New User and Owner of A Commander X16

[Gerry]

Good Morning,
There is A LOT of information on this site so please excuse my basic questions. I'm a new owner of an X16 and have it up and running. Also, I have no experience with the Commodore 64 world as my early computer experience was with the Apple IIe. I still have my IIGSes and a IIe.

I was reading through the x16_user_guide as well as the x16_getting_started documents and there are pages with non-sensical words in both so I'm wondering where the complete documents are? Also, the SD card that came with thX16 is empty, so where do I find and how do I load it up with demo files to see how the X16 performs? I do have the sdcard.img file I found in the X16 emulator version 47 but how do I unwrap it onto the SD card?

I suppose what I'm looking for is a list or procedure of what steps I need to take, as a newbie, to start learning how this computer works. For instance, on page 24 of the X16 User Guide I tried typing in that program multiple times and I kept getting a syntax error on line 40. A bit frustrating but I'm not going to stress myself out struggling to make this work. That's what usually stops me when trying to learn programming, examples that don't work along with incomplete documentation and I don't have enough information to figure it out on my own.

Anyway, thank you for your time and I look forward to learning how to program using the X16.
Gerry

P.S. I forgot to ask, I ordered extra memory, the 65C22 user VIA and I got two other 16-pin DIPs. There's only two empty chip sockets left open on the board but that exactly are this chips and what do they do?

Thanks again.

[TomXP411]

Welcome to the group!

The latest SD Card Starter Kit is at https://commanderx16.com/sdcard

Official Docs: https://github.com/X16Community/x16-docs

[Edmond D]

Welcome the the community!

I was reading through the x16_user_guide as well as the x16_getting_started documents and there are pages with non-sensical words in both so I'm wondering where the complete documents are?

For instance, on page 24 of the X16 User Guide I tried typing in that program multiple times and I kept getting a syntax error on line 40.

I'm wondering which user guide you are referencing; there have been many efforts to create documentation by various people. I'd gladly look at the nonsensical words and syntax error if you could point me to the URLs of the documents.

Tom has posted the link to the official document site for you.

Strange that your SD card cam blank, perhaps an production error. The SD card image continues to improve and evolve. See https://commanderx16.com/sdcard for info

Happy "Retro"ing!

[kelli217]

Welcome to the group!

The latest SD Card Starter Kit is at https://commnaderx16.com/sdcard

Official Docs: https://github.com/X16Community/x16-docs

The first link doesn't work; somehow the N and A got swapped in 'commanderx16'.

It should be https://commanderx16.com/sdcard instead.

Oh, and the two 16-pin DIP chips are support logic for the second VIA.

[Gerry]

Thank you all for your great feedback. I don't remember where I got them but I've added the Getting Started and User Guide files to this post. I will follow up on SD Card Starter Kit as I'm really excited to put the X16 through its paces. As an engineer, I'm always curious about the hardware and how it works. So is there a technical description on the design of the X16 in terms of what each chip does and how it contributes to the over all functioning of the computer?

I also understand that the X16 now supports the 65816 which I'm familiar with from the Apple IIGS. Since the 816 is a 16-but processor, what advantages does it have over the 65C02 in terms of the X16. For instance, can we now access all 2 MBs of RAM without page switching? The 816 is a great processor and fully emulates the 65C02 so if you put an 816 in the X16, it should run all 65C02 programs without any modification as it wakes up from a reset in full 65C02 emulation mode. I would think the X16 firmware would need to be modified so before any program is run, the X16 will have to identify if it's and 8-bit or 16-bit program.

So I'm very curious (and excited) as to how this all works.

Thank you,
Gerry

[DragWx]

Since the 816 is a 16-but processor, what advantages does it have over the 65C02 in terms of the X16. For instance, can we now access all 2 MBs of RAM without page switching?

Sadly, the high-memory still requires bank switching with $0000; the X16 architecture is unaware of the '816's banking registers, so the normal 65c02-style 16-bit address map is all that's available.

Aside from that, you'd still get all of the usual perks from the '816 when it runs in native mode:
- 16-bit accumulator + 16-bit arithmetic
- 16-bit memory operations
- 16-bit index registers (arrays larger than 256 bytes)
- 16-bit stack address (stack can be located anywhere in memory, not just $01xx)
- New "direct" addressing mode
- New block-move opcodes

The firmware is also being worked on to be forwards compatible with the '816.

[Edmond D]

Good Morning,
For instance, on page 24 of the X16 User Guide I tried typing in that program multiple times and I kept getting a syntax error on line 40. A bit frustrating but I'm not going to stress myself out struggling to make this work.

Thanks for providing the copies of the manuals you found. Given the documents were generated by Latex perhaps you got them from here - https://github.com/X16Community/x16-user-guide which was a project by Jestin Stoffel.

The code should look like this:

10 SCREEN 128
20 FOR I = 0 TO 15
30 Y = I * 15
40 RECT 0, Y, 319, Y+14 , I
50 NEXT I

And it does work giving a screen that should look like this image

Screen Shot 2024-05-12 at 9.38.23 AM.png (11.29 KiB) Viewed 3389 times

One thought I had was that the use of 0 (zero) and O (capital letter O) can cause issues depending on what font is used, likewise the letter I and the number one (1)

If you post a screenshot of what you experience I can investigate further. Also what nonsensical words you found. There are placeholder text in the documents such as :

"Autem eos placeat est in iure. Qui tempora ut ut qui dolores "

which is actually Latin text. It's kind of a convention in the publishing world see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorem_ipsum fro a short version, https://loremipsum.io to be schooled.

Finally I'll let others jump in on the difference between the 65c02 and 65816 in an X16 motherboard.

[Gerry]

For your information, I started searching through the posted documentation again today until I got to the link https://github.com/X16Community/x16-docs. Then I went down to the Commander X16 Reference Manual section and in it there is a sentence "Being a reference manual it is light on some details with some expected fundamental knowledge. If you are brand new to the X16, consider consulting the User Guide first." The User Guide link takes you to the Getting Started and User Guide PDFs. Opening them shows on some pages there is the garbage text I mentioned earlier. The link to that page directly is below. I hope this can be fixed.

https://github.com/X16Community/x16-use ... sers_Guide

Thank you,
Gerry

[TomXP411]

For your information, I started searching through the posted documentation again today until I got to the link https://github.com/X16Community/x16-docs. Then I went down to the Commander X16 Reference Manual section and in it there is a sentence "Being a reference manual it is light on some details with some expected fundamental knowledge. If you are brand new to the X16, consider consulting the User Guide first." The User Guide link takes you to the Getting Started and User Guide PDFs. Opening them shows on some pages there is the garbage text I mentioned earlier. The link to that page directly is below. I hope this can be fixed.

https://github.com/X16Community/x16-use ... sers_Guide

Thank you,
Gerry

The UG is only partially complete. The "garbage" text is known as "lorem ipsum" and is just placeholder text until chapters can be written.

So far, the only (relatively) complete, official documentation is indeed the Programmer's Reference Guide at the https://github.com/X16Community/x16-docs site.

[TomXP411]

Also, I'm going to move this out of the How-To forum. This forum is for instructional material and documentation, rather than Q&A or discussion. (That's why post approval is always required.)