Jim Butterfield's 1986 Computer Diary - Commodore Reference Diary 

I say some form of this every time someone posts a video mentioning Jim Butterfield, but he really was a good guy, very generous with his time, and kind.

Remember poking random addresses back when time was unlimited & seeing those effects. Thought 1 lucky poke would unlock some magic no-one heard of before.

I distinctly remember our junior high school computer lab in around 86/87 had a room full of PETs and the mupet system to share the disc drives..!

Jim Butterfield was such a great author. There was nobody better at explaining the assembly language and all the low level stuff.

It kinda looked like a boring topic and then it was just very cool and brought me right back to my younger years when I doodled down commands to remember. Thanks for another great video and nostalgia trip :)

@8_Bit started following you recently and only just realized that you also do these book reviews. Awesome! Also loved your Programmer's Reference Guide deep dive. More of those please! Seeing new books coming out recently that'd be interesting to hear about. Keep it up, love your channel!

Cool video, I was just watching an old video the other day from the early 80s when Jim was giving a demonstration on how to operate the C64. He did a really good job making that video. I wish other companies would have done the same thing with the other 8bit micros etc.

Wow... If I'd seen that back in the day I would have snapped it up; such a handy little reference in such a small form-factor. I was familiar with Butterfield's name from SuperMON and Transactor articles... he was an expert in the days when we were beginners. Thanks for making this video and sharing this bit of nostalgia, Robin!

Very interesting video. I love these little hidden gems I can't seem to find anywhere else on the net. Thanks for documenting these little historical Commodore nuggets.

I remember exchanging pokes with a classmate back in the day ^^

A "diary" is used in both senses in Britain. A daily planner or a personal journal.

Truly your cleverest thumbnail, ever! 😂 Jim Butterfield's salacious "diary" Jim dressed like Hef 😂 🤣 "Many POKEs" 🤣

The Secret Diary of Jim Butterfield, Aged 50 3/4

Not a Commodore owner, but was fascinating to see a glimps into another world. Thanks for making the video! Hoped to see "unnew" in action, back in the day (owned an Atari 800XL) I would have loved an unnew!

Holy eternal artifacts, praise the lord

@8Bit Is it possible to share it in pdf with the public? It looks like a very handy thing :)

34:40 min (reset on save): 226 + 252*256 = 64738 (sys for Kernal Reset)

Haha... I fired up VICE and tried PRINT CHR$(14) as soon as it appeared on the screen! 😄

Thanks, Robin.

Hey Robin! A great video, eh! Nice to see you again on RU-vid with Show & Tell! A few days ago, I completed my first ever build of a new (to me) Commodore 64C computer. Actually the Commodore 64 Reloaded Mk 2 from Individual Computers. I tried many times to see if my new Commodore 64 will boot to JiffyDOS 6.0, the sign on message appears, but there is no cursor and no Ready prompt. In the forums, someone described this same problem, in his original C64 machine. He eventually tracked down the problem to be a bad PLA chip in his Commodore. It seems JiffyDOS is dependent on the PLA chip to function properly. Since my Commodore 64 Reloaded Mk 2 doesn't have a PLA chip, (PLA Free), as it was reversed engineered back into the main controller chip from Individual Computers; maybe that's why JiffyDOS won't boot to my machine? Individual Computers says it should boot fine, but I downloaded a fresh ROM image of C64 JiffyDOS with the same frozen screen result. Someone else on the forums say, they were able to have fast disk access using JiffyDOS just on their 1541 drive, and not have to use the ROM in the C64; perhaps I will try that next. I also tried to flash and run SuperROM on my C64 Reloaded Mk 2 several times. Unfortunately, the SuperROM is not recognized as a legitimate ROM by the C64 Reloaded Mk controller chip, and completely ignores it. When I try to boot directly to the SuperROM kernal, the C64 instead skips over it, and boots back into the root C64 kernel ROM. It seems I need a new genuine C64 machine to use JiffyDOS and SuperROM correctly, which is a different project for another time. I'm looking to buy a brand new C64 circuit board from PCB Way, and build my own C64C with mostly new electronic parts. It will be more expensive than the C64 Reloaded Mk2 costed me, but it would be an interesting build project someday. In the meantime, I am enjoying all the other cool things this C64 Reloaded Mk 2 can do, one of which is running dual SIDs in stereo! Pretty cool! I bought the C64 Reloaded Mk 2 primarily for reliability reasons, and not have to worry about a logic or RAM chip suddenly dying. I am also using the newly redesigned keyboard for the C64, so I won't have to worry about the original C64 keyboard suddenly going out.

Butterfiled? Imagine a field, but covered in butter! Ye gods! The stench! And so slippery!

I _had_ his signature on a WoC brochure from the 80s. Sadly it didn’t survive one of my many moves.

Jim Butterfield was a familiar name during the 1980s in Commodore related magazines and books. My first computer was a Commodore VIC-20 because I could not afford a Commodore PET. I still have that computer along with the cassette recorder/player, dot-matrix printer, MODEM expansion, joystick, floppy drive, and several games. I doubt any of the cassettes onto which I saved programmes are readable due to age (40+ years).

Very cool! I remember using the MUPET in school with the PETs. Wish I had one now. Thanks for sharing

34:44 I wish I knew POKE 818,226:POKE 819,252 back in 1984. Much fun could be had.

Aha! I caught you! @15:58 you say "Disable Run/Stop and Restore"! 😛

Oh sweet! Everything Jim Butterfield is great. Wait what?!?! Did you know Jim personally?! Wow!!! You lucky man!

Fascinating content! Already found myself browsing the first few issues of the Transactor! I do recall that they Combo book/Diaries being popular then ... I had the Adrian Mole one 😀 Edit: Watching a wee bit further, I've got to say that this seems more like an Almanac than a Diary! Such a wonderful little thing to own though, I'm really quite jealous 😀

from what i remember peek was sound poke was colours onscreen there was a hack you could reset the machine with a basic momentary action push button hooked up to two chip legs during a program like a game punch in a poke on the ready screen and the game returns hacked because it held its whole memory. basic days man looking back but it was cutting edge back in the mid eighties

31:42 OK, I looked register 120 up in _Mapping the C64_ and it turns out this is a hack to the CHRGET routine, which is loaded into RAM at boot instead of being called straight from ROM. Modifying this routine (to branch to new, also-RAM-based parsers, I assume) is how disk-based wedges were possible, and I can only assume this was done on purpose by a forward-thinking programmer who realized users would want something more powerful than the stock BASIC and didn't want to have to buy a ROM-replacement cartridge to get it like Atari users would. So it's kind of ironic that the "mindless printing machine" is basically the "memo pad" mode that Ataris drop into when there is no BASIC cartridge.

My first experience with the 6502 was when we purchased a Rockwell AIM at work.The intended use was to develop a battery tester for testing various battery types. As I recall we found Jim’s name buried in one of the ROM’s so I was led to believe he was involved in the development. In the years to follow we grew to worship Jim as my circle of computer geeks were members of TPUG. I never got to meet Jim unfortunately so I have to say you were very fortunate indeed!

Very Cool Video!

BMB Compuscience rang a bell, they made the original Sopwith game for PC.

37:20 - Length of Program is wrong. Commodore DOS uses 2 bytes in each sector to point to the next one storing the program so the multiplier should be 254, not 256. And, of course, it ignores that the last block is, most likely, only partially filled.

The strange tall and thin booklet format is in the style of the old IBM System/360 and /370 Mainframe reference booklets - a must for any Assembly programmer.

That is nuts!

Nice video, nice handbook. A long time ago I also wrote routines for DEC->HEX and HEX->DEC conversion (shown at 25:00). They were significantly shorter :-) In case someone uses it today, here is the code: ``` 0 rem dec->hex 1 ?"dec";:input a:o$="" 2 x=a-int(a/16)*16:o$=chr$(x+48-7*(x>9))+o$:a=int(a/16):if a>0 then 2 3 ?"hex $";o$ 0 rem hex->dec 1 ?"hex:";:input a$:l=len(a$):s=0:p=1:for i=l to 1 step -1 2 v=asc(mid$(a$,i,1))-48:v=v+7*(v>9):s=s+v*p:p=p*16:next i:?"dec:";s ``` Thanks for your, always interesting, videos.

Still have that!

Surprised he didn't list the Amiga (1000) as it came out mid 1985.

I bet that MUPET stuff was used to link the PETs in the classroom scenes of the very Canadian, very Commodore, Hide and Seek. It stands to reason that they found some actual classroom to film in for these scenes, but I'm guessing. In any case while watching this I was fascinated with the idea of a school computer lab of networked PETs. I get that it's a movie, but in theory the actual classroom they used might have used this.

27:08 Strange to see they used Germany (FR) instead of West Germany.

The MUPET looks interesting.

It is called RUN/STOP key at 11:45 in chapter 8. 😄

Noticed there was a POKE command noted in that diary that turns off screen for programs running faster. Seems this could be used in the BBasic episode to get the fastest runtime? This and the POKE command that makes the cursor run really fast.

Its diary in the uk too. Just not secrets specific. Just a record of a days events.

?PEEK(65532)+PEEK(65533)*256 C64 = 64738 PET2001 v1 = 64824 PET2001 v2 = 64721 PET2001 v4 = 64790 Perhaps an easy way to determine which revision of firmware your PET is running?

2:34 I assume it's generally hard to trademark a TLA. 2:42 We had CBM-8032s with MUPET controllers at my high school. 7:12 Huh? There's a road in Toronto called "Avenue"? 11:21 How many people are on team Exclamation Mark/One? 14:02 I assume that Shift-RUN + Restore will also do a soft reset. 14:14 The Reset vector is common to all 6502-based systems. 22:54 The same TED diagram is in the Anthology. 31:15 You can also get this using «OPEN1,0:INPUT#1,A».

Wow, this is super rare. Maybe you have the only one as I could not find it anywhere using the ISBN search. Where did you get it from?

Where did you pick up that little treasure? It's a bit like finding an old copy of "Advanced Poke-Making", and seeing "Property of the Half-Butter Prince" written inside :D One of my favorite parts of collecting old 8-bit RPG games is finding all the previous owners' graph paper maps and notes inside.

ICPUG as a physical meetup closed in 1998, with a tail off represented by Stevenage Computer Club (which Covid-19 seems to have finally killed) Jack Cohen, the membership secretary for 12 years, resigning the post in 1993, passed away August 12th 2010. The webstite seems to be extant, but I can't see much updating since late 2022.

Hey Robin, Do you have a c128? There's a He-Man game that doesn't work on it, even in c64 mode. The title is Masters of the Universe, from 1987 by US Gold. It's the arcade version, not text. I bet you could figure out what's preventing it from working on the c128. Cheers!

What's the reason the remove the line numbers? Cleaner listing of code? Save RAM space possibly? Any thoughts?

Whoever wrote in that diary must have really liked playing poker 😅

December 31, 1985 - should be sys 64760

POKEmon, catch them all!

Thought "usefull adresses", were pokes :-P

I was surprised to see the "national holidays" for the Netherlands. March 28, 31 and May 8, 19 are not (and never have been) national holidays. Strangely enough may 4th and may 5th, which are national holidays related to the liberation after the second world war aren't mentioned. Maybe Jim didn't feel like doing research the day he wrote that table.

If someone could recreate this, I would buy it!

I have some hydra cards for C64 which shared drives & printers which if any viewers have info on these would great

M ulti U ser PET

If the MUPET devices are for networking, you can LAN ASCII DOOM over the Commodore PETs. 😄

Not familiar with "700" series here in the Great White North; were they the European flavours of the "CBM-II" series, which were severe flops in North America?

No references to the Amiga?

MICROPET?

Day planner? Not an agenda?

The thing about commodore that amstrad language hade over was CLS clear screen command could never figure the code on commodore. back in the day a lot of commodore code branched over to BBC and Amstrad language that wasted a lot of time punching in the codes on the commodore. shame. the commodore was the ultimatate benchmark of home computing we will never see again especially the MOS SID chip Man that chip is god

This feels like click-bait, haha

PEEK(65532)+PEEK(65533)*256 is actually the 6502 reset vctor at $FFFC. This is not only guaranteed to work with any Commodre 8-bit, but with any 6502 (and derivatives) machine with BASIC (for PEEK). (It's defined by the hardware and is what the processor looks for, as it comes out of reset.)