KERNAL
Sign in to saveKERNAL is Commodore's name for the ROM-resident operating system core in its 8-bit home computers: from the original PET of 1977, followed by the extended but related versions used in its successors: the VIC-20; Commodore 64; Plus/4; Commodore 16; and Commodore 128.
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Article
9 sectionsContents
- Description
- Example
- The name
- On device-independent I/O
- See also
- Notes
- References
- Bibliography
- External links
KERNAL is Commodore's name for the ROM-resident operating system core in its 8-bit home computers: from the original PET of 1977, followed by the extended but related versions used in its successors: the VIC-20; Commodore 64; Plus/4; Commodore 16; and Commodore 128.
==Description== The Commodore 8-bit machines' KERNAL consists of the low-level, close-to-the-hardware OS routines roughly equivalent to the BIOS in IBM PC compatibles (in contrast to the BASIC interpreter routines, also located in ROM) as well as higher-level, device-independent I/O functionality. It is user-callable via a jump table in RAM whose central (oldest) part, for reasons of backwards compatibility, remains largely identical throughout the whole 8-bit series. The KERNAL ROM occupies the last 8 KB of the 8-bit CPU's 64 KB address space ($E000–$FFFF).