Camen Design

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Update: Sorry, due to unforseen circumstances the auction has had to be put on hold and may be resumed at a later date. :(

Stuff for Clint

This is an auction in order to raise money for my Internet-underprivliged friend Clint. I have a few rare / interesting / curious items I would like to sell. Now I could do this via eBay, and probably gain a lot more attention for my items, but ultimately I don’t believe that flocking to the monopoly is always the best option, so we’re going to do this a little differently.

This will be an e-mail auction. Just e-mail me with your bid for an item and you will be included in a BCC with everybody else and mailed with updates. The auction runs from the 1st of September to the 1st of October (12pm GMT).

I will be personally paying for the postage to anywhere in the world, so is not included, nor extra, on top of your bid. You will pay exactly what you say for the item as all proceeds will go directly to Clint. Payment will need to be made via PayPal, though you will not necessarily require a PayPal account (see the Rules for full details on the auction and payment).

Auction Items

Please bid generously, as your money will be going to a good cause.

Shortlist
  1. Advanced Machine Language Book for the Commodore 64
  2. PCW Games Collection for the Commodore 64
  3. Commodore 64 Exposed
  4. Companion to the Commodore 64 + Sixty Programs for the Commodore 64
  5. Elite: Gold Edition
  6. Simons’ BASIC
  7. High Score! The Illlustrated History of Electronic Games
  8. Best of the Super Mario Bros. + The Giant Asterix Omnibus

1. Advanced Machine Language Book for the Commodore 64

This exceptionally rare 1985 programming book for the Commodore 64 is in very good condition. The pages within are pristine and the cardboard binding is slightly worn at the edges with a crease in the front top-right corner, but otherwise in good condition. This is the First Publishing Ltd. UK version 1984, not the more common American edition by Abacus.

Introduction

In this book we will show you how to make use of many the Commodore 64′s special features and capabilities using machine language.

The book is divided into three major sections. The first section concerns the internal representation of numbers on the Commodore 64 and describes in detail how the computer performs calculations and how its math routines can be used from machine language. In addition to the conversion of numbers between the various formats, the main emphasis of this section lies in writing arithmetic functions which can be used from BASIC with the help of the USR function.

The second section deals with a specialty of the machine language: interrupts. After explaining some of the terms, interrupts are discussed in detail. Many sample programs illustrate the variety of uses for interrupt handling. At the close of this section, a machine language program demonstrates how BASIC subroutines can be controlled with interrupts.

The third and final section presents the concept of vectors in both BASIC interpreter and kernal. The individual vectors are described and the procedure for adding your own commands is explained. The implementation of the REPEAT-UNTIL structure is used to demonstrate this.

2. PCW Games Collection for the Commodore 64

A traditional program-listing book providing the source code of 20 games. This is how things were done before we had the internet—you typed in 10 pages of code from a book and hoped you made no typos. This collection is quite good, notable for a number of good board games: Splash!, Omniopoly (a Monopoly clone) and Othello. Splash is particularly interesting a game and plays very well, especially two-player, so much so that I made a PC port of Splash in 2001. (You can run it on a Mac using Wineskin)

Condition of this book is very good, the pages have yellowed around the edges a few millimetres, but the condition of the pages is excellent (no rips). There are some pencil numbers written on the contents page (mine, but I don’t recall why they’re there or what they mean).

3. Commodore 64 Exposed

This is a dense, learning / reference guide book that covers the whole spectrum of the Commodore 64. It’s chocked full with a full reference of BASIC commands—including examples, memory maps—including a listing of all of the 64’s RAM/ROM addresses with what each address does, a Kernal routines reference, 6510 opcode reference, an invaluable “Keyboard Graphics and how to get them” legend—essential for typing in game books—and lots more. As a book to both learn from and serve as a reference, it’s invaluable and right up there as a lightweight alternative to the official Commodore 64 Programmer’s Reference Guide.

Quality of this book is okay; the outside carboard cover is scratched a lot, but has not broken through the lamination. The book’s page edge is uneven due to the way this book is bound and the pages have yellowed at the edge but not on the page-face. There will be some pencilling on a few pages from me where this book has had a lot of use.

4. Companion to the Commodore 64 + Sixty Programs for the Commodore 64

I am selling these two books together as they are from the same publisher and are only in okay / poor condition.

The Companion to the Commodore 64

An extremely interesting read for being deeply technical and informative but also written in a loving and characteristic manner.

Rotating sprites

This subject appears to cause a great deal of confusion. There is no hardware on the Commodore 64 to rotate sprites. It has to be done with software, i.e. sprite animation. One day, sprites may well consist of sets of three dimensional data, and it will be possible to not only move them around the screen, but also to view them from any desired distance or perspective. Until then, we have to rely on generating the data for each view in advance, switching the sprite pointers between the data blocks to create the effect of rotation.

As a child, this was very inspiring to think there would be a future where one could easily describe characters and worlds in 3D. I thought Starfox (Starwing in the U.K.) was as good as it was ever going to get.

Sixty Programs for the Commodore 64

This chunky compendium does what it says on the cover. Notable games I enjoyed are Stellar Run which was simple and easy to hack and Fall Guy, an interesting two player game where you must slide walls around to get your guy to fall under gravity to the bottom of the screen. I made a PC port in 2001. The book also includes “Evolution”, a three part program that is almost the exact precursor to Spore containing an amoeba stage, a monkey stage and a ‘global thermo-nuclear war’ stage.

For both;

5. Elite: Gold Edition

Elite: the genesis of sandbox games, also arguably one of the best games of all time. You are given a basic space ship, some money and set off into a truly vast galaxy full of planets to trade with and space pirates and aliens to fight, trying to survive any way you can. I can remember intense times fighting off Thargoid invaders whilst trying to skim a sun (to replenish energy) without crashing into it. For a modern, faithful, remake see Oolite.

This is the Cassette Tape, Gold Edition of Elite and includes the tape, ‘Quick Key Control Guide’, ‘Space Traders Flight Training Manual’ (64 pages) and The Dark Wheel 48-page novella (sadly I appear to be missing the key overlay and ‘Ship Identification Chart’). I will also include for free a 5¼″ 1541 floppy disk copy of the game I made using an Action Reply cartridge, since even the tape version of the game allows saving and loading of your data to floppy disk.

Sadly, the quality of this is poor. The box is scuffed a lot, and one corner has split open. The internal contents are in better condition overal.

6. Simons’ BASIC

Simons’ BASIC (‘sim-ons’, not ‘sy-mons’ as is commonly thought) is one of the best things to come out of Commodore—or more technically accurate: out of a 16 year old David Simons. Simons’ BASIC fills in where the lacklustre Microsoft BASIC v2 left off, by adding 114 new BASIC commands to make all kinds of C64 programming work more productive. Initialising the hi-res display and drawing lines on the C64 required quite some expertise and would be too slow writing software routines from BASIC; machine code was the only viable option. Simons’ BASIC combines the speed of machine code and simplicity of BASIC; it’s nothing more than the “HIRES” command to enter graphics mode and then simple “LINE” commands to draw.

This item is in poor, but working condition. The cartridge is fine, but the manual is bent, scuffed, scratched, stained, ripped, marked and just about anything else you can think of. I have no box, just the manual (apparently rare) and the cart.

7. High Score! the Illlustrated History of Electronic Games

This is a full colour ‘coffee-table’ style book detailing the history of the computer game from the invention of electronic computers in the ’40s to the establishment of gaming as a booming business through the ’70s, 80’s and 90s.

Being from 2002, the book doesn’t go beyond mentioning the original XBox, but is very educational as far as the earlier gaming history is concerned and there’s a lot you will learn about the ’70s and ’80s you didn’t know if you weren’t around (or too young) in those times, especially industry founders and the histories of companies like Activision, Blizzard, Id and EA.

8. Best of the Super Mario Bros. + the Giant Asterix Omnibus

These two hardback comic book collections are being sold together.

The Best of the Super Mario Bros.

A superb collection of Super Mario Bros. comics with the same style of humour as the much loved television show. It is in quite good condtion, however there is written in biro on the first leaf the name / address of the previous owner (I bought this at a car-boot sale in the ’90s), and then some writing on a short quiz at page 3.

The Giant Asterix Omnibus

Six Asteric comics combined into one book, including: Asterix the Gual, Asterix and the Goths, Asterix in Britain, Asterix in Spain, Asterix and the Soothsayer (there is a good telvision adaptation of this) and Asterix in Belgium.

For both;

Rules