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Commodore 64 Simon's BASIC manual coming soon!

S

sonic2000gr

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Joined
Jun 22, 2003
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25
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Chania, Crete, Greece
I am in the process of scanning and OCRing the popular Simon's BASIC manual for C64. For those who don't know, Simon's BASIC is a cartridge with a quite extended and easier to use BASIC than the original supplied in C64. The cartridge itself can be found rather easily on Ebay, but most of the times the manual is missing. And I have not seen an online version of it anywhere, except a quick reference kind of thing which is not very useful (The new commands have lots of sometimes non-intuitive parameters)
I estimate I need about a week to ten days to finish it (I have a target of 10 to 12 pages per day and I am almost in the middle of it) and will then post a link.

Thanks
Manolis
 
sonic2000gr said:
I am in the process of scanning and OCRing the popular Simon's BASIC manual for C64. For those who don't know, Simon's BASIC is a cartridge with a quite extended and easier to use BASIC than the original supplied in C64. The cartridge itself can be found rather easily on Ebay, but most of the times the manual is missing. And I have not seen an online version of it anywhere, except a quick reference kind of thing which is not very useful (The new commands have lots of sometimes non-intuitive parameters)
I estimate I need about a week to ten days to finish it (I have a target of 10 to 12 pages per day and I am almost in the middle of it) and will then post a link.

Thanks
Manolis
Click to expand...
Simons basic was great, as a kid it got me into computers bigtime, it was the hook with a big juicy worm, all those extra Basic commands to play with.
Thanks CBM without that gem of a cartridge I would have passed programming by,
and taken a different career path. It changed my life !
I think I still have it somewhere in the attic with the manual, perhaps I should frame it and pay homage to it each morning. Now that is sad ! but not as sad as the "speech synthesis cartridge" remember how weird it sounded anyone ? type in the work " HELLO" and it sounded like EL--LL--LOGH, mind you thats how they talk around here anyway ! the word dipthongs comes to mind, was that the technical term for what you type is what you hear ??? a bit like todays abbreviated text messages ?
I will now go and look that word up in a DDDDIKTENERRY
regards.
Gridlock
 
Well it looks like sonic2000gr hasn't had any forum activity here since May of 2005 - therefore I assume he gave the project over of scanning in Simons' BASIC. :(

Quoting gridlock, about Simons' BASIC -, 'it changed his life!'
Wow, now that's an impressive CBM cart!

Back in 1983 David Simon, a 16 year old British programmer wrote Simons' BASIC and Commodore put it out in cartridge format, along with a nice book of instructions. The cart gave 114 additional keywords added to BASIC 2.0 and for me the nice touch was that when you booted with the cart you were greeted by a nice white screen with blue border and black letters - instead of that odd standard blue on blue scheme that the C64 always booted with.
It was an impressive cart and book and I spent many happy hours using it. I think I paid $30. for it at a Children's Palace store in North Olmsted's Great Northern Shopping Center near Cleveland, Ohio back around '83-84' time. (Look at that, my memory's holding up pretty good for an old geezer :)
I have emulation of the Simons' BASIC cart but have not seen any PDF file of the original manual. I tried a few times to win the cart and book off eBay but lost out because the bid ran too high for what I thought it was worth. (I can only allocate so much for, mainly, nostalgic gear, such as this.)
If anyone wants the 'quick reference' guide to Simons' BASIC showing the keywords and format of use - it's available here as a small text file in zip format. http://project64.c64.org/hw/
 
Cheers Vint,
I will now go and find that Simons Basic cartridge, it's in the attic somewhere and hopefully so is the manual. As for a C64 to run it on .... well thats a car boot sale find .. hopefully.
I do still have the "brick" psu , that powers my shed alarm system, and has been for the last 16 years , the shed has rotted but the brick is still going strong.
regards
gridlock.
 
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