Commodore Programming Languages

While looking for nothing in particular, I came across Glenn Holmer’s excellent site which has an excellent collection of languages for the Commodore 8bit computers.

And among them was the first C compiler I’d ever owned, SUPER-C!

SUPER-C

Towards the end of the effective life of the Commodore 64, people started to dump expensive software on the cheap.  It was a great time to go to the World of Commodore, and see all the great vendors and wares.  And of course feel that ever pervasive shift to the Amiga.  It was where I picked up this fun little binder:

And what about programming in C?

Super-C CCP

It boots up into a CP/M like environment, complete with drive letters.  You can write programs to either be loaded up from the BASIC ROM environment, or the CCP environment.  On the one hand it’s pretty cool, it includes a simple text editor, and the compiler and linker.  But one thing is for sure, using this with a single 1541 is incredibly slow.  The touted Commodore 128 version with REU support would have made it’s insanely slow speeds a little more tolerable.  That and having multiple machines would have been a must.

As interesting as it was to look at, if you really wanted to do anything with C on the Commodore 64, seriously use cc65. There is something to be said for using a cross compiler when you are running at GHZ vs the 6502’s 1Mhz.

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