The Commodore 64 Kernal and Hardware Revealed

The Commodore 64 Kernal and Hardware Revealed by Nick Hampshire, with Richard Franklin and Carl Graham, is a 213-page book published by Collins Professional and Technical Books (William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd), 8 Grafton Street, London, 1985. ISBN 0-00-383090-X.

It is one of the two books in this collection that reach board level, and the only one that reproduces Commodore's own Commodore 64 schematic under licence — figure 1.2 is captioned "Commodore 64 schematics (reproduced by courtesy of Commodore Business Machines)".

What it contains

• Chapter 1 — the design concept: the machine built around the VIC-II and the 6510, with figure 1.2 the licensed Commodore schematic and figure 1.7 the memory architecture map.
• Chapter 2 — the keyboard, joysticks and screen.
• Chapter 3 — serial communications, including the 7406 gate schematic (figure 3.2) used on the serial bus.
• Chapter 4 — the cassette units, with the cassette motor power supply lines traced out (figure 4.2) and the output waveforms to the recorder drawn (figure 4.3).
• Chapter 5 — digital and analogue waveforms, digital sampling and synthesis, and the 8-bit counter.
• Chapter 6 — interrupts and their use (page 184).

Hampshire's stated purpose is that understanding how the operating system and the system hardware work together is what allows a programmer to go beyond the documented interfaces.

Why it is worth having

• It is the only book here that carries Commodore's own schematic, with permission, rather than a redrawing.
• The cassette motor supply and output waveform figures are genuinely diagnostic material: a cassette port that does not drive a motor can be checked against them.
• The serial bus chapter identifies the 7406 as the driver on that bus — the part that dies when a drive is hot-plugged.

How to use it on this wiki

It is a third-party book. Its schematic is Commodore's, but reproduced at book size and without the parts list that accompanies it in the service manual. For component values and board identification use the Commodore 64 / 64C Service Manual and the Commodore 64 Technical Manual and Parts List, which are the primary sources. No figure on this wiki has been taken from this book.

Related pages

• Commodore 64 · Commodore 64 Troubleshooting Guide · Commodore 64 General Maintenance
• The Anatomy of a Commodore 64 — the other hardware-oriented book here, at chip level rather than board level
• Category:Commodore Books — the annotated index of all 60 books hosted here

Download The Commodore 64 Kernal and Hardware Revealed here: Collins The Commodore 64 Kernal and Hardware Revealed.pdf