Commodore History on How C64 BASIC Works

The title refers to an ongoing series with two videos so far. Part 1 (28 minutes) is about how the tokenizer works and how programs are stored in memory, and Part 2 (19 minutes) is on what the BASIC interpreter does to execute the program as it’s running. These are pretty detailed and a bit technical, but interesting of these kinds of shapes can fit into your brain. More below. Part 1: Before a program is run Part 2: How a program is run Some extra links from the videos, a disassembly of the C64 BASIC ROM from pagetable.com, and the open-sourced by Microsoft code of their generalized BASIC interpreter. It should be noted that the original version of Microsoft BASIC were written for the Altair 8800 kit computer by Bill Gates and Paul Allen themselves. I’ll distill the basics of the videos for you. Commodore BASIC is a dialect of Microsoft BASIC. It puts the loaded program at the bottom of memory, starting at 2049, or $0801 in hex. (The custom on the C64 is to denote hex numbers with a…