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I'm Back - and Tickled!

R

Rev. Dave

Member
Loadstar OG
Long ago, I got a Frodo emulator, only to discover that Loadstar did not work as a compleat magazine. So I decided to write a Presenter. It worked fairly well, and I got an IDEA. I called Fender Tucker and said, "You know, we could put together a PC based Loadstar, 'harvesting' programs from the library."

Fender said, "That sounds like a good idea. Go for it!"

And I went. I put out a dozen issues of eLOADSTAR (all of my copies were lost in the tornado). But during that year (2000), Fender and Judy decided to end Loadstar with issue 199. I offered to take it over, and again Fender said, "Go for it." Now I was no Fender, but we persisted. In 2007, we were in a tornado and lost our subscriber database. I wanted to get to Issue 256, but we fell six issues short. Our subscription numbers had declined, and we could not afford to pay for "content." So I thank everyone who sent in new programs and other entertainments.

I am glad to see a community developing around our epitome of 8-bit computers. I have some stories and possible articles that I would like to share - if anyone wants to hear an old grandpa wheeze about the good ol' days. Moreover, I have this hope that young people will discover the power of being a (little g) god over 65536 bytes of wonder and delight. I am sure the Loadstar will be a fantastic resource.
 
Greetings!

Rev. Dave said:
if anyone wants to hear an old grandpa wheeze about the good ol' days
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I'd like to hear about those days. 🙂 Starting with my trusty C= gear as a kid, it eventually led to a lifetime of working in IT so I have extremely fond memories of my 8-bit days.
 
"So, youngsters - gather 'round the overheating powerbrick and hear about the good ol' days..."

I wanted a computer ever since a friend told me about watching someone play Star Trek on an Altair 8800. That would have been back in 1975. I was 25 years old, married, had a son on the way, and trying to finish up a Bachelor's degree. So, finances were tight, and getting a computer was not in the budget at all. In fact, it was not until 1979 that I got a TRS-80 Model I, Level II BASIC machine. It got me through seminary with a BASIC program I wrote called Magic Typewriter.

Buying games - or anything else - for the computer was never my way. The greatest "game" ever was making the machine do my every command and creating my own worlds. In 1986, I was a full-time preacher at a small church and needed a "real" computer and printer for work. ("Tressy" limped along with a Radio Shack cassette machine.) I looked over the offerings at the time: Apple was still pricy. The "IBM Compatibles" were neither IBM nor compatible. And as I looked through the magazines, the C64 had color, sound, and sprites. The only problem was that BASIC 2.0 was not as "good" as TRS-80's Level II. But then the C128 came out, and it had more than the C64 had - and a C64 itself!

My first purchase was a Brother's Daisy Wheel printer. Back in those days, printers were mostly dot matrix, which worked but looked - well - bad. Some had "Near Letter Quality," where the operative word was "Near." But a daisy wheel was a real typewriter; real letter shapes were typed through a ribbon onto the paper. And this printer was "Commodore Ready," which meant that wiring had the serial connectors like at the back of a C64/128. I got the C128, a 1571 disk drive, and a black-and-white TV as a monitor. And I was in 111th heaven. A friend gave me a copy of SpeedScript, which was all the word processor I needed. Forty columns on the screen was just right for the half-sheet bulletins I needed for church. One of the few commercial programs I bought was Music Master, which ran in 64 mode.

I lived out in the empty region of Colorado, so online (CompuServe or QLink) meant long-distance phone calls. So a trip to the big city meant visiting a software retailer. On one such journey, I had an extra $20 in my pocket, and I searched the programs offered at Babbages. But none quite tickled me (since I knew I could write something about as good for free. Then, on the magazine rack, I found Loadstar. It came on two disks, four sides, with a game, some puzzles, and other stuff, for just $8.

Back a home, I put Disk 1 into the drive and typed and entered LOAD "*",8,1. After some whirring, a cover screen came up - with a picture of the Oscar Academy Award. As I worked through the menus of menus, I imagined that this must be what QLink was like - programs, docs, tutorials, puzzles, and games. The editorial style of Fender Tucker seemed to include me in this niche cult, and the clever ideas and tools of Jeff Jones and Scott Resh pushed my knowledge and understanding.

I became a Loadstarite, which meant that every month, I waited with bated breath for my copy to arrive in the mail.
 
So - to continue my long-winded story.

Two things happened around that time. Make that three. First, my budget didn't afford continuing my Loadstar subscription. But, by an unexplainable series of events, I scored a copy of The Complete Commodore Inner Space Anthology. This was exactly what I needed. It had great memory maps, and the ML instructions were all on two notebook sized pages, all laid out for easy reference. Also, the values of the instructions were in decimal as well as hexadecimal. I was not conversant in hexadecimal, and I did not have an assembler yet. I could write ML code in DATA statements - a lousy way to program but a brilliant way to LEARN.

And thirdly - my C128 developed a flakey power switch. Fortunately, holding down the chicken-lips key let it boot into C64 mode. So my coding leaped to a higher level. Well, not that high. I had the conceit that I would write my own compiler language. And I tried three times. The only uptake was that I learned a lot about ML.

I got a MIDI for Christmas. It came with software, of sorts. It had a “sequencer,” a way to make a text list of notes and duration for the MIDI instruments. But I needed a real music processor, one with proper staves and stuff. I sat down and wrote – on paper – a driver for such a processor. But about 1000 bytes of hand-assembled code would be terribly fraught with error. But then I found a copy of Compute! Gazette which had an assembler, ready to be hand-punched into the machine. It took a week, a very boring week.

And it worked. It is called BASSEM, and is really a BASIC Extension. BASIC can be used to guide the assembly, but the assembly code itself is written on ordinary lines of BASIC. I took my notes on the music processor and made it work. But I wanted a real project!




My sister got a PC and a transcontinental railroad game (the name of which I have forgotten). After playing it, I became obsessed with figuring out if I could get something like it packed into my tiny 66636 bytes. We have some marvelous advantages:

Sixteen Kilobytes of shiny, unused memory tucked “under” BASIC ROM.​
Definable font characters.​
ML language that can make anything happen!​
​
The first thing was to get a map of the continent mostly under ROM. Each character would represent a 15x15 mile square. The result was 20 K for the map. The code grabbed a 40x23 grid off the map and slapped it on the screen. Colors were assigned to each character code. Then I had to have a way to lay the track, using a joystick. I needed switch track and stations where trains could be paused until one of four departure times. Cities would grow around the stations. The income was determined algorithmically (number of “cars” determined by the population of the city, number of passengers on each “car” determined by the time of day).

I dug into my old Loadstars to find how to peek under ROM, and how to build my own character editor. And in about a month, I had Sea to Sea ready to send off – to Loadstar, of course. A couple of months later, Fender Tucker called me – which meant this was not a rejection – and offered me a nice chunk of money for my baby. It appeared on Issue #107.

A non-computing friend suggested I switch to programming a “real” computer. At the time, the only “real computer” I could afford was the PC Peanut. I knew I had more power in my now little C64 than those other platforms – and I would need a decade or more to delve in and master all the miracles of the SID and VIC. So I started writing much shorter programs and sending them to Loadstar and Fender.

Screenshot 2025-08-02 163517.jpg
 
Rev. Dave said:
Star Trek on an Altair 8800.
Click to expand...
For me it was Star Trek on a teleprinter in our school library. The terminal was in a room sectioned off and needed approval to enter. Fortunately a love of books earned me the trust of our librarian to allow me access any time the room wasn't reserved.

Rev. Dave said:
I lived out in the empty region of Colorado, so online (CompuServe or QLink) meant long-distance phone calls. So a trip to the big city meant visiting a software retailer. On one such journey, I had an extra $20 in my pocket, and I searched the programs offered at Babbages. But none quite tickled me (since I knew I could write something about as good for free. Then, on the magazine rack, I found Loadstar. It came on two disks, four sides, with a game, some puzzles, and other stuff, for just $8.
Click to expand...
Growing up we were near a few malls but I found Loadstar as a kid at a bookstore names "Gene's Books" in the local mall. It was one of those kinds of book stores back in the day that were absolutely huge and crammed full of books & magazines from all parts of the world. Visits were frequent to pick up The Computer Shopper, Compute's Gazette, and a certain 'magazine on disk' that came in a plastic clamshell.

Rev. Dave said:
I became a Loadstarite
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Oooh, I like that name! I have to work it into the site here somehow. 😀


Rev. Dave said:
The Complete Commodore Inner Space Anthology
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That is one of the books that, though PDFs of it are available, I'm on the lookout for at vintage shows to see if I can add an actual one to my collection. There's just something about printed & bound reference manuals that I enjoy far more over using digital copies.

Rev. Dave said:
It appeared on Issue #107.
Click to expand...
I finally uploaded all of the issues here in our "Resources" sections. 👍 I'm slowly going through all of the issues to grab screenshots and a listing of what is on each issue to build a master index. I've got some done already and it'll be C= related hobby for some time yet to go through them all.



I know these days you're retired and working with your church yet -- Do you find yourself tinkering around with computers yet? Do you have any Commodore hardware still hooked up? What are your thoughts on the "new" Commodore relaunch?
 
Well - I don't do much church work now. Others need the chance to shine! And as far as programming, I don't do much. I have TheC64 (full size) but have not had time to hook it up at all. All other C64s reside in a semi truck that hasn't been opened in YEARS. Anyway, I do a little coding, getting d81s to autoboot to the game I want to play - I have Free Cell (my own version) which forces me to WIN each game in order to move to the next. I fixed up Golem, with all the little walking guys. But my goto is Shisin Sho - by Kate and Ron Slaminko. Beautifully designed for the 40 column screen. Tiles are clever icons that are better (IMHO) than Mahjong. I use VICE and blow it up to full screen. Favorite time waster.

In the last 9 years, I have written a lot of music (full orchestration) on MuseScore), made videos using the music behind images, and writing books. I am right now working on my fourth.

Thanks for reading and responding to my post. Reminds me that I need to continue my story.
 
Thank you so much for telling the stories of those days. Wonderful read, can't wait to read more.

Loadstar was such a big part of my C64 world back then. I still love it today. I bought it at our local bookstore every month and eventually subscribed for a number of years. It is one of the reasons I kept my C64 around well into the 90s even after jumping on the Amiga train. When I did eventually sell some of my C64 stuff, and put some in storage I kept my Loadstar disks. I used emulators throughout the PC/Mac years to get my C64 and Loadstar fix until I finally retrieved my stuff from storage in 2013.

Sadly many of the loadstar disks had gone bad. Especially the early issues and many that used the Opus brand disks. It seems a few brands faired better than others. Thankfully I had found Loadstar Compleat and was sent a CD-R by Fender. I was able to finally read some of the issues I missed all these years later. Still such a great experience.

So glad I stumbled onto this site.
 
Just seeing this site and this thread makes me so happy (even though I've kept in touch with you, Rev. Dave, in FB land!). I was late to the Loadstar party and was one of the last of the newer subscribers at the end of Loadstar's life.
 
I was lucky enough to work with Rev. Dave on the DotBASIC project years ago. I'm very glad to see this forum, and especially glad to see Dave here.
 
Good to hear from you. I dreamed of doing Amiga -especially the Video Toaster. But it was way out of my price point. DotBASIC was a real joy to create. I really wanted to re-work Mr.Mouse 3, which was the heart of the Extension. But Lee Novak sent me the source code - and it was just too complex for me. HE is the real genius of the Loadstarite Commodore 64 world. Thanks to everyone who helped with that project!
 
Back to my musings and wool-gathering. I discovered that in the publishing world, once a creator gets noticed, editors tend to notice further submissions. After selling Sea to Sea, I set out to produce new programs every month. Some were truly unique. Others were just fun. I had a list of projects and clipped through them - until I got to a new music processor.

I wanted a byte-stream memory system, but I could not figure out how to break into the stream for editing. Finally, I came upon the idea of two stacks - everything behind the count immediately under the cursor, and everything ahead of it. The input was a matrix of all pitches at that particular point. It was working well until I left an RTS out, and the program bled out of decrementing one stack and decrementing the other stack. That bug consumed a full month of "thrash and crash" debugging - until I found the missing RTS.

My real life became busy, so I did a lot of beta testing of PRESTO before submitting it. It was a major, useful application, so it had to work flawlessly. Finally, I sent it off - and Fender put it in on issue 128. Which was the Pass-Around issue! Anyway, I was getting better at the craft. There is no better computer game than making the computer do exactly what I wanted it to do.

After issue 128, my memories become a little fuzzy. And - it's 10:30 and my bedtime.
🙂
 
Hey everyone! Dave, I got asked about Sea to Sea during the talk Saturday, and gave a brief rundown of the gameplay. I hope I got it right! You'll be able to see for yourself when it goes up on Youtube.
 
rodneylives said:
Hey everyone! Dave, I got asked about Sea to Sea during the talk Saturday, and gave a brief rundown of the gameplay. I hope I got it right! You'll be able to see for yourself when it goes up on Youtube.
Click to expand...
Thanks. I am lookng forward to seeing it. Drop the link here or directly to me.
 
Rev. Dave said:

In 1999, I had a PC and got on the Web and wondered if video could be fit in our modest 65536 bytes? This is the result!
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That is cool! 😎 The full screen of tiles makes for a nice tech demo.

After watching the full video, it brought back a flood of memories of the "Dancing Baby" craze of the late 90's when the video jumped from being an online thing to the real world being used in TV shows and ads.
 
It is late, and I feel the need to brag:

Visually developing the screen was a giant step forward into “modern” programming. So I built a program to do just that. The first step was creating a font editor that allowed me to “draw” or define characters directly on the screen. Then, a control to place the characters on the screen, paint them with colors, and finally, pack all the information into a file and save it to the disk. But I went a little further. I developed a method to cut out portions of the screen, select specific areas, and place the images – indexed and with color – into a file.

This was what I needed to capture Maurice’s card images. I figured out how to get a bunch of them displayed on the screen, marked the four corners, and copied each into the indexed memory. Now I had a collection of the best card images available for the C64.

But I had another trick up my sleeve. The C64 had BASIC 2.0 built in – as such computers were made back in 1982. But in order to get the machine designed and ready to sell, the designers used a particular version of BASIC that came from 1976. It was created for the Commodore PET – and lacked many of the commands that would utilize this new computer’s capabilities. This didn’t affect the professional game and utility programmers because they simply wrote their code in Machine Language – the numbers that the processor understands directly. But BASIC 2.0 did not have the built-in code to control colors or make sounds or many other things that improved a program’s look and feel.

Loadstar was instrumental in publishing collections of commands in binary files that could be loaded into a program and accessed with a general BASIC command: SYS. Over the years, these collections improved until 1993 when Lee Novak created Mr.Mouse. This “add-on” included mouse control, region recognition (knowing where the mouse pointer was on the screen), and many of the other clever things that toolboxes could accomplish.

I took Mr.Mouse – and my own modulettes – and gave them BASIC-like command names. The most important one was the Do-Loop, which made essential loops (like waiting for a keystroke or mouse click) more efficient.

I used an old trick to add command names to BASIC: When BASIC encounters a character that is not recognized as a command, it branches to the error handling routines. I made a little wedge that looked first for a period, a dot. If that was not found, the system went to its normal SYNTAX ERROR routine. But if the dot was there, my code searched through the new command names. If what was in the program was in the list, the computer trotted over and performed the desired action.

Among the new commands were ones to display the pre-designed screen and to put the little indexed images wherever the programmer wanted them. I also set up the regions to know when the mouse was clicked while over the START or X (exit) places. It also recognized being over the seven columns of cards on the screen.

After that, it was simply a matter of coding the rules of the game into the computer. All games, in fact, all programs, boil down to “If this, then do that.” The cards and their locations were not just displayed on the screen. Deep inside the program were arrays – lists of linked numbers that defined the cards. The column would be noted, and the program would wait for a click where the selected card(s) were to be moved. When the target was chosen, the program checked the first column numbers and determined if one or some of the cards could be moved. It also checked to see if there were enough empty free cells and empty columns to allow the move. And it checked if the ordered suit stacks were all complete. When that happened, the player had solved the puzzle.

The game functioned just like the one from Windows – with one exception. Since every layout was guaranteed to be solvable, I created a way that would take the player through each of 32000 patterns, one game at a time. If the player was successful, the next pattern was presented.

The Commodore 64 was the epitome of the 8-bit computer. It was small – certainly by 21st-century standards. The entire addressable memory was 64 Kilobytes (65536), and the processor ran at just 1 million cycles a second. This is nothing compared to any current machine. For example, one icon on a Windows desktop uses 65536 bytes for pixels and color.

But the C64 is uniquely “knowable.” That means anyone who can spend time and learn what is inside can know everything about the machine. That is not true with today’s computers. And it came with what was, in 1982, the best color screen (which worked on a standard color television) and sound synthesizer. And all the switches are knowable. And there were publications to help the newbie and even to serious intermediate programmers become a (little g) god of the machine.

One of those publications – Loadstar – is now available as a complete download online. It includes 250 issues, which chronicle the entire growth of 8-bit programming from the perspective of hobbyist programmers.
 
I have written a book about Computers in General and the Commodore 64 in particular. I might be a good Holiday present for that 8-bit nerd on your list:

Go to Amazon.com, then search for "book most marvelous machine moorman"

It tells of the invention of the computer up to the Most Marvelous Machine, then documents the rise and fall of Loadstar.

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