Some Assembly Required
The GEOS operating system managed to clone the Macintosh GUI on the Commodore 64, a computer with an 8 bit CPU and 64 KB of RAM. Based on Maciej Witkowiak's work, I created a reverse-engineered source version of the C64 GEOS 2.0 KERNAL for the cc65 compiler suite:
Major GEOS applications on the Commodore 64 protect themselves from unauthorized duplication by keying themselves to the operating system's serial number. To avoid tampering with this mechanism, the system contains some elaborate traps, which will be discussed in this article.
In mid-1990, the floppy disk of special issue 55 of the German Commodore 64 magazine "64'er" contained the "Amica Paint" graphics program – which was broken beyond usefulness. I'll describe what went wrong.
There are many MOS 6502 cross-assemblers available. Here’s a new one. Or actually a very old one. “Macross”, a very powerful 6502 macro assembler, which was used to create Habitat, Maniac Mansion and Zak McKracken, was developed between 1984 and 1987 at Lucasfilm Ltd. and is now Open Source (MIT license):
Microsoft BASIC for 6502 exists digitally in source form – the older version of the Intel 8080 CPU only exists on paper though: as a printout in the archives of Harvard University. Some snippets of the code are public though:
Here’s the challenge: Take code that you wrote some 20 years ago in an obsolete programming language for an obsolete platform, make it run on a modern system (without emulation!)… and actually make it useful!
If you have developed applications for the Commodore 64 in the 80s or 90s, chances are you still have your old floppy disk with the original assembly sources. If you have used the VisAss or
F8 AssBlaster assemblers, you can use a new command line tool I wrote to convert the encoded binary files into ASCII, so they can be published or you can continue development using modern tools like cc65.
The Final Cartridge III was one of the major multi-function extension cartridges for the Commodore 64. It contained BASIC extensions, floppy and tape speeders, centronics printer support, screen editor extensions including F-key shortcuts, a monitor, a freezer – and a GEOS-like windowing system called “Desktop”. In all this, the FC3 integrated seamlessly with the look-and-feel of the stock Commodore 64: It did not change anything (same screen colors and banner!), it only extended functionality in consistent ways.
“The Wave” is a Web Browser for GEOS (with the Wheels extension) on C64/C128 machines with a SuperCPU and a RAM extension.
The Commodore 64 ROM has been subject to immense reverse engineering. Many commented disassemblies were published over the decades, scattered over different media such as books, magazines, disks, and later, the internet – and there are even some commentaries that apply to the C64 ROM, but were written with other systems in mind that shared Microsoft’s BASIC interpreter.
On my quest of collecting as many commentaries on the Commodore 64 ROM at pagetable.com/c64rom, we have gathered Lee Davison’s excellent commentary, the German de facto standard by Data Becker, and an adaptation of Bob Sander-Cederlof’s Apple II ROM commentary, all in the same cross-referenced HTML format.
This is the original 1978 source code of Microsoft BASIC for 6502 with all original comments, documentation and easter eggs:
In our series about C64 ROM commentaries (English version by Lee Davison, German version by Data Becker), I’m now presenting a most unusual C64 ROM commentary – based on a commented disassembly of the Apple II ROM.
After last week’s German C64 ROM disassembly from the “64 intern” book, I have now also converted Lee Davison’s commented disassembly into the same format.
Whenever I need to look up some code in the ROM of the Commodore 64, I have the choice of the commented disassembly by Marko Mäkelä, the one by Ninja/The Dreams, or the one by Lee Davison – or I can just use my paper copy of “Das neue Commodore-64-intern-Buch“, an excellent line-by-line commentary in German.
Feiler, Jesse.
Rhapsody Developer’s Guide.
Boston: AP Professional, 1997.
ISBN 0-12-251334-7
(528 pages, 13.3 MB PDF)
by James Abbatiello
by Julien Oster, reprinted with permission.
by Mike Pall, published with permission.
