8-Bit Book Club: Mapping the Commodore 64

Continuing on with the "Book Club" series, it's another of my favourite C64 books. Let's take a tour of the Commodore 64 with this excellent memory map.

To support 8-Bit Show And Tell:

Index
0:00 Intro
2:25 Comparing the two versions
4:08 Foreword
6:25 What Is a Memory Map?
9:05 Introduction
11:07 Chapter 1: Page 0
20:57 Chapter 2: Page 1
21:49 Chapter 3: Pages 2 & 3: BASIC and Kernal Working Storage
24:14 Chapter 4: 1K to 40K: Screen Memory, Sprite Pointers, and BASIC Program Text
25:52 Chapter 5: 8K BASIC ROM and 4K Free RAM
27:42 Chapter 6: VIC-II, SID, I/O Devices, Color RAM, and Character ROM
37:01 Chapter 7: 8K Operating System Kernal ROM
40:57 Chapter 8: GEOS
42:30 Appendices
44:17 Thanks to my patrons!

[TheStuffMade]

Today I wish I had kept all my old C64 stuff instead of giving it away. I spend many hours with this book, didn't understand all of it back then, but it was amazing to have all this information in one book. People often forget we couldn't just google things back then.

[DavidRomigJr]

I bought the Commodore 64 Personal Computer Programmer’s Reference Guide when I was young. It was a white non-binder book and it was awesome. It came with a fold out schematic of the C64. I read it a lot. Over the years, the pages began to fall out, and my wife finally through it out without telling because “it was falling apart”. I
wish I still had it.

[LanceHall]

Commodore Book Club. It looks like the author is still alive. You could interview him or do an anything Commodore discussion.

[MK-gemh]

I used to work for Sheldon Leemon! He was co-owner of a couple of Commodore-based computer stores here in the Detroit area called Slipped Disk. One was in Sterling Heights. I can't remember where the other location was. When I was a teenager, he paid me to do some stuff on the Amiga. The only thing I remember him having me do was copying a bunch of disks. He was a big ham-radio guy as well.

[jondorthebrinkinator]

After rewatching this for the umpteenth time, I just now noticed that the foreword at 5:20 mentions Dan Heeb's Toolkit books that you mentioned in a later video slipped under your radar. Talk about hidden in plain sight. :)

[DPDK]

This book was probably the most coffee stained book in my collection. It rarely found it's way to it's resting place on my book shelf, and I admit to my computer "nerdness" that this book was usually my bed time reading. That habit was actually the cause for some sleepless nights because I would read something that sparked an idea that I had to get out of bed and try out what ever it was. My other, well "dog eared" book of choice was Compute's Programming the Commodore 64, The Definitive Guide.
By the way, Robin, snow makes an excellent hand cleaner ... it's cold as all heck, but that's why it works.
P.S. Your editing skills have greatly improved - very sly and ALMOST unnoticeable.

[NeilRoy]

My favourite trick was relocating where in RAM the PRINT command printed to, and then literally printing sounds and sprites into memory, rather than a slower reading and poking data one byte at a time. You just printed the characters that represented the numbers you wanted in that RAM location sequentially, understanding which RAM locations did what. I recall having a program where you could choose various sound effects just for fun, and there were no POKEs to set the sound, just one to redirect the PRINT to the start of SID memory, then a print command with a bunch of random characters that made the sound effect. It was a really and effective way to get a block of numbers into memory fast.

I owned the Programmer's Reference Guide and loved it.

[yruqqey]

A list like that list of BASIC function entry points would have saved me a ton of time when I wrote my extension to BASIC 7. I had the reference guide for the c128 was not aware of the equivalent “mapping” book for the C128 at the time. I manually looked at the vector table for the various BASIC 7 tokens and manually disassembled the code it pointed at. I was able to borrow a lot of cool circle and line routine logic for creating hi-res 640x200 mode commands. It was terribly slow to go through the weird VDC chip ports to access that video RAM, but I eventually got it done :)

[ryancraig]

Good ol' Compute! Magazines and books. That brings back some memories.

[vcv]

While the SID gets so much attention I always found the VIC-II so fascinating, and later learning it was designed by one person (Charpentier) in a few months impressed me even more. Yannes saying the filter was a little unfinished (my words) didn't take anything away from their accomplishment in a very short design cycle. IEEE Spectrum, March 85. Commodore 64 Design Case History.

[baardbi]

I love these book videos almost just as much as the assembly videos. I bought two Commodore books yesterday: "Programmering med Commodore Basic" (a norwegian book) and "Simons' Basic - 114 Additional Programming Commands". Finally I'll get some use out of my Simons' Basic cart.

[viJ]

I loved this book. I bought it new one summer as a teenager, in a bookstore we stopped at during vacation. We were visiting all these historic spots on the east coast, but I couldn't wait to be done with each so that I could get back in the car and continue poring over Mapping The Commodore 64. It really helped me make sense of a lot of the kernal calls I had seen in programs I was still hand disassembling (thanks to the Reference Guide) at that time.

[alerey]

On a memory oriented cpu like the 6510 (and all of the Motorola's 68xx family) this book is an essential reading; this also explains the heavy use of the BASIC POKE commands to not only fill the memory with user data but for controlling many I/O aspects and modes of the C64

[Washu]

I found that a good text book plus a knowledgeable teacher for lectures and tutorials/directed study is the best way for me to learn.

[TeslaRangerNY]

I decompiled the BASIC and KERNAL routines *by hand* back in school (1990). Could have used this book. I was planning to write my own double-precision floating point math routines, but I never got around to it. I lost the notebook soon after I was finished, so *that* was time well spent (sarcasm). I *did* learn a lot by doing it, so it wasn't a complete waste.

[setSCEtoAUX]

19:54 Hello, C3PO! I guess it's a capital "o" rather than a zero, but I still think it's fun. :) Also love the Leonard Cohen -esque credits tune.

[fcycles]

I remember buying "mapping the commodore 64" when I did not understand english but needed it to improve my assembly language skills! Totally worth it...

[svenpetersen]

Those Mapping the... books are cool. I have downloaded a version of Mapping the VIC from archive, too. It was very useful, when I wrote my first VIC-20 machine language program in almost 40 years :-))) It has a feature, that the C64 book does not. It marks memory locations in the zero page, that might have some function, but also be available as user memory.

[eightsprites]

Cool, I got the older book, didn’t know there was a new revision. Guess 34 years later is better then not at all ;)

[EviesRevue]

This is my favorite Commodore book. Probably wouldn't be a BackBit without it.