Setting up Hardware

Setting up the Hardware

According to the advertising at the time, the Commodore 64 had a huge 64k of memory, yet when the computer is booted it proudly announces that there is 38991 bytes free. So what happened to the other half of the memory?

For the computer to operate it needs an operating system, which in the case of the C64 is the Kernal, and yes its spelled with an 'a' not an 'e' that's just what Commodore called it. The Kernal provides very simple functions, such as loading to and from disks, reading the keyboard etc. all of which are critical to the computer working the way it should, but that takes memory. The C64 also has the BASIC computer interpreter built in again this uses memory.

When writing a game there is very little use for the Kernal and absolutely zero use for the BASIC interpreter, in fact usually the Kernal is only used to access files on the disk or tape which can easily be replaced by more efficient user code.

The C64 has 64k of RAM, at boot time the Kernal and BASIC ROMs are switched out with some of this RAM but it is possible to switch this ROM back out and enable the extra RAM.

Disabling the BASIC and Kernal routines also has the added benefit of freeing up the whole of zero page memory, (I will cover zero page in another post). For now, it is enough to say that this is a very good thing.

The initHardware function is the first subroutine to call when starting any game program.

initHardware: {

   //Disable CIA IRQ's to prevent crashes

lda #$7f

sta $dc0d

sta $dd0d

//bank out BASIC and Kernal

lda $01

and #%11111000

ora #%000101

sta $01

// set VIC to BANK 3

lda $dd00

and #11111100

sta $dd00

// set screen to char mem

lda #001100

sta $d018

rts

}

The first block of code disables the CIA interrupts, these interrupts trigger Kernal functions and since the Kernal is about to be removed they must be disabled to prevent the system crashing.

The second block makes the RAM at addresses $A000-$BFFF and $E000-$FFFF available, this would usually be the BASIC and Kernal respectively. It also makes the RAM at $D000-DFFF available, however, this memory is used by the VIC and SID chips and is write only. Any data stored in this area can be used by the VIC but if the memory is read by the program the ROM data is returned. I will return to this in depth in another article.

The third block of code tells the VIC chip which bank of memory to use, the VIC chip is only capable of seeing 16k of memory and all of the addresses used by the VIC are offset to the selected back. The bottom lower two bits specify which bank to use. In the example above the VIC bank is at the top of memory, out of the way. 

The bank options are:

, 0: Bank #3, $C000-$FFFF, 49152-65535.
%01, 1: Bank #2, $8000-$BFFF, 32768-49151.
%10, 2: Bank #1, $4000-$7FFF, 16384-32767.
%11, 3: Bank #0, $0000-$3FFF, 0-16383.

The final block sets the character set pointer and the start of the screen memory, in this example the screen starts at $0800 and the character set at $2000 both relative to VIC bank.

This means that in this example the screen starts at $C800. because we have set the VIC bank to 0 and the screen to $800 so the screen starts at $800 bytes from the start of the VIC bank.