Saddle Up & Learn
BASIC, Assembly & the frontier arts
BASIC Programming
The C64 boots right into BASIC. It's the friendliest on-ramp in retrocomputing.
- C64 Wiki — BASIC reference
- Programmer's Reference Guide (online)
- Programmer's Reference Guide (Archive.org)
Commodore BASIC 2.0 is a direct descendant of Microsoft BASIC. It has its limits — no built-in commands for sprites, sound, or high-res graphics — but that's half the fun. Everything needs a PEEK and POKE. The Programmer's Reference Guide is the definitive text; bookmark it and print the memory map appendix.
6502 / 6510 Assembly
Where real speed lives. Every classic game was written here.
- Easy 6502 — interactive tutorial
- 6510 CPU — C64 Wiki
- ACME — cross-assembler (GitHub)
- KickAssembler — modern macro assembler
The 6502 has only 56 instructions and 3 registers. You can hold the whole thing in your head. Easy 6502 is the best first-week resource. Once you're moving data around, pick up KickAssembler for serious development — it has macros, labels, and integrates with the VICE debugger.
Video Tutorials
Learn by watching people who've been doing this for decades.
- 8-Bit Show and Tell (YouTube)
- The 8-Bit Guy (YouTube)
- Mr. SID — music & demo content (YouTube)
- Robin Engelbrecht — C64 assembly tutorials
8-Bit Show and Tell is gold — deep dives into C64 programming techniques, magazine type-ins, and forgotten gems. The 8-Bit Guy covers restoration and community history. For assembly specifically, Robin Engelbrecht's series walks through 6510 coding from scratch with great clarity.
Books & Manuals
The old books are still the best books. Most are free online now.
Mapping the C64 by Sheldon Leemon is the memory-map bible — every address documented with what it does. If you're going to PEEK and POKE, this is your guide. Pair it with the Programmer's Reference Guide and you've got everything the original C64 community was working from.
Graphics, Sprites & Sound
The C64's graphics and sound chips are programmable marvels. Here's how to talk to them.
VIC-II Graphics — The video chip supports 8 hardware sprites, character mode, bitmap mode, and multicolor. Each mode is a different trade-off of resolution, colors, and CPU intervention. The C64 Wiki's VIC-II article is comprehensive and cross-links every register.
SID Sound — Three voices, four waveforms each, a filter, and an envelope generator per voice. Programming it directly via registers gives you full control. The SID Saloon section goes deep on the chip itself.
Sprite editors & tools — SpritePad and CharPad (both by Subchrist Software) are the community-standard tools for building sprites and character sets for C64 projects. Free downloads, Windows and Wine-compatible.