Commodore 64 Games Books from Melbourne House

When I got my Commodore 64 for Christmas in about 1984 or 1985 it came with a book called Commodore 64 Games Book by Clifford and Mark Ramshaw, and published by Melbourne House.

This book featured 30 games which you had to type in yourself. Each was printed over at least a couple of pages. This is how things were done at the time.

Because it was expected that you were going to make some mistakes typing in hundreds of lines of code, the first program in the book was Chexsum -- a program that you could use to check if you had any errors when you finished typing in one of the games.

The idea was, you would type in Chexsum, save it and then load it first before typing in any of the games. Then you would run the Chexsum code -- located at a line number higher than any of the games needed -- and it would produce a list of numbers that you could compare with the Chexsum codes at the end of each game listing. If any numbers didn't match then you could see which line was wrong and fix it.

After the excitement of a new Commodore 64 and a few games wore off, I looked through this book and identified Flight Simulator as the first game I was going to try. Being about twelve or thirteen, and having little or no experience with typing meant that this was a very long process and I'm sure Chexsum probably solved many problems.

If you have played this Flight Simulator game yourself, then you can probably imagine my disappointment when I first played it and found that it wasn't much of a simulator -- you are just flying in the dark and the whole game just comes down to a few things being right at landing time.



I persisted and over months or years gradually worked my way through most of the games, maybe all of them.

Most of the games are pretty ordinary, but the book does teach you about BASIC games programming and what can be achieved on a Commodore 64.

I never knew until in recent years -- forty years later -- that there was a second book. I haven't looked at these games yet.



You can read the first book and the second book online at the Internet Archive.

Some of the games can be found in games databases and some can be downloaded.

Someone (YouTuber OldSkoolCoder) has also typed in the games so you can find the listings for the first book and the second book on a GitHub. However, I did try a few of these in the VICE emulator and found that they needed a little work with some of the special characters and text before they would work.