this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2024
536 points (92.0% liked)
Technology
59608 readers
2909 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/3045/what-was-the-purpose-and-history-of-the-c64s-special-keys
"The Commodore "C=" Key
The VIC-20 removed the numeric keypad that the PET keyboards had, combining the numeric and punctuation keys on the top row with the unshifted keystrokes giving numbers and the shifted keystrokes giving punctuation (!, ", etc.). They also added colour and assigned character codes to change the colour of the text. A good guess would be that this is the reason they added the "C=": it's a second kind of shift that now allows three PETSCII codes to be produced from each key rather than just two. This allows all the original graphics codes still to be produced and adds enough extra keystroke inputs to cover the new colours as well. The same keyboard and decoding was used on the C64, with a few extra color codes added.
Thus, while SHIFT L produced PETSCII code 204 on both the PET and the C64, SHIFT 6 produced code 182 on the PET but an ampersand & on the C64, and to get that code 182 on the C64 you'd instead use "C= L"."
Thank you. May copilot be with you.
DOS is my co-pilot.