Commodore Free 17/Commodore_Free_Issue_17_2008_Commodore_Computer_Club.d64/t.b guide 2.2

Text File | 2023-02-26 | 12KB | 387 lines

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In the Beginning
By Lord Ronin from Q-Link

Chapter 2, Section 2

Another thing that might toss you a
curve in what I wrote above for the
screen. The screen is white and the
words are in black. Or some other form
of colour, and the words may not say
exactly the same thing as I wrote.
Don't worry too much. Some hackers
burned their own main chips. Adding
their colour scheme and maybe their
own names. I have seen it, but can't
tell you how it was done with the chip
burner. OK there is another major thing
that you may see and if you do, then
you are very blessed. You will also
have been wondering why I didn't
mention that little toggle switch on
your C=64. Well if you see the words
"JIFFY DOS" on that starting screen.
You have the special replacement chip
installed. I'd rather save that till
later on, in the parts about all the
additive things for the C=. The
commands for things that I will
shortly present, work with the jiffy
dos chip. A great chip, I know, as
almost all of my Commodore items have
it installed. Anyway, for you that
little toggle switch will turn the
chip on and off. For now don't worry
about it, we will over that later.
Will tell you that it is going to
shorten your loading time one hell of
a lot.

Saying that the system comes on, and
that you have a disk drive, and that
you have some disks. Which is the
general way that people have gained
these 2nd hand collections. I know
that you want to see what this machine
does before I go over the users manual.
OK I did the same thing. So pick a
disk, any disk at all. Slip it in the
drive, lable side up. <actually it
reads the bottom side of the disk>
Make certain that it is in securely.
Lock it in place and .... Save for
possibly the drive making a little bit
of noise nothing happens.

Time to start learning the system. So
you have to tell the drive to do
something. Yeah I said the drive, and
not the disk. You see unlike the other
systems. We use a smart drive. That
means to say that there is a micro
processor in the drive. We talk to it,
and not the OS on the disk. OK there
really isn't an OS <Operating System>
on the disk as you may understand it.
On that note, we use GCR formatting,
the other system that we call the
"heretic" uses MFM. Nope not a clue as
to what that means, and it is
unimportant for us at this moment.
Suffice to say in our format, well
that 1.44megger disk I mentioned, it
is 1.6megs for us.

Type the following on your keyboard.
It should be displayed on the screen.

 LOAD"$",8

after that, press the RETURN key.

 Screen should say a few things. The
light should flash rapidly on the
drive. When that is all done, in a few
seconds. The cursor, that is that
solid box, will be flashing and it is
time to type in the following.

 LIST

and then press RETURN.

All works well, and you have a bunch
of stuff that scrolls up the screen.
Stuff that looks odd and weird to you.
Looked that way to me and I had no
idea what was going to happen. Below I
am placing an example. That we well
lightly discuss. After that, I will
cover what may have gone, or looked
like it went wrong.


0"THE VILLAGE BBS   "VC 2A

90 "LOST CAT 71"     SEQ
100"LOST CAT 72"     SEQ
40 "EDSTAR II"       PRG

434 BLOCKS FREE

Well it will look a bit like that.
Could be shorter and could be longer.
Besides, I am not sure how you are
reading this, so the format may not be
exact. Starting at the top. That 0
means that it was written or read on
device 0. This is hang over from the
days of multiple drives on one device
number. Don't worry about it. "THE
VILLAGE BBS" is the name of the disk.
That is what I called it when I
formatted it. At this point I should
mention that in normal operation it
will read in upper case. I have more to
say on the case part when we go to the
manual information. That "VC" is the ID
code that I create for the disk during
formatting. The drive/computer uses
this for the map of the disk. Lets
leave it at that point for now. "2A"
means it was done on a 1541, or similar
disk drive.

That may be a little different for
you. But now we come to the really big
difference. On the next line we have
for the first one "90", that is the
number of blocks that the file takes.
Then there is the name that I gave the
file. Ah but that is followed by the
"SEQ". Short for Sequential. Avoiding
the tech gear head stuff. Think of it
as a text file. In the illustration,
that is what it is exactly. But these
SEQ files are more than that, and not
really needed to explain more at this
stage. OK lets move to "EDSTAR II".
That is the name of the "PRG" that I
use for most of my editorial writing.
In fact it is what I am using to write
this series. But it is listed as the
PRG, or Programme file type.

At the bottom it tells us how many
blocks are free on the disk. I didn't
know of any form of measurement. So I
just accepted this at face value as
the way it is done. You may be coming
from another from another style of
measurements. Well the C= mainly uses
blocks. But some users also measure in
KB. Personally I don't. However you
may need a conversion. So in rough
terms, 4 blocks = 1KB. Right that
seems too small to do anything. Well
lets talk about that text file of 90
blocks. When printed out it will be
around 8-10 pages of text. See we can
do more in less. That is one of the
parts of interest to people in the C=
community. Like I said early, need to
relearn about computers. But that is
why you are reading this rambling
series. <BG>

 So now then, what if you didn't see
anything like the above on the screen?
Well there are a few reasons for that,
and you will run across them over
time. First thing is that there was a
rattle, a grunt and then nothing on
the screen. Most of the time this
means that the disk isn't formatted.
If you have jiffy dos on your C=.
Press the  key and then return. You
will see something like 74,drive not
ready,00,00. For those that don't have
jiffy dos. We aren't going to do the
long type in thing to see the error.
At this time, I'll quickly add.
Under the above conditions you have an
unformatted disk. Right, it just came
out of an official company box, and
the box says that it is ibm formatted.
That is true, it is ibm formatted, it
isn't CBM formatted. Remember we use a
different formatting system. And no
not at this time am I going to tell
you how to format the disk. Not till I
have covered some other things. As you
can destroy a working disk of data, at
this stage. I know, did it several
times myself when I started.

Here is a something that I must toss
in at this stage. Your disk should
read, ah that is for the blank ones,
that it is a "double sided, double
density" disk. That might be written
as "DS/DD", or even "DD/DS". Do not
try High Density disks, "HD". Do not
use Single Density disks, "SD". HD
will make your system grunt and
rattle. But won't do a thing for you.
SD ones, will do the same rattle
stuff, but also screw your head up on
the drive. Takes a lot to put it back
in place. So speaketh the voice of
painful experience.

Look at the drive and if that
generally green light, is flashing at
a regular rate. There is a problem.
I'll deal with some of this in a
while. But here we are going to deal
with nothing shown  in a directory, or
some weird stuff on the directory.
Before going into anymore disk things

 I know that you aren't ready to do
this yet. Yet you need to know this
point. An experienced programmer can
bugger up the directory. Yes he can do
it intentionally. You may see a disk
with a name, and an ID code, and it
tells you that the disk has 664 blocks
free. If this seems to be a factory
disk, I mean one that has a fancy
lable on it from a company. Your disk
is suspect. No not that it is bad.
That they have hidden the directory.
The programmes on the disk may still
work fine. You just can't see them in
this way. Really you can't tell till
you try to load a programme. Hang in
there we will get to that part.

 If all you see is a 0, and not all
the time does that show. Plus what at
first glance looks like a castle
tower, or the rook in a chess set. You
have a corrupted disk 99.99% of the
time. Actually that rook looking thing
is the quote mark in reverse video.
This happens for several reasons.
Mainly a bad to incomplete format of
the disk. Like what happens if you
yank the disk out before it is
finished formatting. Yeah I've done
that as well.

Another freaky common one is the size
of the file being like 1328 or some
other fantastically high number. Since
the 1541 disk is only 664 blocks. That
can't be right and it isn't. I have
seen that mostly in decompressing some
files. Which didn't decompress right

OK I was just reminded that there may
be some readers that have downloaded
files for the C=64 from Websites. You
may want to put them on disk and start
playing with them. Sorry guys, ya just
gotta wait. What you have is probably
a .D64 extension on the file name.
That is made for use with the
emulators. Length of the file for one
side of a 1541 disk is 689 blocks.
Ain't gonna fit, and even if you put
it on a 1571 disk.

File won't run in the .D64 format.
BUT! We have tools to make it work for
you. Another thing to talk about in
the series. Love to tell you that was
a ploy to expand on the fact that
there is a mess of things on the Inet
for the C=. Pushing the greatness of
the C=. But my dear little Vixen,
reminded me about the DL problems we
have dealt with in the users group.
OK one last thing that you may see on
a disk in the directory. Won't see it
very often. I present it just to show
some of what people have done with the
C=. The directory can show up in
coloured text. Don't know how that is
done. One users group was talking
about it and did it on their disks. OK
that was the penultimate last thing. I
just flashed on one that is a freak
out for the beginner and an irritant
to others. You go for a listing of the
directory. You don't get one, as the
computer suddenly starts to load the
programme. Can't exactly remember how
that is done. Though I did it a few
years ago. Basically speaking it is in
the ID code and some simple tricks, so
that when the directory is read. The
LOAD command is executed for the first
programme on the disk.

Well since I don't know what disk you
used. Guess it is time to do a little
more on file types. PRG and SEQ we
touched upon. Now for USR, this stands
for USeR file. Simple and not fully
accurate, it is a file type that is
user defined. Don't worry about it
right now. You will see a lot of these
in using the prg Geos. The next one to
talk about is REL. Standing for a
RELative file. Another one not to
worry about just yet. Not very common.
Most of the time this file is used to
create a form of list. Lets leave it
at that for now. Last one to mention
is the DEL file.

As you may surmise this is for
DELeted. Exactly what this is, I don't
know. Seen it in a few places. May be
a special thing for another level of
Basic for the C=. I have only made
them with one programme. Which was a
1581 directory manipulator. Doesn't
seem to do anything that I can find
out. So we won't worry about it.
That taken care of, there is one other
thing to add to the directory listing.
Symbols on the directory. Like in the
below.

93 "BEGINNING 1"    SEQ<
0 "KITTY BOX"      SEQ*

 That < symbol means that the file is
locked. You can't scratch it. Need a
tool, or the programming lines to type
in to unlock the file. Many Geos files
will have that < on the line. OK then
we have the *  symbol. You can see
that the size of the file is 0. This
is called a splat file. It isn't
really there, most of the time.
Specifically it means that the file
was opened for the copy but it wasn't
closed. There are ways to close it,
but for me I just delete the file and
try again.

OK I know that you want to see what is
on the disk. Before we go into the
manual of the C=64. So I will tell you
how to load a file, and what you may
find. Now then the traditional way to
load a programme. Right a PRG, that is
the only thing that you can load <at
this point in time>. So below is what
you type on the screen.

LOAD"0:*",8,1
press RETURN

 OK this is the one that I use the
most. Actually it is to load a ML <we
will get to that> prg. But it works
for a BASIC one as well, most of the
time. Have to explain that more in the
next session. Out of space again.