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GEOS Tricks & Tips

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Revision as of 02:16, 25 September 2026 by Josh (talk | contribs) (P4 verification: real documentation page — publisher, edition, ISBN, contents, and an explicit statement of whether the book is a repair source (the Anatomy of the 1541 contains no schematic))

GEOS Tricks & Tips by M. Kerkloh and R. Tornsdorf — "For all COMMODORE 64 owners who use GEOS, includes Version 1.3". A Data Becker book published by Abacus Software, Grand Rapids, Michigan, First Printing, September 1987. 285 pages. The scan is from the retro-commodore.eu archive (Tomse), processed with ABBYY, and carries a searchable text layer.

Note the title. The book's own cover and title page read Tricks & Tips, in that order; this page's title inverts it. The authors' initials are also transposed between this book and its companion — this one is by M. Kerkloh and R. Tornsdorf, GEOS Inside and Out is by M. Tornsdorf and R. Kerkloh.

The preface explains why it exists: the authors found the GEOS coverage in the magazines of the day to be "superficial repetitions of passages from the manual, or even half-truths or less", and wrote the book to correct it.

Contents

  • Chapter 1 — Tricks and Tips for the User Interface (p. 1): load and go (3), deskTop (5), geoPaint (18), geoWrite (26)
  • Chapter 2 — Programming Tricks (p. 29)
  • Chapter 4 — the machine language monitor EDMON (p. 150): full listing (151), the program itself (156), command overview (197) and working tips (200)
  • Chapter 5 — GEOS for the programmer (p. 205): examining GEOS (207), getting into GEOS (208), GEOS routines (218), how GEOS works (219), memory layout (222), the GEOS jump table (224) and variables used by the GEOS KERNAL (258)
  • Appendix (p. 262), Index (p. 263)

Chapter 5 is the substantial part: the jump table and KERNAL variable list are the reference material a GEOS programmer actually needs, and they run to around forty pages.

This is a third-party book, not Commodore documentation, and it is not a repair source. It carries no schematic, no parts list, no component values and no service procedure. Nothing on this wiki should cite it for a hardware figure.

Download GEOS Tricks & Tips here: Abacus_GEOS_Tips_and_Tricks.pdf (18 MB)

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