file. In many cases, that binary file was cross compiled or generated from a graphic program, so it didn't originate from that memory location on a c64. I looked in the 1541 manual and the description of "LOADed at exactly the same memory location from which it came." is from commodore, so my nit pick is with them!
Reminds me of an NES controller t-shirt a friend had that had an egregious error, much worse than these incorrect commands-the B and A buttons were reversed! I’m wondering if it was officially licensed, since I imagine Nintendo wouldn’t have allowed such a blatant error on a licensed product.
When type ins started coming with error checking was a game changer, it really simplified things. The only gripe I have is that it wasn't standardized. Seems like the Ahoy magazine used a small assembler program, but I remember many using a basic loader for assembler with checksums on each DATA statement, crude, but it really cut down on hunting for that one wrong number.
Yes, regarding manually typing in programs, the "Accuracy is important for Survival" is totally correct. More so if you were unlucky enough that your Computer was a Sinclair ZX81 with a worn Membrane keyboard and the Sinclair 16K RAM expansion. Not only did you have the problem of losing all of your program if the slightest movement upset the connection on the RAM Pack, It also had a tendency to freeze when it overheated due to the strain during the hours of debugging errors in the program and print errors from the magazine. It was common for spaces to be incorrect and badly printed graphics characters to cause havoc when using them to denote machine code within a BASIC program (an odd quirk of ZXBASIC,)
Using the ZX printer would be poor quality black on sliver which was not easy to typeset. Using a regular printer resulted in a black and white print which would be more easily typeset and would work with any early 80s machine. But might only be able to print ASCII characters. In some cases Sinclair specific characters ended up being handwritten.
When I was still little, my parents thought it was necessary to list the diskette's contents first and check for the full name of the first program which is why I learned rather late about LOAD"*",8,1 at all.
13:21 I used to use the space bar for the FOUND prompt until I had a game which wouldn't start properly if space was in the keyboard buffer. It drove me crazy until I realized what the issue was. I switched to C= key after that :)
I didn't grow up using a VIC-20 or C64 so this was informative. And though I've only had limited experience in the past few years, I did know why (kinda) the first example was wrong and guessed the second one would specify the tape rather disk drive. I just didn't know that tape drives would literally try to find a program called *.
I grew up with the machine and could feel something was terribly wrong with the shirt but it didn't immediately click it was the case. Informative breakdown.
I'm embarrassed to say that I could not figure out what was wrong with what was printed on the T-Shirt... But then again, it's been decades since I messed around on a real C64.
Maybe it's worth to notice that LOAD"*",8 could be used to load a previously loaded program again. CBM DOS won't search the directory from thr begin if a program was already selected. The asterisk clobbs to the already loaded one again. An unexpected behavior sometimes ...
I completely agree Robin! People like us were conditioned to be exact in our instructions. :) Thanks for the insight on the handling of * by the drive controller vs. using it with the tape load routines in ROM - I'd never thought about that before, but found it very interesting.
The tape-handling code was originally put together for the PET and then moved over wholesale for later Commodore machines. That means a lot of patches and changes, and the sort of coding hack that gives the pause. And a little caveat for disk drive owners using LOAD"*",8(,1) - it doesn't automatically check for file type. So if it tries to load in a SEQ, USR or REL file as the first in the directory it can give you an error or FILE NOT FOUND. Best to use a directory editor to make your boot PRG physically the first in the directory. The C128's autoboot can also be affected by having the wrong file type. EDIT: The O instead of zero worked because there isn't a physical "drive O", it's expecting zero or 1 - another feature carried over from earlier drives.
I think I read somwhere (wish I rememebered the source) that the core of the tape code, written by Chuck Peddle himself, remained untouched, because no one could understand it and dared to touch it. It is quite slow, but very safe, thus Commodore was considered to have the best tape performance of all the early 8-bit computers (when RAM and file sizes were low and speed not a big consideration).
I haven't touched a Commodore since 1994 and immediately knew the issue with the T-shirt. I didn't own a tape drive, so thank you for explaining the ins and outs. My uncle owned a VIC20 and tape drive, and I always wondered how to store more than one program on a tape and how to retrieve it. Now I know. I'm with you 100% regarding the precision of commands. Imagine seeing a T-shirt with a bunch of upper case Linux commands. I just got back from a Cafe Press search, and they do exist.
Tape drive? Wow... I never called datassettes with that name here in Spain. The odd thing here was a disk drive, as its price was a full monthly salary. In fact, I never saw any original game in disk format at computer shops, only tapes were available, since disks were a luxury good used only in Central Europe and United States. Still nowadays the salaries in USA, Netherlands, Germany or France are 300-400% higher than ours.
@@BlackHoleSpain Don't complain about salaries, because in the Eastern block it was much worse. In the late 80s in the USSR we would have had to spend more than half a year's salary to buy a computer like Commodore 64! So the only way for the ordinary people like me to get a computer was to make it by yourself :-) That's why I'm not a Commodore guy but a Spectrum one, because there were no Commodore clones, only ZX Spectrum. So I soldered my first computer ("Leningrad" - a simple 48K clone) in 1991, then the second (ATM Turbo-2) in 1993 was much more complicated: it was a very advanced version of Spectrum 128K with 512 KB of memory, additional video modes (similar to EGA on PC), CP/M mode and a floppy disk drive. But soon the era of PC came, so I saved all my money for 2 years to assemble my first Pentium in 1995-1996.
A lot of commercial tapes will only work with shiftrun or c=run, they will fail to work if you try to manually load. In the northwest of USA we called it "splat" instead of asterisk or star. Interesting to note different computer jargon based on region.
There was even a commodore disk magazine called LoadStar, referencing the name commonly used for asterisks in much of Canada and the USA. I was not aware of "splat" as a term, but it makes sense as a name for a wildcard.
Now I'm remembering that the most common time I heard "splat" was when there was a "splat" in a disk directory listing, indicating that the file was bad in some way, usually not closed properly. I think that tied in with the * looking somewhat like a squished bug, and the "splat-file" was a buggy file.
Pedantry plays an important survival role in respect of spam emails and messages. Most of these contain grammar and spelling errors. If a person doesn't care about spelling and grammar, they are far more likely to fall for a scam, especially one that simply asks you to click on what you think is a trusted web address.
There are many more people without knowledge than with. There are many more people who make mistakes and still succeed than people who rarely do. This means that the history will be written by the victors - the incompetent. The only antidote is to share correct information and hope that many people see it - and to correct people when they're wrong. People like 'why' answers like this one, and you explain in detail. Kudos.
I knew that [ Load "*",8,1 ] would give a ?syntax error, but I was wrong about why. I thought the lowercase letters were the problem, since I know that C64 BASIC uses all caps for every command. It didn't occur to me that the capital L was the issue, because I never played around with mixed case mode. After seeing your explanation though, it makes perfect sense. Also, typos and syntax errors are the main reason that I love a GUI. BAD SPELLARS OV THE WERLD UNTIE!
This is likely in part down to the C64 using PETSCII rather than ASCII. Which only has a single case when unshifted. With the ROM routines which parse the input only caring about the character codes rather than how they display.
"Load" I can understand, and even forgive. Modern devices these days love to be "helpful" and do stuff like automatically add punctuation and capitalize things that they think require capitalization. My devices do the same thing to me ALL THE TIME whenever posting/commenting about computer/electronics things. Usually I'm alert enough to catch them in the act, but sometimes I accidentally let one slip through. So whoever made the "Load"*",8,1" shirt may have fallen victim to this. Also capital-L is (technically) grammatically correct ("first word of a sentence should always be capitalized!") so maybe someone at the T-shirt company who was proofing the design and who doesn't know much about retrocomputing, thought "huh... that looks wrong... I'm gonna fix it!" Of course WE know that the correct version would be "lO"*",8,1" assuming your C64 is in upper/lower mode. Oh well, at least they got the ",8,1" part right. :) (unlike the second example you pointed out :) )
Yeah, I can understand the t-shirt mistake on one hand, but on the other it's a "you had ONE job" kind of thing. The t-shirt design consists of a single line, and it's not even correct. With the documentary guys, they had dozens of things going on in their 90 second trailer, with a whole bunch of camera set-ups for many shots, organizing all the props, lighting, all the editing, sound work, etc. etc. So from this perspective, the trailer guys got 99% of their work correct, and only 1% error, while the t-shirt is way worse as a percentage :) I'm not really serious about which is worse here, just offering another way of looking at it.
Used a c64 from a round 83 to 90. Never even knew it has a mixed case mode. Also started with a dataset, for the life of me I couldn't remember how to load the first file on the tape. I fared better with the disk command. Again, case threw me. But I remembered that 8 was a device ID. Didn't really know what the 1 one was for. Sometimes it was needed, sometimes it wasn't. I did not know that * could mean last loaded file though. Actually my first instinct was 8 meant the disk drive, and 1 was the drive ID on the bus, in case you had more than one daisy chained. I was one of those peeps that basically just played games ;p. Did some homework in GEOS too.
LOAD"",1 will load the file to the start of BASIC memory, typically $0801 on a C64. This is what's called a "relocated load", and it was generally meant to allow BASIC programs saved on other models of Commodore 8-bits like the PET or VIC-20 to be loaded successfully on a C64. LOAD"",1,1 will not relocate the load, and the file will be loaded to the address specified in the file. Additionally, LOAD"",1 is only a suggestion to do a relocatable load, as there's an optional byte in the tape header that will force non-relocatable load.
This sort of thing acts as a pretty convenient shibboleth for how much the people responsible for things like that shirt or that documentary actually care about the subject matter. It's not unreasonable to expect someone who's going to the trouble of actually producing products to sell have the most basic understanding of the thing those products relate to. I look at that shirt and my brain immediately goes to bootleg merchandise that misspells the name or attaches the wrong name to the picture.
Imagine someone who is unfamiliar with the C64, buying that T-shirt, then getting a C64 sometime afterwards, only to then figure out that what it says on the T-shirt doesn't actually work. If it was me, then that T-shirt would instantly plummet in emotional value. So no, I don't think you're nitpicking at all, Robin. That thing with the asterisk when loading from tape is actually rather obvious, when you think about it. I have just never thought about it until now... and you know I love that kind of stuff. - At some point in the past I began using "LOAD":*",8,1" instead. Which is suppose to always load the first file from the disc. I don't recall reading it anywhere, so someone must have told me about it. I also don't recall whether it skips a "DEL
Yes, that LOAD":*",8,1 should always load the first file. I also don't remember where I learned it. It seems to be sort of like the 0 GOTO trick that allows a "parameterless" GOTO, in that preceding the colon *should* be a drive number of 0 or 1 but it seems it can simply be omitted. This will require someone to read the CBM-DOS disassemblies but I assume specifying a drive number (even a nameless/default drive) will cause the drive to disregard any "cached" file that * would otherwise bring up and force it to load the first file from the disk. Lots of room for investigation in this area. Hopefully in the future!
I'd make that: LOAD "0:*",8,1 because of the save-with-replace bug. Got bit by it once or twice back in the day. The 1541 drive thinks it's a dual drive, and if you search for a file, it'll first check side 0 (which exists) and, if it doesn't find it, searches drive 1. Now it thinks it's looking at drive 1, and when you do a save-with-replace, it instead turns your file into a splat file, which appears in the directory as type *. It will grow and it will eat every file on your disk. There was an article about it in either Compute! or Compute's Gazette back in the day. I remain suitably paranoid about splat files and I'm terrified that no-one seems to know about it anymore And, indeed, it IS a throwback to when Commodore disk drives were dual units. They used the same ROM from those drives in the 1541, which is why the 1541 thinks it's a dual drive.
It should be fine when just loading programs, but yes, it's definitely something to be concerned about if doing saving, especially save-and-replace. I believe the 1541 ROMs were originally in the 4040 Dual drive, then modified to the 2031 single drive, then modified again to the 1541. Some of the dual drive code was removed or patched out, but not enough!
Back when we used the PET with the INTERNAL Datasette, if we also had an EXTERNAL Datasette we used ,2 to access the external unit. p.s. I also have that Telidon button…I remember seeing Telidon demoed at the CNE in Toronto, Canada.
Cool about the Telidon button; I love its design. And yes, and most (all?) later PETs supported two cassettes though of course they were both external.
Interesting. On the C64 ",2" specifies the pseudo-RS232 interface on the user port, typically used for modems. The LOAD command is illegal on those devices.
My partner wanted to buy me a Commodore 64 disk load shirt and was turned away from a mixed-case offering because somebody took the time to comment on the product page that the command as written wouldn't work. She found a corrected version and now it's one of my favorite pieces of clothing. I'm surprised at how few people know what it means.
We think of the C64 as the best selling home computer, but compared to the world population, the 10 - 30 million sold units were actually not that many. Sad to think that the vast majority of people on Earth are missing out.
IIRC, "*",8 will load the first program after a new disk is placed in the drive, OR the last program loaded if a different named one was already loaded. ":*",8 will always load the first program regardless if any other programs were loaded prior to it.
i can remember a fast load named "@" on the disk and you had to alter the filename you wanted to load with the fastloader. Maybe with a ":" in front, but i am not sure.
Yes, that would be DOS WEDGE or similar. It's loaded into memory and intercepts the commands before BASIC looks at them. So it spots the character and sends the following filename/command to the disk drive.
To be even more pedantic (because pedantry is fun): LOAD"*",8,1 doesn't necessarily load the last _loaded_ file. It is _supposed_ to load the last file that was _either LOADed or SAVEd._ But, in fact, it actually loads the last file that was opened on _either channel 0 or channel 1_ in the disk drive. This can be via a LOAD or VERIFY command (both of which use disk channel 0), a SAVE command (which uses disk channel 1), or even an OPEN command (such as OPEN 1,8,0,"MYFILE,L" or OPEN 1,8,1,"NEWFILE,S"). That being said, the OPEN command is not really _supposed_ to be used with channel 0 or 1, as these are intended to be used only by the KERNAL's LOAD, VERIFY, and SAVE routines - but the C64 won't actually stop you from misusing them in this manner. Finally, if there hasn't yet been a file opened on disk channel 0 or 1, the LOAD"*",8,1 command will just treat the asterisk as a normal wildcard, which is what causes it to load the first PRG file on the disk. And while this is usually safe, it is preferable to use LOAD"0:*",8,1. If you don't use the explicit drive unit specifier ("0:"), the drive will likely make an attempt initilaize the non-existent "drive unit 1". Due to an indexing bug, this can A) corrupt one of the drive's 5 internal data buffers, and B) wrongly convince the drive that drive unit 1 actually exists snd contains a valid disk. This latter bug can potentially cause lots of drive errors, and is even related to the infamous and devastating save-and-replace bug.
Very interesting; I have vague recollections of experimenting with with some of this stuff but don't remember what I found (if anything) :) I'll take note and may return to this in the future, thanks.
Robin i need your help as Professor of c64 ;) i got myself a c64 again c64c with 1541-2 like from the past. Just i had always a ActionReplay but now i own a final catridge 3. My Problem... i search webs, Reader manuell up and down... how to cheat with fc3 ?? I get freeze, then i go to Monitor, i change 0913 ( turrican 3) so .m 0913 the Adress i change to 60. Then enter, then x (leave monitor) now im back in Desktop. There is no key to get back in the Running Programm?? My question how to get back in the game. I find only "bar" turns your menu on again and freezer is aviable but i cant get back in the game. Is there an allmighty sys.... to switch back at the point the freeze Was made ? I remember in ActionReplay that you can change memory and just get back into the game. Else the Monitor in FinalCatridge is useless or ?
So when you X (exit) the monitor, it goes right back to the desktop, and not the "freezer menu"? Because from the freezer menu you should be able to choose Exit->RUN and the program will continue.
I know exactly what you mean! These youngsters will never know what it meant to type in a game from a magazine and have to work through pages of DATA statements looking for the missing digit or comma that was throwing the order out and crashing the game ..... whether it was graphics in the wrong places, or music that went wrong and crashed leaving something dissonant still playing at full volume .....
That doesn't seem to exist for the C64 (yet). I played around with the screen reader in Windows 11, but that can't read the content of a C64 emulator window. Threre are smartphoe apps that can read any text in front of the camera, so holding that in fornt of any computer screen might work? If you have a Braille keyboard for a modern PC, that should work for entering text into a C64 emulator like VICE.
If you have 2 floppy drives, LOAD"*",9,1 will load from the 2nd drive. If you remove 8, it will load from the 1st drive. ,1 means Load the file into the starting address specified within the file, which is often used for machine language programs or other non-BASIC files.
Hi, something from the past, even back in the day people thought the last ",1" stands for "autorun" after loading, but of course we knew better :) also I never used ",8,1" a lot and am still alive, and later upgraded to a C128 where I never needed the plain LOAD anyways :) Thanks for picking this up, it always annoys me seeing these commands. 👍
I don't know myself, but if you had no cassette tape perhaps 'LOAD"*",,1' (note the two commas) would do the trick? It's worth remembering that most 8-bit computers shipped with 64K or less of memory and memory-mapped I/O was common. So there really wasn't a lot of room for more sophisticated approaches to dealing with user input or anything else. It was therefore best to address the most common cases and/or stick to consistent behavior. It would also have quite a pain back then to distribute a firmware update, so they put serious effort into debugging any code that shipped in ROM chips.
Just stumbled on this channel. I was a kid in the 80s and spent a LOT of time on the C64, but was too young and not patient enough to ever write anything other than very basic and silly programs. I did try to type in a horse racing game from Commodore Gazette once but it never worked 😅 But since those days, I’ve never really understood the LOAD command that I typed in thousands of times. This video was a real blast and I leaned something about a cherished part of my childhood. Thank you!🙏🏾
When I was 8 I had an Amstrad CPC 464 and bought a DK'Tronics light pen that plugged into the expansion slot. Reading the instructions it said "All that is required to run the ROM software is to type "lightpen" and press " I tried over and over entering "lightpen" and it kept saying Syntax Error. Eventually, 8 year old me called the tech support number (imagine the horror of being tech support talking to a squeaky voiced 8 year old kid 🤣). Me: it won't work, keeps saying syntax error Tech: Are you entering it exactly? Me: Yes Tech: OK, must be faulty, you'll need to return it. After the call, all sad and disappointed that my new gadget was dead on arrival, I sighed then I just typed it without the quotes around the word "lightpen" 😅 it worked 😂 I was so happy at that moment seeing the lightpen software show on the screen 😊
A friend and I spent a long time typing in this game, Bunny Hop. We made mistakes. At first the SYNTAX ERROR IN LINE xx told us where to go. After fixing those, the game ran enough to where it redefined the chars so reading the error msgs required hitting Stop+Restore and catching a glimpse of the number as the chars reverted before the screen cleared (about 1 frame later. Then it started running but our next error was a bug that made the game unplayable. What a let-down
It's not nitpicking. It's pointing out a very serious flaw on these products. Anybody who would buy these, would know from memory why neither are "real". The Load with mixed case also just looks awful
MC Frontalot's "Penny Arcade theme" has a refrain of "ell-shift O to the quote and then dollar," as a shout-out for how to load and display the directory. of course it's missing the ,8 to specify disk, and it will display a directory of the tape but only if there's no program named "$" on it.
It's amazing the disconnect that exists these days between modern/new fans of vintage technologies (not just VC fans but also vintage synthesizer/electronic music fans) and the technologies' history. Is it that these "new" fans just aren't interested in the history of what they are into? The worst part is that these days there is no reason not to know the history, all you have to do is spend a couple minutes searching online, it's like you have to hunt down books and read them, (god forbid) to piece together the history. Not trying to be a jerk or a snob, I'm just concerned when I see the history of something that is all about the "vintage" being pushed aside or ignored as if it isn't all that important.
Loading tapes (shift and run stop) or just type load. To find file then load"file",1 Disk I do keyboard shortcuts.. or use a utility cartridge with shortcuts.
Those type-in magazine listings, with errors, were a great way of learning though, fixing it was always provided more experience, as my 8-year-old brain experimented with solutions.
I found an hack long time ago, games with horizontal rainbow lines loader could be prevented to run automatically by keeping pressed run stop, you could even then save them on floppy
Off topic: I would love to see you make a video where you go over TRSE (Turbo Rascal). I feel like most UA-camrs either don't know what it is or they ignore it.
About typing programs from magazines ... yeah it is very tedious and error prone (user or publisher induced). I heard that long time ago in Britain, when they had the BBC microcomputer with the datasette, some radio stations actually sent program binary audio in certain (late) hours. You could then set up your casette recorder, and just press record just before the program is on the air. And later you could just load the program from the recorded casette. Don't know the specifics tho.
Your knowledge is impressive, respect! I didn't have my own, most i know (quite so for not owner) is from visits in friends houses, but only 2 wanted more than gaming. I don't know if you check comments to old videos, i wonder about one i left in video on multiply in assembly.
Spotted both right away. *Only because I dug my old C64 out recently and essentially made both these mistakes (and more) trying to remember the commands.
When you started talking about being traumatized I chuckled at the hyperbole, but then when you opened the magazine at a type-in program and I physically jolted. I guess you're right. I AM traumatized!
I was sitting here feeling a little bit proud that the Ataris of my childhood were "better" in some little ways, ;) when I understood that Commodore can store multiple, named files on tape. I would have liked that feature! :)
Robin, that rant against permissiveness of sloppy practices was just beautiful. People love to 'dunk on' others for being "pedantic" but no one complains when stuff works properly because someone did their work to a high standard.
Indeed! I enjoyed the rant greatly, and was an instant thumbs up for the video, particularly at this moment when I'm tutoring someone on address decoding for 8-bit systems. He wants to design and build his own little SBC, but I'm despairing that it will ever work unless he gets his act together and starts getting pedantic, rather than just guessing what the effect might be of the circuits he's showing me.
This was super interesting! I always thought "*" was universal, but after Robin explained that it was the disk drive interpreting the "*" differently, it all made sense. Still learning so much 35 years on!
Being in the UK and having used the ZX Spectrum 48K before getting a C64, I naturally used LOAD "" when trying to load a game from tape.
Not having a Disk drive, I didn't know about using ',8,1' or even ',1' until years later
Also, one of the best magazines made in the UK for programming was a series called INPUT - It had code for the C64 and VIC20, as well as the likes of the Spectrum (ZX80 & 48k) and even the BBC / Electron.
If only I still had a working C64
I’ve been on every version of commodore since 82. I’ve also only used twin 1541’s and always used CAPS, in white, just like this. I’ve learned two things today. 😮 Okay, three things. 😂❤
@2:48 I saw that you mentioned on twitter that there's an alternate meaning for "blue angels". I had to google it! :D
The Blue Angels flew directly over my house multiple times last month (part of San Francisco's Fleet Week). Good golly they're loud!
I assume you've seen the C64 game Blue Angel 69? Sounds like an old yahoo email address, but it's an actual game (Magic Bytes, 1989).
@12:48 Cool, didn't know that certain key presses could skip the pause. My tape days were mostly VIC-20. I assume it worked there too?
re: Blue Angels, yes, I think it's a regional thing. We'll see how many people get it :)
I only learned about Blue Angel 69 in the last couple weeks when someone mentioned that the Accolade game was fairly rare so I looked around online to make sure it had been imaged etc.
The VIC-20 doesn't pause at all when it finds a file. It also doesn't blank the screen while loading. I assume the pause was added to the C64 when they found they had to blank the screen due to the VIC-II's cycle stealing which made the existing tape routines unreliable with the display enabled, but I haven't looked into that :)
Just be lucky it's not Blue Waffle.
Pedantic it may be, dead on accurate it absolutely is. If you are gonna sell merch based on C64 nostalgia, at least have the goddamn common courtesy to get it right. Excellent video.
Finally I good explanation of the Why Only Some Keys & Why About Eight Seconds 🎉
The Commodore specifically was really picky with what you typed in - the pain of typing a whole page program only for something to have been typed slightly wrong and the problem doesn’t work.
I was today years old when I finally learned what they mean when they say "I'll get it done in a jiffy".
The actual length of a jiffy will vary between different computer platforms but it's usually somewhere between 1/10th of a second and 1/100th of a second. On most Commodore systems it's 1/60th of a second. I've seen some people get dogmatic that a jiffy is 1/100th of a second, but it's dependant on the system hardware and/or operating system.
Thanks for keeping the facts straight!
I knew the issue with the disk loading command right away, but did not know that about the tape command.
I've known where at least a majority of my pedantry came from.. it was definitely programming on the C64 and typing in those lengthy listings. I don't think I ever entered one of any significant size without at least a few mistakes, sometimes many. 'Precise' is correct; nothing else usually sufficed.
Just a side question: I keep seeing some of the same patrons repeated across multiple videos as "New Users". Are they dropping off the list and rejoining or something? 🙂
I'll push more of the new patrons off the list next time I update it :)
Preach it my man.
hello - can some1 help me out here? im looking for a game called grand prix from a book listing from 1982 or 1983 ?? for the dragon 32 ?? has any 1 seen this particular game from a book?? thanks............... let me know if any1 sees it thanks............
Look for the book "Sixty Programs for the Dragon 32" published by Pan / Personal Computer News Computer Library. Authors Robert Erskine, Humphrey Walwyn, with Paul Stanley, Michael Bews. On page 209 is a type-in game called "Grand Prix".
There are PDFs of it online and I also see reasonably-priced copies of the book for sale.
ok many thanks but this grand prix (in sixty programs for the dragon 32) i dont think is the one because its graphic based - the one i type in 1982 or 1983 was text based many thanks and bless u lots!!!!!!@@8_Bit
so many words for what???
What?
i was only a kid at the time but i always loaded stuff with ,8,1, then RUN. and it DID work. we had a lot of dodgy software but it ran stuff that it ran. the only thing i learned i could do differently was use L (shift) O or R (shift) U in place of load and run.
And hooooooo boy did i used to p*ss off my dad by getting him to load impossible mission on tape which took almost an hour, only to play it 5 minutes and want to play pit stop on cartridge.
I'm all in to being accurate, but making a 24 minutes video about something that could be read and understood on a web page in a minute or two is stupid. But that's the way today on any other information no matter how small and quick, everything has to be done on video.
Go ahead and write it then. Make sure you leave the comments open so I can call whatever you create "stupid".
I have had discussions (some heated) about the meaning and workings of the asterisk in the LOAD command. The commodore manual says that it loads the last file loaded and if the commodore can't determine which file that is, it just loads the first file. As you said in the video. I'm glad you underlined the meaning of the asterisk.
Maybe the shirt says "?SYNTAX ERROR" on the back? 😂
There are too many people in the world who take a correction as an attack on their character. I think growing up learning computer programming and later going into the IT field has taught me to value corrections others might make to my work. The other edge of that sword however is that I also don't hesitate to correct mistakes that I see. So yeah...I'm with you completely. :D
In our line of hobby, it's not just an attack on our character, but on our *special* character, and that's just too much.
Nowadays people take even greetings as an attack ;) Let them suffer from their own "unimportant" mistakes, which - surprise, surprise, suddenly become super important if it affects them, i,e. writing 1,000 instead of 1.000 is alright, no big deal, same thing, right?... unless it's their paycheck ;)
No worries, Skynet will take care of them :)))
I love being corrected if I am wrong. It helps me learn and grow.
That's a big problem with the Linux community. Until they get their act together, people will always stay with the devil they know.
I didn't notice if you mentioned, but just like disk, you can provide the additional parameter for tape too and use LOAD"",1,1. That's not very common of course, as it loads the file into the address it was saved from so it is useful only for specific cases.
Aww, man. After twice saying that the Asterisk loads "the first file on disk", Robin corrected himself the third time. I was so excited to jump into the comments and be pedantic on a video about being pedantic, and now I have to settle for enjoying pedantry vicariously.
I would love a t-shirt with "L" followed by a shifted "O" from the C64, that graphic and then the rest. Only C64 users would understand it.
Great idea.
I have a self-made font of C64 charsets, you can create a graphics of your T-shirt. There are several undertakers for printing a customized image on a T-shirt. Do you need my font?
It works for ALL commodore machines, not exclusivley the C64 🤪
@@PeterMaddison2483 Oh really? It didn't work on the Commodore Amiga 500, Commodore Amiga 2000, Commodore Amiga 3000, Commodore Amiga 4000, Commodore Amiga 1200 or any of the Commodore PC machines. I don't think it worked on the Commodore PET either. 🤪
@@PeterMaddison2483that's a lie. You're a liar. Why would you lie about something so ephemeral. dopamine is free. But that doesn't mean there aren't better ways to get it.
I never thought about the type-in experience shaping me into the pedant I became. It might explain a lot. Sometimes I feel that it's like the person who writes something poorly is deferring the task of correcting them (in the readers mind) to the reader, representing a laziness. A computer will not accept this. Why should a reader? So put the effort in! I have even found myself correcting typos before hitting "send" on ChatGPT. Why should I make ChatGPT spend processor cycles first correcting my language before processing an answer? :D
Thanks for being pedantic, Robin!
I am no less upset about the error on the T-Shirt, despite NEVER having typed in a program from a book or magazine. I would rather write an own program, no matter how much worse it will be. The idea of typing in pages and pages of code is just hideous to me. I also thought at the time that this was a cheap way to fill the magazine, without any use, because no one would ever do that. ;-) I guess I am protected by lucky genes providing me with a healthy dose of lazyness.
2:25 You always teach me something! I did not know of the mixed case mode in BASIC, only knew toggle between upper and lower!
Perhaps they should just print "? syntax error" on the back of the shirts they've already printed.
When someone calls you on your shirt (sic), you just spin around so they can read the back. :)
I never knew you could even change cases
Took me way too long to see what was wrong with the t-shirt...
Those wedges the magazines eventually develop for typing in listing certainly helped. They allowed the checksum to validate the line. Made it a lot easier, but took them forever to create that utility
Interesting that you can press those other keys to make the tape load faster. I guess Commodore said to use the Commodore key so it doesn't print anything on the screen afterwards, so it was kind of a lazy implementation.
In reference to the magazine, I remember typing in from Compute's Gazette and they had a program that you could use to type in the program which gives a checksum code after every line similar to what is shown in that magazine in the video with the 2 letters at the end so you could verify there were no mistakes. It helped a lot in machine language programs.
Those checksum systems definitely helped, but this particular listing I've shown still had errors anyway; it had a bug in the program they used to generate the listings and checksums.
Damn, I _wish_ a certain children's magazine had done that in their "Basic Training" column. Few things more frustrating than typing a program in _exactly as printed_ and having it not work. 😠 I swear, it turned me _off_ programming altogether until high school, when I started messing around with TI-BASIC on my graphing calculator and basic HTML on my GeoCities website.
(It didn't help that I was on a PC when I started in '93-'94, and QBASIC for MS-DOS didn't have great documentation that I could find at the time. Certainly nothing like the VIC-20 and C64 manuals I've seen in more recent retro stuff.)
I'm _so_ sick of random internet commenters referring to programmers as "lazy" when something isn't implemented as those commenters, with little knowledge or experience, think it ought to be implemented.
The folks who wrote the CBM KERNAL packed in a _lot_ of good features in a fairly decent design (a _very_ good design for the time) all in a fairly small amount of memory. And they wrote it fairly quickly, too. This is all the exact opposite of lazy.
Certain tricks such as reading the row, rather than trying to determine an individual keypress, save both execution time and space. You're essentially accusing the author of that bit of code of being "lazy" for not making the ROM larger and slower.
So maybe these random internet commenters could take a moment to consider how much they know about the code and why it was written the way it was before slinging insults?
Just a side note you can ALWAYS load the first program by adding a : in front of the asterisk. What that tells the drive OS is to use drive zero and resets the pointer, even if the drive is a single drive like a 1541. It's a leftover from the 4040 and 8050/8250 OS. So to ALWAYS load the first program from disk "load":*",8,1" will always work. The * actually means next found not first, but since inserting a disk resets the pointers when the write protect changes that's why it loads the first, usually.
Perhaps I am not recalling correctly, I thought the * was the last file accessed, not the next. I do recall the ":' used for 1st program on disk.
Disk 'speed enhancers' often came with their own set/custom commands. I used Mach-5, Jiffy Dos as well as RAM drive.
I am still confused. It is not even clear to me what "first program" means . The first that was saved (the oldest)? The first in the directory? What will be loaded when that gets scratched, or replaced? And what does "next" mean, next realtive to what? The last loaded? The previously saved? Would be worth an own episode I think.
I guess I am not the only one that sees those misprints and thinks to myself, "That won't actually work". haha. Thanks!
On a side note about some instructions and games including the 0: before the name. I would guess they started doing this after the Save with Replace bug was verified in the magazines and they recommended that you always use the 0: prefix. The reason is, IIRC, is that if you start your session always using the 0: when issuing commands the bug will not occur.
That's very true. Not using the drive unit specifier "0:" causes the drive to attempt to initialize the non-existent "drive unit 1". It will fail, as it should, but a very sloppy and obvious indexing bug in the DOS ROM can trigger the save-and-replace bug as well as several other less serious bugs.
Great video - these things bug me too!
Since we're being pedantic, I don't like the description of the command# of 1 (e.g. ",1" at the end) indicating that the data is loaded to the memory location "from which it was saved". I think it's more correct to say it causes the data to be loaded to the memory location specified in the file. In many cases, that binary file was cross compiled or generated from a graphic program, so it didn't originate from that memory location on a c64. I looked in the 1541 manual and the description of "LOADed at exactly the same memory location from which it came." is from commodore, so my nit pick is with them!
I agree completely, I've think I've said it a bunch of ways between different videos but "as specified in the file" seems like the best way.
Reminds me of an NES controller t-shirt a friend had that had an egregious error, much worse than these incorrect commands-the B and A buttons were reversed! I’m wondering if it was officially licensed, since I imagine Nintendo wouldn’t have allowed such a blatant error on a licensed product.
When type ins started coming with error checking was a game changer, it really simplified things. The only gripe I have is that it wasn't standardized. Seems like the Ahoy magazine used a small assembler program, but I remember many using a basic loader for assembler with checksums on each DATA statement, crude, but it really cut down on hunting for that one wrong number.
Yes, regarding manually typing in programs, the "Accuracy is important for Survival" is totally correct. More so if you were unlucky enough that your Computer was a Sinclair ZX81 with a worn Membrane keyboard and the Sinclair 16K RAM expansion. Not only did you have the problem of losing all of your program if the slightest movement upset the connection on the RAM Pack, It also had a tendency to freeze when it overheated due to the strain during the hours of debugging errors in the program and print errors from the magazine. It was common for spaces to be incorrect and badly printed graphics characters to cause havoc when using them to denote machine code within a BASIC program (an odd quirk of ZXBASIC,)
Using the ZX printer would be poor quality black on sliver which was not easy to typeset.
Using a regular printer resulted in a black and white print which would be more easily typeset and would work with any early 80s machine. But might only be able to print ASCII characters. In some cases Sinclair specific characters ended up being handwritten.
When I was still little, my parents thought it was necessary to list the diskette's contents first and check for the full name of the first program which is why I learned rather late about LOAD"*",8,1 at all.
Back in the day it seemed every magazine program I typed in never worked. Was so frustrating. Great video Robin.
I could smell that frustration from a distance, so never typed in a program.
13:21 I used to use the space bar for the FOUND prompt until I had a game which wouldn't start properly if space was in the keyboard buffer. It drove me crazy until I realized what the issue was. I switched to C= key after that :)
I didn't grow up using a VIC-20 or C64 so this was informative. And though I've only had limited experience in the past few years, I did know why (kinda) the first example was wrong and guessed the second one would specify the tape rather disk drive. I just didn't know that tape drives would literally try to find a program called *.
I grew up with the machine and could feel something was terribly wrong with the shirt but it didn't immediately click it was the case. Informative breakdown.
I'm embarrassed to say that I could not figure out what was wrong with what was printed on the T-Shirt... But then again, it's been decades since I messed around on a real C64.
Maybe it's worth to notice that LOAD"*",8 could be used to load a previously loaded program again. CBM DOS won't search the directory from thr begin if a program was already selected. The asterisk clobbs to the already loaded one again.
An unexpected behavior sometimes ...
I completely agree Robin! People like us were conditioned to be exact in our instructions. :) Thanks for the insight on the handling of * by the drive controller vs. using it with the tape load routines in ROM - I'd never thought about that before, but found it very interesting.
The tape-handling code was originally put together for the PET and then moved over wholesale for later Commodore machines. That means a lot of patches and changes, and the sort of coding hack that gives the pause. And a little caveat for disk drive owners using LOAD"*",8(,1) - it doesn't automatically check for file type. So if it tries to load in a SEQ, USR or REL file as the first in the directory it can give you an error or FILE NOT FOUND. Best to use a directory editor to make your boot PRG physically the first in the directory. The C128's autoboot can also be affected by having the wrong file type.
EDIT: The O instead of zero worked because there isn't a physical "drive O", it's expecting zero or 1 - another feature carried over from earlier drives.
I think I read somwhere (wish I rememebered the source) that the core of the tape code, written by Chuck Peddle himself, remained untouched, because no one could understand it and dared to touch it. It is quite slow, but very safe, thus Commodore was considered to have the best tape performance of all the early 8-bit computers (when RAM and file sizes were low and speed not a big consideration).
I’ve seen that t-shirt. It’s maddening. I would be embarrassed to wear that shirt
I haven't touched a Commodore since 1994 and immediately knew the issue with the T-shirt.
I didn't own a tape drive, so thank you for explaining the ins and outs. My uncle owned a VIC20 and tape drive, and I always wondered how to store more than one program on a tape and how to retrieve it. Now I know.
I'm with you 100% regarding the precision of commands. Imagine seeing a T-shirt with a bunch of upper case Linux commands.
I just got back from a Cafe Press search, and they do exist.
Tape drive? Wow... I never called datassettes with that name here in Spain. The odd thing here was a disk drive, as its price was a full monthly salary.
In fact, I never saw any original game in disk format at computer shops, only tapes were available, since disks were a luxury good used only in Central Europe and United States.
Still nowadays the salaries in USA, Netherlands, Germany or France are 300-400% higher than ours.
@@BlackHoleSpain Don't complain about salaries, because in the Eastern block it was much worse. In the late 80s in the USSR we would have had to spend more than half a year's salary to buy a computer like Commodore 64! So the only way for the ordinary people like me to get a computer was to make it by yourself :-) That's why I'm not a Commodore guy but a Spectrum one, because there were no Commodore clones, only ZX Spectrum. So I soldered my first computer ("Leningrad" - a simple 48K clone) in 1991, then the second (ATM Turbo-2) in 1993 was much more complicated: it was a very advanced version of Spectrum 128K with 512 KB of memory, additional video modes (similar to EGA on PC), CP/M mode and a floppy disk drive. But soon the era of PC came, so I saved all my money for 2 years to assemble my first Pentium in 1995-1996.
A lot of commercial tapes will only work with shiftrun or c=run, they will fail to work if you try to manually load. In the northwest of USA we called it "splat" instead of asterisk or star. Interesting to note different computer jargon based on region.
I did know a few "splat" people back in the day. I had forgotten about that, thanks for the reminder!
There was even a commodore disk magazine called LoadStar, referencing the name commonly used for asterisks in much of Canada and the USA. I was not aware of "splat" as a term, but it makes sense as a name for a wildcard.
Now I'm remembering that the most common time I heard "splat" was when there was a "splat" in a disk directory listing, indicating that the file was bad in some way, usually not closed properly. I think that tied in with the * looking somewhat like a squished bug, and the "splat-file" was a buggy file.
Pedantry plays an important survival role in respect of spam emails and messages. Most of these contain grammar and spelling errors. If a person doesn't care about spelling and grammar, they are far more likely to fall for a scam, especially one that simply asks you to click on what you think is a trusted web address.
There are many more people without knowledge than with. There are many more people who make mistakes and still succeed than people who rarely do. This means that the history will be written by the victors - the incompetent. The only antidote is to share correct information and hope that many people see it - and to correct people when they're wrong.
People like 'why' answers like this one, and you explain in detail. Kudos.
I knew that [ Load "*",8,1 ] would give a ?syntax error, but I was wrong about why. I thought the lowercase letters were the problem, since I know that C64 BASIC uses all caps for every command. It didn't occur to me that the capital L was the issue, because I never played around with mixed case mode. After seeing your explanation though, it makes perfect sense.
Also, typos and syntax errors are the main reason that I love a GUI.
BAD SPELLARS OV THE WERLD UNTIE!
This is likely in part down to the C64 using PETSCII rather than ASCII. Which only has a single case when unshifted. With the ROM routines which parse the input only caring about the character codes rather than how they display.
@@markevans2294 PETSCII being way better, I see ASCII as the culprit.
"Load" I can understand, and even forgive. Modern devices these days love to be "helpful" and do stuff like automatically add punctuation and capitalize things that they think require capitalization. My devices do the same thing to me ALL THE TIME whenever posting/commenting about computer/electronics things. Usually I'm alert enough to catch them in the act, but sometimes I accidentally let one slip through. So whoever made the "Load"*",8,1" shirt may have fallen victim to this. Also capital-L is (technically) grammatically correct ("first word of a sentence should always be capitalized!") so maybe someone at the T-shirt company who was proofing the design and who doesn't know much about retrocomputing, thought "huh... that looks wrong... I'm gonna fix it!" Of course WE know that the correct version would be "lO"*",8,1" assuming your C64 is in upper/lower mode. Oh well, at least they got the ",8,1" part right. :) (unlike the second example you pointed out :) )
Yeah, I can understand the t-shirt mistake on one hand, but on the other it's a "you had ONE job" kind of thing. The t-shirt design consists of a single line, and it's not even correct. With the documentary guys, they had dozens of things going on in their 90 second trailer, with a whole bunch of camera set-ups for many shots, organizing all the props, lighting, all the editing, sound work, etc. etc. So from this perspective, the trailer guys got 99% of their work correct, and only 1% error, while the t-shirt is way worse as a percentage :)
I'm not really serious about which is worse here, just offering another way of looking at it.
Used a c64 from a round 83 to 90. Never even knew it has a mixed case mode. Also started with a dataset, for the life of me I couldn't remember how to load the first file on the tape. I fared better with the disk command. Again, case threw me. But I remembered that 8 was a device ID. Didn't really know what the 1 one was for. Sometimes it was needed, sometimes it wasn't. I did not know that * could mean last loaded file though.
Actually my first instinct was 8 meant the disk drive, and 1 was the drive ID on the bus, in case you had more than one daisy chained.
I was one of those peeps that basically just played games ;p. Did some homework in GEOS too.
the first thing I ever learned to write was LOAD”*”,8,1 Return
LOAD"",1 does not perform a relocated load, LOAD"",1,1 does.
LOAD"",1 will load the file to the start of BASIC memory, typically $0801 on a C64. This is what's called a "relocated load", and it was generally meant to allow BASIC programs saved on other models of Commodore 8-bits like the PET or VIC-20 to be loaded successfully on a C64. LOAD"",1,1 will not relocate the load, and the file will be loaded to the address specified in the file. Additionally, LOAD"",1 is only a suggestion to do a relocatable load, as there's an optional byte in the tape header that will force non-relocatable load.
This sort of thing acts as a pretty convenient shibboleth for how much the people responsible for things like that shirt or that documentary actually care about the subject matter. It's not unreasonable to expect someone who's going to the trouble of actually producing products to sell have the most basic understanding of the thing those products relate to. I look at that shirt and my brain immediately goes to bootleg merchandise that misspells the name or attaches the wrong name to the picture.
Imagine someone who is unfamiliar with the C64, buying that T-shirt, then getting a C64 sometime afterwards, only to then figure out that what it says on the T-shirt doesn't actually work. If it was me, then that T-shirt would instantly plummet in emotional value. So no, I don't think you're nitpicking at all, Robin.
That thing with the asterisk when loading from tape is actually rather obvious, when you think about it. I have just never thought about it until now... and you know I love that kind of stuff.
- At some point in the past I began using "LOAD":*",8,1" instead. Which is suppose to always load the first file from the disc. I don't recall reading it anywhere, so someone must have told me about it. I also don't recall whether it skips a "DEL
Yes, that LOAD":*",8,1 should always load the first file. I also don't remember where I learned it. It seems to be sort of like the 0 GOTO trick that allows a "parameterless" GOTO, in that preceding the colon *should* be a drive number of 0 or 1 but it seems it can simply be omitted. This will require someone to read the CBM-DOS disassemblies but I assume specifying a drive number (even a nameless/default drive) will cause the drive to disregard any "cached" file that * would otherwise bring up and force it to load the first file from the disk. Lots of room for investigation in this area. Hopefully in the future!
I was really waiting for this video... thanks for explaining.
I'd make that:
LOAD "0:*",8,1
because of the save-with-replace bug. Got bit by it once or twice back in the day.
The 1541 drive thinks it's a dual drive, and if you search for a file, it'll first check side 0 (which exists) and, if it doesn't find it, searches drive 1.
Now it thinks it's looking at drive 1, and when you do a save-with-replace, it instead turns your file into a splat file, which appears in the directory as type *. It will grow and it will eat every file on your disk. There was an article about it in either Compute! or Compute's Gazette back in the day. I remain suitably paranoid about splat files and I'm terrified that no-one seems to know about it anymore
And, indeed, it IS a throwback to when Commodore disk drives were dual units. They used the same ROM from those drives in the 1541, which is why the 1541 thinks it's a dual drive.
It should be fine when just loading programs, but yes, it's definitely something to be concerned about if doing saving, especially save-and-replace. I believe the 1541 ROMs were originally in the 4040 Dual drive, then modified to the 2031 single drive, then modified again to the 1541. Some of the dual drive code was removed or patched out, but not enough!
I wonder where these people get these lines. Certainly not from the manual!
Back when we used the PET with the INTERNAL Datasette, if we also had an EXTERNAL Datasette we used ,2 to access the external unit.
p.s. I also have that Telidon button…I remember seeing Telidon demoed at the CNE in Toronto, Canada.
Cool about the Telidon button; I love its design. And yes, and most (all?) later PETs supported two cassettes though of course they were both external.
Interesting. On the C64 ",2" specifies the pseudo-RS232 interface on the user port, typically used for modems. The LOAD command is illegal on those devices.
@@8_Bit I remembered that later. #1 was on the back, and #2 was on the right (usually covered up).
My partner wanted to buy me a Commodore 64 disk load shirt and was turned away from a mixed-case offering because somebody took the time to comment on the product page that the command as written wouldn't work. She found a corrected version and now it's one of my favorite pieces of clothing. I'm surprised at how few people know what it means.
We think of the C64 as the best selling home computer, but compared to the world population, the 10 - 30 million sold units were actually not that many. Sad to think that the vast majority of people on Earth are missing out.
IIRC, "*",8 will load the first program after a new disk is placed in the drive, OR the last program loaded if a different named one was already loaded. ":*",8 will always load the first program regardless if any other programs were loaded prior to it.
You do recall correctly:)
What if they actually had overwritten that commercial tape with a program named "*", though?
:v
Correct pedantry is the best kind of pedantry
I think it is trumped by correcting incorrect pedantry. When someone thinks they're right in correcting you but are hopelessly wrong.
I guess just typing LOAD isn't as impressive-looking today, though it was when the C64 was in its heyday to some people.
i know it`s a bit long, but i would like to see the Alice in adventureland game.
i can remember a fast load named "@" on the disk and you had to alter the filename you wanted to load with the fastloader. Maybe with a ":" in front, but i am not sure.
Yes, that would be DOS WEDGE or similar. It's loaded into memory and intercepts the commands before BASIC looks at them. So it spots the character and sends the following filename/command to the disk drive.
I remember how proud I was when a friend brought his 1541 over and for the first time I could successfully do
LOAD “*”,9,1
😂
I have three 1541s by now, but need them for three computers (two C64s and one DOS/Windows PC), so I am still waiting for my first niner. :-)
@@NuntiusLegis Lucky you, I still have my old hardware but haven't tried it out in ages.
To be even more pedantic (because pedantry is fun): LOAD"*",8,1 doesn't necessarily load the last _loaded_ file. It is _supposed_ to load the last file that was _either LOADed or SAVEd._ But, in fact, it actually loads the last file that was opened on _either channel 0 or channel 1_ in the disk drive. This can be via a LOAD or VERIFY command (both of which use disk channel 0), a SAVE command (which uses disk channel 1), or even an OPEN command (such as OPEN 1,8,0,"MYFILE,L" or OPEN 1,8,1,"NEWFILE,S"). That being said, the OPEN command is not really _supposed_ to be used with channel 0 or 1, as these are intended to be used only by the KERNAL's LOAD, VERIFY, and SAVE routines - but the C64 won't actually stop you from misusing them in this manner.
Finally, if there hasn't yet been a file opened on disk channel 0 or 1, the LOAD"*",8,1 command will just treat the asterisk as a normal wildcard, which is what causes it to load the first PRG file on the disk. And while this is usually safe, it is preferable to use LOAD"0:*",8,1. If you don't use the explicit drive unit specifier ("0:"), the drive will likely make an attempt initilaize the non-existent "drive unit 1". Due to an indexing bug, this can A) corrupt one of the drive's 5 internal data buffers, and B) wrongly convince the drive that drive unit 1 actually exists snd contains a valid disk. This latter bug can potentially cause lots of drive errors, and is even related to the infamous and devastating save-and-replace bug.
Very interesting; I have vague recollections of experimenting with with some of this stuff but don't remember what I found (if anything) :) I'll take note and may return to this in the future, thanks.
@@8_Bit Until then, I will avoid * and @ like the plague.
Robin i need your help as Professor of c64 ;) i got myself a c64 again c64c with 1541-2 like from the past. Just i had always a ActionReplay but now i own a final catridge 3. My Problem... i search webs, Reader manuell up and down... how to cheat with fc3 ?? I get freeze, then i go to Monitor, i change 0913 ( turrican 3) so .m 0913 the Adress i change to 60. Then enter, then x (leave monitor) now im back in Desktop. There is no key to get back in the Running Programm?? My question how to get back in the game. I find only "bar" turns your menu on again and freezer is aviable but i cant get back in the game. Is there an allmighty sys.... to switch back at the point the freeze Was made ? I remember in ActionReplay that you can change memory and just get back into the game. Else the Monitor in FinalCatridge is useless or ?
So when you X (exit) the monitor, it goes right back to the desktop, and not the "freezer menu"? Because from the freezer menu you should be able to choose Exit->RUN and the program will continue.
I almost didn't notice the t-shirt being wrong. I'm so use to the C64 being all upper case that I just ignored it. lol
I know exactly what you mean!
These youngsters will never know what it meant to type in a game from a magazine and have to work through pages of DATA statements looking for the missing digit or comma that was throwing the order out and crashing the game ..... whether it was graphics in the wrong places, or music that went wrong and crashed leaving something dissonant still playing at full volume .....
Youngsters or people like me being way too lazy to even try that. ;-)
My running gag back in the day was, "I wish this stupid computer would do what I WANT it to do instead of what I TELL it to do".
Why didn't they have a way to enter programs as Braille.
That doesn't seem to exist for the C64 (yet). I played around with the screen reader in Windows 11, but that can't read the content of a C64 emulator window. Threre are smartphoe apps that can read any text in front of the camera, so holding that in fornt of any computer screen might work? If you have a Braille keyboard for a modern PC, that should work for entering text into a C64 emulator like VICE.
Wow! Many small "details" I never knew that affected loads! Thank you so much for the clarification.
Happy Holidays
Charles
I see you brought your A GAME.
If you have 2 floppy drives, LOAD"*",9,1 will load from the 2nd drive. If you remove 8, it will load from the 1st drive.
,1 means Load the file into the starting address specified within the file, which is often used for machine language programs or other non-BASIC files.
Great video Robin! LOAD"*",1 is actually a pretty good way to find all programs stored on the tape 😃 Cheers!
Hi, something from the past, even back in the day people thought the last ",1" stands for "autorun" after loading, but of course we knew better :)
also I never used ",8,1" a lot and am still alive, and later upgraded to a C128 where I never needed the plain LOAD anyways :)
Thanks for picking this up, it always annoys me seeing these commands.
👍
I don't know myself, but if you had no cassette tape perhaps 'LOAD"*",,1' (note the two commas) would do the trick?
It's worth remembering that most 8-bit computers shipped with 64K or less of memory and memory-mapped I/O was common.
So there really wasn't a lot of room for more sophisticated approaches to dealing with user input or anything else. It was therefore best to address the most common cases and/or stick to consistent behavior.
It would also have quite a pain back then to distribute a firmware update, so they put serious effort into debugging any code that shipped in ROM chips.
Untrue documentation really bugs me. "... select the Import File option...." THERE *IS* NO IMPORT FILE OPTION!!!!!!!! etc. It's beyond lying, it's FRAUD.
Just stumbled on this channel. I was a kid in the 80s and spent a LOT of time on the C64, but was too young and not patient enough to ever write anything other than very basic and silly programs. I did try to type in a horse racing game from Commodore Gazette once but it never worked 😅
But since those days, I’ve never really understood the LOAD command that I typed in thousands of times. This video was a real blast and I leaned something about a cherished part of my childhood. Thank you!🙏🏾
When I was 8 I had an Amstrad CPC 464 and bought a DK'Tronics light pen that plugged into the expansion slot. Reading the instructions it said "All that is required to run the ROM software is to type "lightpen" and press "
I tried over and over entering "lightpen" and it kept saying Syntax Error. Eventually, 8 year old me called the tech support number (imagine the horror of being tech support talking to a squeaky voiced 8 year old kid 🤣).
Me: it won't work, keeps saying syntax error
Tech: Are you entering it exactly?
Me: Yes
Tech: OK, must be faulty, you'll need to return it.
After the call, all sad and disappointed that my new gadget was dead on arrival, I sighed then I just typed it without the quotes around the word "lightpen" 😅 it worked 😂 I was so happy at that moment seeing the lightpen software show on the screen 😊
A friend and I spent a long time typing in this game, Bunny Hop.
We made mistakes.
At first the SYNTAX ERROR IN LINE xx told us where to go.
After fixing those, the game ran enough to where it redefined the chars so reading the error msgs required hitting Stop+Restore and catching a glimpse of the number as the chars reverted before the screen cleared (about 1 frame later.
Then it started running but our next error was a bug that made the game unplayable. What a let-down
It's not nitpicking. It's pointing out a very serious flaw on these products. Anybody who would buy these, would know from memory why neither are "real". The Load with mixed case also just looks awful
MC Frontalot's "Penny Arcade theme" has a refrain of "ell-shift O to the quote and then dollar," as a shout-out for how to load and display the directory. of course it's missing the ,8 to specify disk, and it will display a directory of the tape but only if there's no program named "$" on it.
with old computers there is no room for mistakes .
They were strictly logical, and required that from the user as well. Today's computers set up neural networks to learn illogic and hallucination.
I never had a c64 but I always find your videos fun to watch.
It's amazing the disconnect that exists these days between modern/new fans of vintage technologies (not just VC fans but also vintage synthesizer/electronic music fans) and the technologies' history. Is it that these "new" fans just aren't interested in the history of what they are into? The worst part is that these days there is no reason not to know the history, all you have to do is spend a couple minutes searching online, it's like you have to hunt down books and read them, (god forbid) to piece together the history. Not trying to be a jerk or a snob, I'm just concerned when I see the history of something that is all about the "vintage" being pushed aside or ignored as if it isn't all that important.
Loading tapes (shift and run stop) or just type load. To find file then load"file",1
Disk I do keyboard shortcuts.. or use a utility cartridge with shortcuts.
Those type-in magazine listings, with errors, were a great way of learning though, fixing it was always provided more experience, as my 8-year-old brain experimented with solutions.
"Logic, by its very nature, brooks no denial."- I cant remember... Ok, going back to cleaning :)
I found an hack long time ago, games with horizontal rainbow lines loader could be prevented to run automatically by keeping pressed run stop, you could even then save them on floppy
Off topic: I would love to see you make a video where you go over TRSE (Turbo Rascal). I feel like most UA-camrs either don't know what it is or they ignore it.
About typing programs from magazines ... yeah it is very tedious and error prone (user or publisher induced). I heard that long time ago in Britain, when they had the BBC microcomputer with the datasette, some radio stations actually sent program binary audio in certain (late) hours. You could then set up your casette recorder, and just press record just before the program is on the air. And later you could just load the program from the recorded casette. Don't know the specifics tho.
Your knowledge is impressive, respect!
I didn't have my own, most i know (quite so for not owner) is from visits in friends houses, but only 2 wanted more than gaming.
I don't know if you check comments to old videos, i wonder about one i left in video on multiply in assembly.
Spotted both right away.
*Only because I dug my old C64 out recently and essentially made both these mistakes (and more) trying to remember the commands.
this could've been an email.
HEY OP, iF YOU KNOW THE
TRUTH, THEN JUST SAY iT.
21:22 I still do this to unwind sometimes. They don’t have a word for what’s wrong with me
We call it Dutch.
@@Okurka.hahaha
When you started talking about being traumatized I chuckled at the hyperbole, but then when you opened the magazine at a type-in program and I physically jolted. I guess you're right. I AM traumatized!
Have to laugh. Those of us that had a C-64 back then spotted it immediately. I saw Press Play On Tape far more though. ;)
I was sitting here feeling a little bit proud that the Ataris of my childhood were "better" in some little ways, ;) when I understood that Commodore can store multiple, named files on tape. I would have liked that feature! :)
Pedantic nItPiCkErS for the win. Also know as competent software developers.