PETSCII News · THE MACHINES
A real BASIC, and a real 1541 disk that is yours
Type a program and it runs. Save it and it goes onto a genuine .d64 disk image you can take to a real 64.
The 64 on The Machines is not a picture of a 64. Type 10 PRINT "HELLO" and 20 GOTO 10, then RUN, and it runs until you press RUN/STOP. Underneath is a BASIC V2 interpreter written for this site: the same keywords, the same error messages, the same way of squeezing what you type into tokens. PRINT, INPUT and GET, DATA and READ, and POKE to change the border colour, all of it.
Drive 8
Next to the machine stands a 1541. LOAD "$",8 and LIST shows its directory; SAVE "HELLO",8 writes your program to it. The disk is a real .d64 image, laid out track by track the way a 1541 lays one out, with the directory and the block map where they belong. Members keep their disk on their account; visitors keep theirs in the browser.
Take It Home
Download the disk from the drive, put it on an SD card or write it to a floppy, and your program loads on a real Commodore 64. Upload a .d64 from home and it is in the drive here.
The Command Channel
OPEN 15,8,15 talks to the drive the old way: scratch a file, rename one, read the drive's status. DS$ and ST tell you how it went.