If a COMMODORE 64 dies after the warranty expires the owner has the option of finding a local repair shop or sending it off to Commodore.

Another option and the subject of this manual is fixing it yourself. How useful the tips found here will be depends on your electronics experience and resources. Even the most  experienced technician can save a lot of time with repair history on a machine he has not worked on before. On the other extreme, some people may have great difficulty with the simplest repairs. Where you fit will determine how far you want to troubleshoot. This manual will be of use to electronic repair centers by bypassing some of the learning curve that goes with taking on any new line of equipment, in this case the Commodore 64.

Ultrakit - A Programmer's Toolkit by Zach Townsend (Alpha Omega, 1986) - ULTRAKIT adds nearly 30 commands to the standard Commodore Basic, for use in developing your own  programs. It includes commands for debugging BASIC programs, for listing to the printer, for altering and checking blocks of memory, as well as a fully-fledged multicolour Character Editor and Designer.

This archive contains a .TAP file instead of a .D64.  I was unable to convert it using FinalTAP because it isn't a BASIC program and has a non-standard loader.  You can easily use this in CCS64 or the VICE emulator.  Thanks to Green_Bert over at the Lemon64 forum for sharing this and the manual.

ULTRAKIT adds nearly 30 commands to the standard Commodore Basic, for use in developing your own programs. It includes commands for debugging BASIC programs, for listing to the printer, for altering and checking blocks of memory, as well as a fully-fledged multicolour Character Editor and Designer.

FontPack Plus expands your use of GEOS by giving you a wider choice of fonts from which to select. FontPack Plus contains a variety of fonts for use with many GEOS applications. The fonts in FontPack Plus - 53 in all - range from a wide selection of alphabet styles to special characters, such as faces and astrological symbols.

CBM Filefinder 1.0 by AEG software (2009) - This utility is one of my go to programs when I'm trying to find a file with a particular filename or even a partial filename that could be somewhere inside of 100,000+ .D64 images.  You can search through many different disk image formats and even search directories recursively.  The only issue I've found with this utility is that it has trouble when the full path to a file is quite long.

Paint Magic by Mark Riley (1984) - I was doing some data recovery tonight on a batch of disks I got many years ago with a Commodore 64 and ran across a couple Paint Magic disks.  One of the disks appears to be a bunch of custom art by a person named Joe.  So if your name is Joe and you used Paint Magic back in the day, this might be your handy work.

As a hint to anyone desperate to get data off a dirty mildew covered floppy; carefully cut the top of the disk open, gently pull the floppy out of the sleeve, and clean it with 70% rubbing alchohol with a drop of dish detergent mixed in using a soft cloth. Find a new or at least clean donor disk that you can slide the cleaned floppy back into. You'd be surprised at how often this works.

P.S. - don't forget to clean the heads of the floppy drive you used the disk in before revocery.  Use the same 70% alchohol with a Q-tip.

Merlin 128 is an extremely powerful, comprehensive Macro Assembler system for the Commodore 128 computer. It consists of four main modules and numerous auxiliary and utility programs which comprise one of the most complete assembler systems available for any personal computer.

You can find the Merlin 128 manual here.

Buttermort by Jim Butterfield for the Commodore VIC20 - Thank you Bruce Thomas for tracking down this program!  Although "Buttermort" isn't the official name, this is the name I found it under when I was reading the 1983 Commodore Computer Club newsletter where I ran across it.  Bruce found this program on a .D64 disk image in a TPUG (Toronto Pet Users Group) CD compilation under the name "MORTGAGE.Z".

Scrapwriter 64 by Scrap of GENESIS*PROJECT (Released December 2022) - This is a really cool noter that uses 5 pixel width characters to display 64 characters per line.  There is built-in help in editor mode and some extra graphics symbols in the character set to create logos and such.  You can put 26 pages of text into a single note!  Hope to see some people using this nice new noter.

Original source is csdb.dk

Joe's 2nd Book for the C64 by Joseph E. Gordon - This book is a collection of tips, reviews and type-in programs from various sources.  I'm not so sure this should be considered a book in the traditional sense because what it covers is so broad and really not in much depth.  It seems more like a diary of things Joe has worked on or played with since his 1st book.  All the same, it has some good information and references some interesting and useful software.

Here's a link to Joe's First Book for the C64

HomeWord was a word processing program by Sierra-Online released in 1983.  I don't think this is the full manual, but it sure does help to use the program.  Thanks to one of our visitors for pointing out this could be found on archive.org.

Here's a link to the Commodore 64 HomeWord program if anyone's interested in giving it a spin.

This is an archive of the Centipede 128 BBS website found at https://snowpig.org/centipede/ and created by Mike Martin. This website contains the last publicly released version of Centipede BBS and all of the additional games, networking, documentation and updates.  Because some of the files don't have associated MIME types, browsers would try to download them as text, so I took the liberty of putting the files inside .zip's so they download properly.  I've updated the links, so this site should be fully browseable offline.

If you'd like to check out the original website maintained by the Centipede 128 creator, Adam Fanello of BugSoft, you can find it HERE.  You can also find an archive of that website HERE.

One of our visitors contacted me a couple days ago to let me know that we don't have an archive of the amazing Commodore 128 BBS called Centipede by Adam Fanello of BugSoft.  With the kindly provided website links that are still functional, I started to work on gathering information and quickly realized there is a lot of details to putting all the pieces together.  Instead of tackeling this all at once and trying to get everything into a single archve, I've decided to break this into pieces.  The first piece to this is a complete archive of the still existing and original Centipede 128 BBS website.  With this archive extracted, you should be able to double click the index.html file in the root directory and surf the compelete site, including downloadable files locally (without an internet connection).  Although you can get Centipede Lite and Updates to the Centipede BBS from this archive, it is not the full BBS as released to the public at a later date.  An archive of https://snowpig.org/centipede/ which contains the most up-to-date and complete release of Centipede 128 BBS can be found HERE.

Denise 1.1.3.1 (released June 27th, 2022) is a cycle accurate and platform independent Commodore 64 / Amiga (not yet) emulator.  Denise supports REU, GeoRam, EasyFlash, EasyFlash³, Gmod2, Retro Replay, Action Replay, Final Cartridge, Light Guns/Pens, GunStick, Mouse 1351, Mouse Neos, Paddles.

Included in this archive is versions for Windows 32 & 64 bit, Linux & Mac OSX. You can find the latest release and previous releases >here<, and you can find the source code repository >here<.

See the detailed description for the change log.

DraCopy 1.3doj by Draco and others (Released June 7th, 2022) - Excellent full featured disk utility for dealing with files and disks.  DraCopy uses kernel I/O routines, so is compatible with most storage devices including CMD hard Drives and SD2IEC devices.  Also has suppot for .d64, .d71 and .d81 disk images.  Additionally, there is a specific build in this archive that supports RAM expansion units.  This archive includes versions of DraCopy and DraBrowse for the Commodore 64, Commodore 128, Commodore Plus4 and Commodore PET computers (with both 40 and 80 column versions)

The lastest versions, along with source code and documentation can be found HERE. 

TopDesk 64 v5.0 Release .01 (October 17th, 2021) by "TD64-Friends" - TopDesk is a replacement DeskTop for GEOS running the MegaPatch 3.3 (Release 6 or newer) updates.  There are versions for both the Commodore 64 and Commodore 128 including builds for German, Spanish and English. I haven't used this extensively, but I like what I've seen so far.  

1541U RTC by Torsten Kracke (Released December 12th, 2017) - This is a very handy GEOS Auto-Exec utility that will read the real-time clock on a 1541 Ultimate II / II+ or Ultimate 64 and set the time in GEOS during boot-up.  For this to work, you need to have v3.1a or newer firmware.  I tested this on an Ultimate 64 with firmware 3.10a, so I assume anything in between will work. 

Original source for this utility was www.tokra.de which was discovered from a Facebook post in the Ultimate 64 group.

GEOS Configure 2.1.1 Release 3 by Paul Murdaugh, released (June 20th, 2021) - This .D81 disk image contains four new Configure files that you can use to replace the original Configure on your GEOS 2.0 disk.  Two of the files are for the Commodore 128, and two for the Commodore 64.  The files named CONFIGUREr and 128 CONFIGUREr should be used with geoRAM expansions, and the ones without the "r" should be used with REU's like the 1764, 1750.  Here is a summary of the new features as written by Paul on this Facebook post:

GEOS FIxes from latest original configure.

REU Support up to 16MB.

RAM 1581 drive bug is fixed. Bug caused "auto copy" to corrupt the REU 1581 ram drive.

DMA option and RBOOT option were backwards. Setting DMA transfers on turned on rboot and turning on rboot activated DMA option. If both were active you would never notice a problem. Fixed to behave as it should.

GEORAM Fixes.

GEORAM support up to 4MB.

RAM 1581 drive bug fixed. (same bug as above).

Was Googling for some instructions on TBoard Painter and went down a rabbit hole.  I found this interesting article from "Replay - The Polish Journal of Game Studies" by Markku Reunanen, Tero Helkkinen and Anders Carlsson.  I'm not sure if it's OK to re-distribute, so if it isn't, someone please tell me and I'll remove it.  I believe the official source for this is HERE for those interested.  Here is an Abstract:

PETSCII is the built-in character set used on 8-bit Commodore computers, such as the PET, C-64 and Plus/4. The character set and the BASIC environment provided an entry point to rudimentary graphic editing for a generation of hobbyists. Over the years PETSCII has been used for a variety of creative purposes: for example games, demos, telecommunications, videos, books and fine art have been created using the graphical symbols. Through the analysis of existing art works and our own hands-on project – a graphics editor – we dig deeper into the specific properties of the character set. In this article we show how the fixed symbols set the frame for what is possible and how, on the other hand, they provide grounds for creative experimentation, display of skill and recognizable styles.

TBoard Painter v1.1 Pro by TAO/Triad - Excellent PETSCII editor that appears to be the third re-write as stated in the scroller, because the first two floppies with the application were de-magnitized,  as a result, the program was improved upon each time and... Wahala, we now have this nice Pro version that is especially nice for C*Base BBS owners because it has a "filter first byte" mode (C= + W).  Absolutely no clue what that means, but it's what the scroller says.  Now go forth and create!

Please don't judge this program from the screenshots.  It apparently doesn't initialize screen memory when it starts, so its populated with (random?) screen garbage. 

JiffyMON/64 is a unique and powerful machine language monitor for Commodore 64 and 128 (in 64 mode) computers equipped with the JiffyDOS speed-enhancement ROMs. Like other machine language monitors, JiffyMON lets you inspect and modify individual bytes in your computer's memory; assemble, disassemble, and execute 6510 assembler code programs; and also provides a number of features which assist in debugging and writing assembly language programs.

This fully re-typed and improved manual came from the excellent slark.me/c64 website.  Please visit them and check out the other fine reference material

I forgot I made this a couple years back, but glad I found it!  This is a cheat sheet for WinVice 3.5 with a handy keyboard reference when using the positional mode.  It also has JiffyDOS v6.01 quick reference, along with the full command set, CBM Command hotkeys, GEOS DeskTop shortcuts and GeoWrite Shortcuts.  

Mailing List by the NorthWest users group of California - Pretty straight forward label making software for the Commodore 64.  This has all the features you'd need to make labels for that old school, dot-matrix printed newsletter you've been thinking of doing over the last couple years.  So quit sitting around thinking about it and download this handy utility and get writing!

This archive includes the full NorthWest Starter Kit.  There are some other utilities / programs you might find useful on it.

BASIC Primer for the Commodore 64 by the NorthWest group of California - Although this is titled as an introduction to BASIC programming, it doesn't lean towards the technical side of things.  I would consider this more of an introduction to the Commodore 64 and the 1541 Disk Drive along with some commands you would use from BASIC to control your computer.

This archive includes the full NorthWest Starter Kit.  There are some other utilities / programs you might find useful on it.

The Machine Language Tutor by the NorthWest group of California - I'm not a ML programmer, but if I wanted to get started, I would definetly give this intro to 6502 program some serious attention.  This program is really cool in how it walks you through all the various machine language instructions, and shows you in simple animations how the bits in the CPU registers and memory locations update as the code executes.  This one is worth looking at, even if your just curious about ML and don't really want to learn to program in it.

This archive includes the full NorthWest Starter Kit.  There are some other utilities / programs you might find useful on it.