The Commodore 64 Assembler Workshop is aimed at those of you who have been delving into the delights of programming at machine code level. It is a natural progression from Commodore 64 Assembly Language, but will be invaluable even if you learned assembler and machine code using any of the other relevant books available. It provides a bench full of useful assembly language routines and utilities programs and examines the techniques involved.

The Write Stuff is a collection of word processing software. The main program, BB Writer, is a high productivity, full-featured word processor for the Commodore 64. Although designed to meet the needs of advanced users, BB Writer, when used in "menu mode," is equally suitable for use by children and occasional users. BB Writer allows all essential edit-print-load-save features to be selected from menus. No special keyboard or embedded commands need to be learned. However, as the user gains experience, over 100 advanced features can be selected using keyboard and embedded commands.

BB Talker is the talking version of BB Writer that works with S.A.M., the Software Automatic Mouth. If you have the double-sided version, S.A.M. and BB Talker are both on the backside of the disk. BB Talker is on the single-sided version, but you must have a copy of S.A.M. to use it.

Elite Exchange One BBS (EX1-BBS) by Steven Prothero (Ironfeather - 1988 / 1989) - Here is a quote from the Author in 2021 as found on the BBS Documentary site -  "EX1 BBS Software was sold nationwide for $25 (included all future updates free and instruction booklet), version EX1-185 was released on "qlink" and BBSs as a shareware version. Created in BASIC(blitzed) & ML By Stevyn Prothero aka IronFeather. I took ideas from C-net (like mci commands), ideas from COLOR64, Ivory, etc. I had a "spec" file it loaded first and that contained all the settings, I tried to make everything an "option". This of course confused many people, and made setup a workout. I also had some template files for questionnaires, new user apps, etc. Towards the end i added ANSI translation & was converting "adventure" like games over to work with it. Dam, if I had more tyme i would tweak it even now ;)".

Here is a link to the manual.

After a little more searching, it turns out Steven (IronFeather) still runs a BBS of sorts (A web forum) called the Iron Feather Journal.  

Voice Key v1.0 by Covox,Inc. is a program that works in conjunction with the Voice Master hardware (Also by Covox,inc.) in order to allow you to simulate key presses in various software by using voice commands.  There is some additional software on the disk for use with SpeedScript.

Here is a link to the manual.

Do you have a favorite program that requires various keyboard letters as input? A game or educational or word processor? The object of VOICE KEY is to let you command by voice instead of pressing keys! VOICE KEY will not interfere with most programs (provided they do not use random-access memory "behind" read-only memory). Load VOICE KEY. Attach VOICE MASTER to the rear joy stick port. Then train the computer to the particular command words you want to use and define the keystrokes that you want these words to enter into the computer. Then load in your favorite program and proceed to run it using either keystrokes or command words. Up to 18 words. Each
word can create up to 18 keystrokes including control characters. Complete instructions in manual. Disk is not copy protected. Special instructions for the popular "Speedscript" word processor.

Here is a link to the software.

(Commodore) Money Machine - Issue 03, Vol. 02, No. 02 - Ran across the nice business oriented magazine yesterday over at archive.org.  It appears to be self published by Don Vandeventer with assistance by Paula Vineyard.  

In this issue, there are some great reviews of Flexidraw, Partner 64, Word Writer 3, Bobs Term Pro 128, Fontmaster 128, Word Writer 128, Pro Video CGI and TV*Text.  There are also serveral interesting articles about Amiga Memory Expander, GEOS Problems & Solutions and LT. Kernel Hard Drive to name just a few.

I'd really look forward to finding some more issues of this great magazine that appears to be published using a Commodore 128 and Amiga 1000.

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.

Here is a link to a .TAP image of Ultrakit.

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.