Non-Commodore Commodore utilities

Here are some utilities I have written that are not run on Commodore machines, but which work on data for Commodore machines.

All programs described on this page are released according to the GNU General Public License, version 2 or the MIT license.

Bastext

bastext is a program I developed for iDOC=. Its purpose is to convert Commodore BASIC programs from and to binary formats, making it easy to transport those programs over text-only media, without losing content in the transfer, due to character set insimilarities and similar, and to make it easy to convert the text format back to a working BASIC program even if you don't have bastext. It's also aimed as to being compatible with tok64, supporting more Commodore BASIC dialects.

The latest version can be downloaded using Git from GitHub. You can also download version 1.2, here (May 2026). The file is a 158,401 byte ZIP archive, and comes with precompiled Windows 64-bit binary, and full source code.

D64 browser

D64 browser is a small program I developed for the web version of my old PD library to allow the D64 files (disk images) to be browsable from the web. It supports displaying the directory of D64 images, as well as extracting individual files, either as text, detokenized BASIC using Bastext or as direct C64 binary downloads.

The source code can be downloaded using Git from GitHub. If you make changes, patches are very welcome.

ROM dumper

Since I have bought JiffyDOS for several of my computers, I also wanted to use it when I was running the computers under emulation. Since I didn't find any software for copying ROMs to files, I wrote them myself.

SAVE-ROM saves the KERNAL ROM for the Commodore 16/+4 and Commodore 128 (partially). For VIC-20 and Commodore 64 you can do this with a regular machine language monitor since the memory is directly accessible, but these computers have MMUs which makes it a tiny bit more difficult. Source code in assembly (cl65 format).

READ DRIVE ROM reads the ROM from the 1541/1571/1581 disk drive and writes to a file. It is written in BASIC and very slow, since I only found the command syntax for reading a single byte at a time; it is possible to make it faster, but then I had already copied them and didn't need it. Source code in BASIC (bastext/tok64 format); should work on all Commodore BASIC computers.

C64 KERNAL patcher

After dumping the JiffyDOS on my Commodore 64, I wanted to patch it with a Swedish keyboard layout. This simple program can do that (to any C64 kernal with the keyboard layout in the default location). It can easily be extended to include more patches. Source code in C.

koalatoppm & artstudiotoppm

These small utilities converts Koala Painter and Art Studio images to portable pixmaps (PPM). You can download the latest version here: koalatoppm, (zip, 16,911 byte, updated 1999-06-12), artstudiotoppm (zip, 16,281 byte, updated 1999-06-12). The archives comes with precompiled DOS versions, and full source (known to compile under Linux).

font2pbm

This program converts Commodore 64 font files (must be stored as PRG files with starting addresses, or as ROM images without) to portable bitmaps (PBM). The program supports fonts in the sizes 1×1 characters (8×8 pixels), 1×2, 2×1 and 2×2. You can download the latest version, 1.1.0, here (updated 2025-03-30). The file is a 2990 byte GZip compressed Tar archive and contains the complete source code.

The source code can also be downloaded using Git from GitHub. If you make changes, patches are very welcome.