Listing The 1541 Directory

I own a Commodore 64 and a 1541 disk drive, and I have a question: How do I go about listing the directory of a disk?

Danny Chu

After making sure that your computer and disk drive are on, and no BASIC programs are in memory, insert your disk into the drive, and type LOAD "$",8 and press RETURN. The disk drive will whir and spin a bit. After the drive has stopped and the READY with the blinking cursor is displayed on the screen, type LIST and press RETURN. The directory will be displayed on the screen. To slow down the listing, press CTRL on the keyboard.

However, there is one thing to watch out for. Listing the directory using this method puts it in the BASIC programming area, so any BASIC program in memory will be overwritten. Also, when you're through looking at the directory, enter NEW to clear the BASIC memory pointers before loading a BASIC program.

If you are searching through several disks for a particular filename, you can have the LOAD command display only that filename. Let's say you're looking for a game called "Space Game." Here's the format:

LOAD "$0:SPACE GAME",8

Type LIST, and if the filename is found it will be displayed on the screen. If the filename is not on that disk, only the disk header (name of the disk) will be displayed. If you forget how you spelled the name of the file you want, use the wildcard feature, represented by an asterisk. For example, if you enter LOAD "$0:SPACE* ", 8 it will display all filenames starting with the letters SPACE such as SPACE GAME, SPACEMAN, etc. If you enter LOAD "$0:S*",8 you'll get all the filenames starting with an S.