Commodore BASIC 2.0

A lot of fun with binary numbers can be had by printing them to the screen. This is a quick post to show how to do that with Commodore BASIC 2.0. This is a follow up to Quick Post: XOR in Commodore BASIC 2.0.

We’ll be using both of these in upcoming posts, so it’s good to have them handy.

5 REM PRINT ALL 8 BIT NUMBERS IN BINARY
10 FOR N= 0 TO 255
20 FORI=7 TO 0 STEP-1
25 B=0
30 IF N AND 2^I THEN B=1
40 PRINTMID$(STR$(B),2);
50 NEXT
60 PRINTN
70 NEXT

This prints all the numbers from 0 to 255 in binary. It’s a little slow, but it’s easy to understand and fun to watch.

Modern and retro mix

One of my favorite peices of retro clone hardware is Bob Corsham’s KIM-1 Clone. I’ve featured it many places like the 6502 speed series.

I have the latest model of this board, and he made an interesting design choice. It actually has an FTDI chip on board and you use that via USB to connect via a modern computer with an FTDI driver. This is very convenient for working with a modern computer, but then eliminates the ability to use a real serial port.