Original title: A Commodore 16-os belső felépítése
Novotrade Budapest, 1986. ISBN: 963-02-4457-8
I wrote this book shortly before leaving Hungary in the summer of 1986. At the time, the classic home computer, the Commodore 64, enjoyed tremendous popularity in Hungary; there was hope that the newer, cheaper models like the Commodore 16 would also become popular. Many of these machines were sold by Novotrade Ltd., the company that was also an active publisher of computing books.
The book follows the outline of the very popular Commodore 64 reference by German publisher Data Becker, which by this time was also available in Hungarian. It is a "hacker's" tome: more of the book is taken up by appendices (most notably, a fully disassembled and annotated listing of all the ROM code) than anything else.
Content is broken down into seven chapters plus appendices:
- Preface
- 1: General Description
- 2: The Processor
- 3: The KERNAL
- 4: Video Possibilities
- 5: Producing Sound
- 6: I/O
- 7: And Finally: Do You Speak BASIC?
- Appendices
- Circuit Diagram
This book did not actually hit bookshelves until after my departure; I was already living in Vienna, Austria, when my good friend David sent me a copy. I presume I ought to one day grab a Commodore-16 off eBay, if only to be able to play with this enjoyable, though not particularly successful computer one more time. Or maybe I can repeat the accomplishment of my sadly deceased friend, Ferenc Szatmári: for a machine specifically designed to not permit the construction of a memory extension cartridge (in order not to compete with other Commodore models) Feri managed to design one anyway, a cartridge that successfully tricked the C-16's control bus into accepting external memory as a substitute for its internal RAM.
