The Complete Commodore 64 ROM Disassembly is identical in purpose to the Milton Bathurst's Inside The Commodore 64, a pure reference guide for machine-code programmers and those who want to see how the machine code is written.

There isn't a great deal to say about ROM disassemblies except from commenting on layouts and formats - and price. This book at £5.95 is under half the price of Bathurst's... but it is lacking in content and presentation.

Pages 7 to 34 give a breakdown of all the system variables, main ROM entry points and memory map with 6526 (CIAs) and 6581 (SID) diagram charts. Surprisingly though, there's no VIC chip detail; and all of this information (apart from the ROM entry points) is available in the Programmer's Reference Guide.

The disassembly itself is from pages 35 to 128 with about 150 bytes disassembled per page. I was annoyed to see that a disassembler has been run straight to a printer with no attempt made to document tables of commands, jump vectors or initial values. In fact, the only information given is a title at the start of each block corresponding with the ROM entry points and saying what the code does.

The reader would have to spend a great deal of time with this before obtaining any useful information. And it's my belief that any machine-code programmer could have produced this book if they had a printer, disassembler and a little knowledge about the C64.

If you want a book that will give you information about the C64 ROMs, Inside The Commodore 64 would be a much better buy - even at twice the price. Save your money.