It kind of is, because the relevant Archive.org page (link in the description above) does have PDF versions online. Sadly, the "PDF with text" does not include the high-resolution images, and the PDF with hi-rez images does not include text. Also, I've just discovered that Evince is ambiguously case-sensitive - this is somewhat of a poor implementation. But at least in principle that PDF is searchable.
wow what an awesome resource... it contains SO MUCH information on even non computer subjects! it's almost like a guide to the modern world or something. incredible.
Nice to see the CCCC users group in there. I met the last surviving member of that group in 2020 and purchased ALL the equipment, disks and books they had and have a decade worth of their monthly news letters. ALOT of interesting stuff. Btw, i emailed Karl Hildon regarding this and linked him to this video in case he was interested, or didn’t see it yet. I know you mentioned he was a friend, so I’m guessing he might have, but never assume.
The Transactor was awesome!!! I used to read and re-read every issue a half-dozen times. As a teen, it was the first place I saw info on adding a reset and cartridge port switches (so that I could dump them to floppies) to the C=64; my first ever computer mods!
40:30: Looking at the PETSCII table, the "POKE 1024, 81" bit confused me, but Wikipedia clarified that: _"The actual character generator ROM used a different set of assignments. For example, to display the characters "@ABC" on screen by directly writing into the screen memory, one would POKE the decimal values 0, 1, 2, and 3 rather than 64, 65, 66, and 67."_
I contacted Karl a few months ago about getting new paper copies of this and he didn't have any left. He sent me a link to the unlocked PDF because I asked nicely. I have pages 37- 42 printed on single sheets of paper (both sides) and laminated it ;-) 11:00 We all make mistakes. Ain't that the truth? 11:40 I think I prefer Simons' BASIC, not sure if I can pin down why 12:06 "That was a weird move". I'm reading the 3 book series on the history of the Commodore by Brian Bagnall and there isn't a page in those books where "That was a weird move" doesn't apply. 21:00 This chart with the op codes on one page has also been really helpful in building standalone 6502 based boards lately. These pages are worth exploring more. 22:30 Love these startup values, now if I just had a chart with ALL of the startup values. I know a lot of the video related ones like $d011, but a list would be nice. 26:43 This is something that keeps me going, and going and then asking it to do things no one had ever thought to ask it to do. It's endless "frontiers". Love it. 27:25 I think I need that human eye upgrade. Do they sell that at the store yet? Can't. See. Those. Tiny. Numbers. 27:55 I have a series of BASIC programs I've used to help remember the edges of the screen to scroll horizontally which work well for this. Which row is next off screen and where they go. Excellent overview Robin. Looking forward to the next book club installment.
I'm currently retyping the anthology into Open Office format. I've managed to maintain the the layout, but it's not easy, especially the tables (ie. CPU Model). I'm about 25% done.
@@MichaelDoornbos I'm dropping several sections though, like COMAL, and Telecomputing, and Clubs (unless someone can point me to updated information). The print is a teeny tiny 6pt on most of the 8½" x 11" (letter) pages. I'm seriously considering on using a larger font better suited to my old eyes.
Transactor was the most valuable subscription I had. I had both the original brown bible and the inner space anthology and wore them both out! Growing up in Northern Ontario we didn't have the luxury of attending club meetings like TPUG. After running up a $2000 phone one month (yes in one month!) I invested in a Bell Canada Datapac account. It was substantially cheaper! Sadly my Transactors, and all my notations(!), are long gone with the sale of my C64 in the late 80s. (One of those unemployment events that forces you to sell everything you own because you just bought a vehicle!)
I have a copy of this book signed by the author as well. I believe the only (officially released) Commodore 8-bit computer it doesn't cover (considering there is a C128 addendum) is the special features of the SuperPET (the normal features are covered by the 8032 sections). Well I suppose it doesn't cover the VIC-1001, MAX or Educator 64 as well, but then we might be splitting hairs.
I have this book! Blast from the past as I probably haven't looked at it in 30+ years! It was a fantastic source of information back in the day as was the Transactor magazine as well.
I have this book (it's bound slightly different - double-wire binding). When I saw this I laughed - it was five feet away. I always kept it close. I also have a copy from online because sometimes I use a swing arm tablet for looking up stuff on 8BC (8-Bit Computers).
I remember checking out datapac again in the early 2000's, it was an X.25 switching network, just looked n bell canada shut it down finally in 2009 according to wikipedia. It wasn't a destination on its own like delphi or compuserve was but a way to dial a local number then connect to remote systems. I don't remember what was still connected to it near the end though.
Can't tell you how many times I wished for something similar to this manual to have in-hand. I ordered the Definitive Guide (by Raeto West) and Mapping the C64 (by Sheldon Leemon) yesterday from lulu publishing, and also the Programmers Reference Guide from amazon (used, but in Good condition). I should be set for a while, and it will be nice not to have to have a load of .pdf files open in the background while I'm working. I don't know, maybe one day I'll grab this one as well.
READY. 10 PRINT "Now I know, why did two wires soldered on to my C=64's back, ended in a microswitch." 11 REM Now I know, that 'leftback' port is called 'USER PORT'. 12 REM Never used, never know whats for 13 PRINT "Now I know!" 20 PRINT "The holy 'RESET' button!" 30 PRINT "COLD START to GND!" 31 REM Memory is NOT destroyed... isn't that warm? 40 PRINT "It didn't work for me, probably the microswitch was dead, and as a kid, I always wondered, what's that mod for?!" 50 PRINT "After 29 years, now I know what was that mod for!" 60 PRINT "THANKS!" 70 PRINT "But now, I don't know, why this mod had never been done to the 'BREADBIN' ?!" 80 PRINT "Simply by factory?" 90 GOTO 80 RUN ... ?OUT OF DATA ERROR IN 80 READY. 0
0:05 "Inner Space Anthology"… never heard of it. Oh wait, it's my go-to reference for everything Commodore! 1:05 That looks like the reprint with the C128 section. I have an original with a metal-wire binding. 6:31 Karl appears to call parentheses "Brackets" as well. 7:29 I'm not sure that the amount of RAM available to BASIC really matters beyond 32K. A BASIC program that big is going to be very awkward to write, given only global variables, and will be slow to run, especially on a machine with slow garbage collection. ua-cam.com/video/eabOVMxn8iw/v-deo.html 7:48 I think the phrase is, "Screw it - ship it!" 8:16 It probably would have helped them to keep the zero-page and system locations as consistent as possible between their different machines, to help software compatibility. 9:54 The 8032 has escape codes as well. 13:54 They wouldn't want to rewrite the Kernal as well, so the Kernal's variable locations would stay the same. 14:50 Looks very "COBOL-y", but I don't recall any of that. Maybe it was only the PET printers that supported these printing formats. 16:25 I'm guessing that's supposed to be "Calc Result". 18:10 By the author of your previous book review. 24:58 Yep. PETs use the shift register for the wave form and a timer of their VIA chip for the frequency to make sound. 35:44 I've been scooped on my own comment! 36:25 The CMD SwiftLink and Turbo 232 use the 6551 chip as well. 36:43 You can also tell by the pins: the C64 chip had Separated Video, /CAS-/RAS Dynamic RAMs, and bus arbitration while the VIC-20 chip had sound and paddles. 37:24 I wonder what percentage of people know what name comes after "trillion". Is the British "long" scale is pretty much dead? 37:53 That's a strange one, considering that Acres are units of area and Rods are units of length. 39:21 The C128 section wasn't in the original Anthology, since I don't think the C128 was even released at the time. This section came from an article in a regular issue of The Transactor.
I loved The Transactor mags! However, because I did not at that time understand anything about assembly or machine language I felt a little intimated. It wasn't the fault of the mag at all, but rather my age and lack of experience. This publication was very much the hardcore magazine of all the Commodore systems and peripherals... Right down to the very nitty gritty of their electrical design and what one can do with them. Perhaps more so, Canadians are proud of our influence on computing history... BTW: Speedscript Ride or Die!
Yes, the Transactor magazines were definitely intimidating to many of us as kids. I believe I was still 11 when I bought the issue with tagline "The Transition to Machine Language" and I revisited the articles in that issue over many years, understanding a bit more each time. Transactor is a proud part of our Canadian Commodore heritage :)
This would certainly help to program. There's also mining other program listings to get subroutines to incorporate into your own program. The old ways. Good memories. Thanks.
30:00 Long forgotten systems that somehow still manage to operate are more real than you might think... Just Google the "DC Phantom Radio Station" for an example. I'm sure there are some computers out there still waiting on the phone to ring after all these decades....
Getting Simon's Basic is easy today. Getting the Super Expander for the C-64 is HARD. Getting the manual is easy, but I'm still trying to get an original cart for my collection. It's my punishment for selling it off when I was a kid. .
"... a telecomputing section, which is good for some laughs..." Back In The Day the free world used one dot two all the way up to nineteen dot two, dial-up MO-DEMs to practice fighting (telecomputed) battles. I'm laughing, but for non-tech reasons. :)
23:23 - Can you demonstrate how to execute code on the 1541? I’ve always wondered if it could be done and how. I know it’d be slow as, getting whatever’s processed into the computer but would a fast load cartridge help? And would it work on an SD2IEC SD card reader drive?
Huh..that makes me think of an odd trick to save space...if your ML program is made up of opcodes that are also codes for typeable characters, set it as a string (or possibly as a REM, though I think that might get tokenized rather than left as a literal, figure out where the string is in memory, then SYS to it to run the ML.
It was not uncommon to have a Comal 80 cartridge for your C64 in Denmark (where Comal was invented in the first place) if you wanted to use the computer to actually learn about programming, and all the C64's in my school had them (back in the mid 80's). It made the machine a much more useful tool for teaching kids about programming than to use basic. I had one myself before I learned assembly language.
Very interesting I still have my books on my commodores including all the service manuals. Seeing books I missed or was this only available in Canada? Interesting to hear you mention Cornwall as I live in the mining county your Cornwall is named after.
As far as I know all Transactor publications were available throughout North America but had limited reach overseas. Very interesting about Cornwall, we do have many towns and cities named after places in the UK.
Hi Robin, if somebody created a program in COMAL on the C64, could every C64 run that program (without a cartridge or extra software to be loaded ? ) I know that it needs to be converted. But was that build in ?
Unfortunately I don't know if COMAL has a compiler to make stand-alone programs and haven't been able to find an answer with a bit of searching. Hopefully someone more knowledgable will see your question and answer. I'll try to make a COMAL episode sometime, but I'll need to do some learning first :)
@@8_Bit XC Basic is probably best if someone is looking for a byte compiled style solution for the Commodore. I’m aware of a modern COMAL 80 Cart project, but I don’t recall seeing a byte compiler. Not a well known one anyway.
I'm going to go through the Pet manuals then Vic20 then C64. I'm learning now, stuff that I so wanted to learn as a kid. 😊📺🌟
This is a most excellent volume. You have an awesome library. Thanks so much for sharing, including your personal and historical insight.
Amazingly comprehensive. All the time I was thinking it really should be a searchable website :)
It kind of is, because the relevant Archive.org page (link in the description above) does have PDF versions online. Sadly, the "PDF with text" does not include the high-resolution images, and the PDF with hi-rez images does not include text. Also, I've just discovered that Evince is ambiguously case-sensitive - this is somewhat of a poor implementation. But at least in principle that PDF is searchable.
@@ropersonline I would love to take the content and make it webby but I am sure it is a legal minefield
wow what an awesome resource... it contains SO MUCH information on even non computer subjects! it's almost like a guide to the modern world or something. incredible.
Nice to see the CCCC users group in there. I met the last surviving member of that group in 2020 and purchased ALL the equipment, disks and books they had and have a decade worth of their monthly news letters. ALOT of interesting stuff.
Btw, i emailed Karl Hildon regarding this and linked him to this video in case he was interested, or didn’t see it yet. I know you mentioned he was a friend, so I’m guessing he might have, but never assume.
The Transactor was awesome!!! I used to read and re-read every issue a half-dozen times. As a teen, it was the first place I saw info on adding a reset and cartridge port switches (so that I could dump them to floppies) to the C=64; my first ever computer mods!
Wow, what a book! And that closer song!!
Great manual - and I had never heard of it. Thank you for the tip!
Wow! "Comprehensive" doesn't even begin to do this book justice. Thanks for bringing it to my attention, Robin!
I understood none of this but i certainly enjoyed watching it love old school computing keep the great videos coming
Wow!!! Incredible book. Thanks for sharing
40:30: Looking at the PETSCII table, the "POKE 1024, 81" bit confused me, but Wikipedia clarified that: _"The actual character generator ROM used a different set of assignments. For example, to display the characters "@ABC" on screen by directly writing into the screen memory, one would POKE the decimal values 0, 1, 2, and 3 rather than 64, 65, 66, and 67."_
I have some of those magazines too. That was my favorite magazine too.
Excellent book . A must have for every commodore 64 fun!!!!
37:02: I bet Adrian's Digital Basement would like this.
Goodness. I had forgotten that resistor color band mnemonic! My dad always replaced the first 'R' with 'ravaged' in our household. @ 35:23
You'll never know when a periodic table of elements comes in handy when programming a Commodore machine!
I contacted Karl a few months ago about getting new paper copies of this and he didn't have any left. He sent me a link to the unlocked PDF because I asked nicely. I have pages 37- 42 printed on single sheets of paper (both sides) and laminated it ;-)
11:00 We all make mistakes. Ain't that the truth?
11:40 I think I prefer Simons' BASIC, not sure if I can pin down why
12:06 "That was a weird move". I'm reading the 3 book series on the history of the Commodore by Brian Bagnall and there isn't a page in those books where "That was a weird move" doesn't apply.
21:00 This chart with the op codes on one page has also been really helpful in building standalone 6502 based boards lately. These pages are worth exploring more.
22:30 Love these startup values, now if I just had a chart with ALL of the startup values. I know a lot of the video related ones like $d011, but a list would be nice.
26:43 This is something that keeps me going, and going and then asking it to do things no one had ever thought to ask it to do. It's endless "frontiers". Love it.
27:25 I think I need that human eye upgrade. Do they sell that at the store yet? Can't. See. Those. Tiny. Numbers.
27:55 I have a series of BASIC programs I've used to help remember the edges of the screen to scroll horizontally which work well for this. Which row is next off screen and where they go.
Excellent overview Robin. Looking forward to the next book club installment.
I'm currently retyping the anthology into Open Office format. I've managed to maintain the the layout, but it's not easy, especially the tables (ie. CPU Model). I'm about 25% done.
@@MattKasdorf neat. I’m an open format fan of pretty much anything
@@MichaelDoornbos I'm dropping several sections though, like COMAL, and Telecomputing, and Clubs (unless someone can point me to updated information).
The print is a teeny tiny 6pt on most of the 8½" x 11" (letter) pages. I'm seriously considering on using a larger font better suited to my old eyes.
@@MattKasdorf yeah I can’t imagine typesetting this thing
Transactor was the most valuable subscription I had. I had both the original brown bible and the inner space anthology and wore them both out!
Growing up in Northern Ontario we didn't have the luxury of attending club meetings like TPUG. After running up a $2000 phone one month (yes in one month!) I invested in a Bell Canada Datapac account. It was substantially cheaper!
Sadly my Transactors, and all my notations(!), are long gone with the sale of my C64 in the late 80s. (One of those unemployment events that forces you to sell everything you own because you just bought a vehicle!)
That was an incredibly interesting video, thanks mate!
I have a copy of this book signed by the author as well. I believe the only (officially released) Commodore 8-bit computer it doesn't cover (considering there is a C128 addendum) is the special features of the SuperPET (the normal features are covered by the 8032 sections). Well I suppose it doesn't cover the VIC-1001, MAX or Educator 64 as well, but then we might be splitting hairs.
I have this book! Blast from the past as I probably haven't looked at it in 30+ years! It was a fantastic source of information back in the day as was the Transactor magazine as well.
dang this cost a lot of work, kudos to Karl Hildon. for putting up with it :-)
I have this book (it's bound slightly different - double-wire binding). When I saw this I laughed - it was five feet away. I always kept it close. I also have a copy from online because sometimes I use a swing arm tablet for looking up stuff on 8BC (8-Bit Computers).
8BC , i got it!😜
I remember checking out datapac again in the early 2000's, it was an X.25 switching network, just looked n bell canada shut it down finally in 2009 according to wikipedia. It wasn't a destination on its own like delphi or compuserve was but a way to dial a local number then connect to remote systems. I don't remember what was still connected to it near the end though.
Can't tell you how many times I wished for something similar to this manual to have in-hand. I ordered the Definitive Guide (by Raeto West) and Mapping the C64 (by Sheldon Leemon) yesterday from lulu publishing, and also the Programmers Reference Guide from amazon (used, but in Good condition). I should be set for a while, and it will be nice not to have to have a load of .pdf files open in the background while I'm working. I don't know, maybe one day I'll grab this one as well.
READY.
10 PRINT "Now I know, why did two wires soldered on to my C=64's back, ended in a microswitch."
11 REM Now I know, that 'leftback' port is called 'USER PORT'.
12 REM Never used, never know whats for
13 PRINT "Now I know!"
20 PRINT "The holy 'RESET' button!"
30 PRINT "COLD START to GND!"
31 REM Memory is NOT destroyed... isn't that warm?
40 PRINT "It didn't work for me, probably the microswitch was dead, and as a kid, I always wondered, what's that mod for?!"
50 PRINT "After 29 years, now I know what was that mod for!"
60 PRINT "THANKS!"
70 PRINT "But now, I don't know, why this mod had never been done to the 'BREADBIN' ?!"
80 PRINT "Simply by factory?"
90 GOTO 80
RUN
...
?OUT OF DATA ERROR IN 80
READY.
0
One of my cats is watching this video with me and she is following your hand go on and off the screen like it's a bird. :) hahah
Man, this book is nuts. I can't believe how much they crammed into it. Have to ask though:
35:24 What the actual?
It took me a minute, but yea. You can't even say that aged poorly. I don't think that could have ever been appropriate.
13:57 COMAL's "STUPID" command 🤣
Had most of the Transactors from '82 to '88 but not the Anthology. Very nice!
0:05 "Inner Space Anthology"… never heard of it. Oh wait, it's my go-to reference for everything Commodore!
1:05 That looks like the reprint with the C128 section. I have an original with a metal-wire binding.
6:31 Karl appears to call parentheses "Brackets" as well.
7:29 I'm not sure that the amount of RAM available to BASIC really matters beyond 32K. A BASIC program that big is going to be very awkward to write, given only global variables, and will be slow to run, especially on a machine with slow garbage collection. ua-cam.com/video/eabOVMxn8iw/v-deo.html
7:48 I think the phrase is, "Screw it - ship it!"
8:16 It probably would have helped them to keep the zero-page and system locations as consistent as possible between their different machines, to help software compatibility.
9:54 The 8032 has escape codes as well.
13:54 They wouldn't want to rewrite the Kernal as well, so the Kernal's variable locations would stay the same.
14:50 Looks very "COBOL-y", but I don't recall any of that. Maybe it was only the PET printers that supported these printing formats.
16:25 I'm guessing that's supposed to be "Calc Result".
18:10 By the author of your previous book review.
24:58 Yep. PETs use the shift register for the wave form and a timer of their VIA chip for the frequency to make sound.
35:44 I've been scooped on my own comment!
36:25 The CMD SwiftLink and Turbo 232 use the 6551 chip as well.
36:43 You can also tell by the pins: the C64 chip had Separated Video, /CAS-/RAS Dynamic RAMs, and bus arbitration while the VIC-20 chip had sound and paddles.
37:24 I wonder what percentage of people know what name comes after "trillion". Is the British "long" scale is pretty much dead?
37:53 That's a strange one, considering that Acres are units of area and Rods are units of length.
39:21 The C128 section wasn't in the original Anthology, since I don't think the C128 was even released at the time. This section came from an article in a regular issue of The Transactor.
I loved The Transactor mags! However, because I did not at that time understand anything about assembly or machine language I felt a little intimated. It wasn't the fault of the mag at all, but rather my age and lack of experience. This publication was very much the hardcore magazine of all the Commodore systems and peripherals... Right down to the very nitty gritty of their electrical design and what one can do with them. Perhaps more so, Canadians are proud of our influence on computing history... BTW: Speedscript Ride or Die!
Yes, the Transactor magazines were definitely intimidating to many of us as kids. I believe I was still 11 when I bought the issue with tagline "The Transition to Machine Language" and I revisited the articles in that issue over many years, understanding a bit more each time. Transactor is a proud part of our Canadian Commodore heritage :)
actually saw the User Group I joined - Scranton Computer Users Group back then. wow... amazing book
Enjoyment of this video spoiled by a pre-roll ad featuring Nigel Farage.
This would certainly help to program. There's also mining other program listings to get subroutines to incorporate into your own program. The old ways. Good memories. Thanks.
30:00 Long forgotten systems that somehow still manage to operate are more real than you might think... Just Google the "DC Phantom Radio Station" for an example.
I'm sure there are some computers out there still waiting on the phone to ring after all these decades....
Cool, thanks for that DC Radio info, I love stuff like that!
38:33: Oh look, all the way up to 106. Of course, these days, we're up to 118 (Oganesson).
Getting Simon's Basic is easy today. Getting the Super Expander for the C-64 is HARD. Getting the manual is easy, but I'm still trying to get an original cart for my collection. It's my punishment for selling it off when I was a kid. .
"... a telecomputing section, which is good for some laughs..."
Back In The Day the free world used one dot two all the way up to nineteen dot two, dial-up MO-DEMs to practice fighting (telecomputed) battles. I'm laughing, but for non-tech reasons. :)
Big wow!
its almost well exxactly like the atari st reference guide i had it was the bible to the st and 68000 chip wonderful stuff
Interesting that it didn't have coverage of the 1001 Disk Drive. I think it was out at the time.
30:40: HSX
23:23 - Can you demonstrate how to execute code on the 1541? I’ve always wondered if it could be done and how. I know it’d be slow as, getting whatever’s processed into the computer but would a fast load cartridge help?
And would it work on an SD2IEC SD card reader drive?
Huh..that makes me think of an odd trick to save space...if your ML program is made up of opcodes that are also codes for typeable characters, set it as a string (or possibly as a REM, though I think that might get tokenized rather than left as a literal, figure out where the string is in memory, then SYS to it to run the ML.
As a meta comment - Transactor reminded me of old Omni covers
It was not uncommon to have a Comal 80 cartridge for your C64 in Denmark (where Comal was invented in the first place) if you wanted to use the computer to actually learn about programming, and all the C64's in my school had them (back in the mid 80's). It made the machine a much more useful tool for teaching kids about programming than to use basic. I had one myself before I learned assembly language.
Very interesting I still have my books on my commodores including all the service manuals. Seeing books I missed or was this only available in Canada?
Interesting to hear you mention Cornwall as I live in the mining county your Cornwall is named after.
As far as I know all Transactor publications were available throughout North America but had limited reach overseas. Very interesting about Cornwall, we do have many towns and cities named after places in the UK.
Hi Robin, if somebody created a program in COMAL on the C64, could every C64 run that program (without a cartridge or extra software to be loaded ? ) I know that it needs to be converted. But was that build in ?
Unfortunately I don't know if COMAL has a compiler to make stand-alone programs and haven't been able to find an answer with a bit of searching. Hopefully someone more knowledgable will see your question and answer. I'll try to make a COMAL episode sometime, but I'll need to do some learning first :)
@@8_Bit XC Basic is probably best if someone is looking for a byte compiled style solution for the Commodore. I’m aware of a modern COMAL 80 Cart project, but I don’t recall seeing a byte compiler. Not a well known one anyway.
Wow! Some might call it shovelware, but I call it a Geek Treasure Trove!!
Face reveal at 38911 subs.
READY.
_