Programming the Commodore 64: the Definitive Guide

Mirk writes "Back in 1985 it was possible to understand the whole computer, from the hardware up through device drivers and the kernel through to the high-level language that came burned into the ROMs (even if it was only Microsoft BASIC). The Reinvigorated Programmer revisits R. C. West's classic and exhaustive book Programming the Commodore 64 and laments the decline of that sort of comprehensive Deep Knowing."

Comments

Want to read Programming the Commodore 64?

[gklinger]

Should anyone wish to download an electronic copy (PDF) of Programming the Commodore 64 by R. C. West they may do so from DLH's Commodore Archive. It's a community supported archive of Commodore-related printed materials (books, magazines, newsletters, manuals etc.) and it could use your support. Enjoy.

Re:Its still possible..

[TheRaven64]

Octocore Core i13 and a half is just a fancy C64 with more CPU instructions, more memory, more peripherals that runs faster

Possible, but nowhere near as easy. I've read most of volume 3A of Intel's architecture reference while doing background reading for my Xen book, but the complete architecture reference is well over 3,000 pages. The GPU reference - if you can get it - is a similar length, and that's before you get to the OS. The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System is 720 pages. It's a good book, but it skips over a lot of details. The copy of the X11 protocol reference that I read was several hundred pages, and it's a few revisions old. The OpenGL reference was a similar length. But now you can do 2D and 3D graphics and, once you've read the C spec (not so bad, only a couple of hundred pages) and spent some time familiarising yourself with your C compiler and standard library you can draw things.

To get the level of understanding that the original poster is talking about, on a modern computer, means reading and remembering around 10,000 pages of reference books, and gaining familiarity with the source code that they mention. And that's just going to give you one CPU architecture and the core bits of the OS.