tokenize-basic.md

Writing BASIC Files on the Computer and Transferring to the Commodore 64

The VICE emulator includes a c1541 utility that can create d64 disk images.

On the C64, Basic programs are not stored as text. It's a tokenized version that is saved on disk. But VICE also includes petcat which does this for you.

So first you'll create a C64 disk image:

c1541 -format hello,dd d64 hello.d64

Then you'll write your basic program in a text file called hello.bas as

10 print "hello mac"
20 goto 10

Once that's done, you'll tokenize the program into a prg file:

petcat -v -w2 -o hello.prg -- hello.bas

And write that prg file to the C64 disk you created:

c1541 -attach hello.d64 -write hello.prg

And now you've got a C64 ready to be loaded onto your C64 using an SD2IEC, or you can test it in VICE using:

x64 hello.d64