With all of the e-book work I've been doing on my eBookMan website, I thought, why not try and encode one of the books for the Commodore 64? So, I chose a recent favorite find of mine, “Beware, The Usurpers!”, by Robert W. Krepps. I found it to be a good read and a nice size to try out my idea.

First, I had to try and find something to act as an e-reader. I remembered something I stumbled upon a few years ago, it was a text reader that was developed by the Loadstar folks for the disk magazine, “CommodoreFree”. It's a pretty simple text reader but, the major advantage of it is that it's relatively easy to compose SEQ files for it.

Because the reader doesn't have bookmark support, I decided to break out and compile the SEQ files by book chapter. So, once you launch the reader, you choose which chapter you wish to read.

Once you choose the chapter, the text is loaded up and displayed in the reader. By clicking on the text with the pointer, using the joystick and fire button, you can advance the text line-by-line. To advance by page, move the pointer to the bottom boarder and press the fire button on the joystick.

It's simple, but this seems to be a pretty effective way of reading a book on the C64. Ideally, it would probably be more comfortable to read white text on a black screen, but I don't know Assembly, so I guess it's just going to have to be black text on a white screen.

If you want to read this e-book for yourself, download these two disk images and LOAD “QUIKMENU.PKD” then RUN.

Beware, the Usurpers Side 1.D64
Beware, the Usurpers Side 2.D64

Enjoy!

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