My own brief emulator
FAQ, so kill the most common questions
The Beginners
guide to emulators was provided by Linus Åkerlund. Great stuff,
with a very high level of ambition.
Hardware docs
All reference material you need to program the C64 is to be found at Marko
Mäkelä's c64 server - I have merely linked to his documents.
His library includes, but is by no means limited to these fine documents:
A very complete documentation to the VIC, i.e.
the graphics chip of the C64. It features EVERYTHING you could possibly ask
for, including descriptions on how to perform some of the more complex programming
tricks frequently used in demos. Text mainly by Christian Bauer, the author
of the great emulator Frodo.
The Commodore
64 Super Reference page. Well, the name implies more than the page provides,
but you can find some bits and pieces here. The basic commands, ASCII/screen
codes, a basic tutorial and also some information on how to work with files.
Books
David Holz (White Flame) has some stuff on-line that is "must have",
in paperback format or in files like this. Sometimes the server provides odd
results. If it does, press this
link
Formats is Peter Scheper's (author of the
excellent conversion program 64Copy) contribution to enlightening us about
the structure of the different formats commonly used on the C64 and the emulators.
The text has grown covering more and more, so the overview was slightly lost.
To solve this, Peter split the file into one file for each format description.
What you get here is a ZIP file containing them all.
Project 64 home page This is not an
actual document, but a reference to a vast number of documents. It contains
the docs for games and c64 related books, including the docs for most of the
Commodore devices.
Commodore Knowledge Base - This
is a huge base of Commodore related knowledge made availabe to search in.
If you'd like to code on the native c64 I suggest you have a go on
one of the below listed tools; all FairLight products I might add.
X ass 3.3 + TronMon 2.11 beta 9 - This a development
system you need a REU to take advantage of, but if you have one is the by
far best version of TurboAssembler. TronMon is what really turbocharges the
pack and makes it seeing the competitors in the mirror.
TurboAssembler 5.2 - For the low end systems
without a REU. This is Bacchus' wide-spread TurboAssembler version, which
fixes a lot of it's know quirks (f.ex. where Run/Stop+Restore restarts the
assembler).
TurboAssembler Macro - For the high demand
coder who wants macro support, you here have the version fixed by Bacchus
which fixes a few know quirks. The combination Run/Stop+Restore restarts the
assembler and also you now have a default starting address in case you forget
specifying one so that you don't have to start over again in case you make
this small error.
X-terminator 2 - This is the FairLight
RLE packer+linker used by us crackers and coders. Watchman coded is to rely
on the REU, but could in return make it swell. It replaces the need for the
"load all the parts to memory, save $0801 to $FFFF and then pack it".
This does just about the same but way smarter. It also included a revision
of TronMon in case you want to make some final adjustments to what you loaded
in.
The Turbo Assembler Homepage - The
Style guys did the most advanced versions of TurboAssembler and keep progressing
it further. Please check this page for the documentation, archive and also
the most recent version.
Example code
Some nice fellows do share their code for your enjoyment, and among the more
skilled coders we surely find Elysium from Poland. Take a look at what you can
get from here:
Another piece is the impressive "C64 ML tutorial" pack. It contains
many popular tutorials like Coder's World, Scibax, Venom, Puterman's, Cruzer's,
Tnd's, Bonker's, C= hacking, Go64 and many more. You can also find here every
technical document related to C= hardware and coding that you can imagine, stuff
ranging from magazine articles to complete books. Musician wannabes will also
be pleased to find stuff about composing music for the awsome Sid.