Improving the Laser Genius Manual for the Commodore 64
Here is a Dropbox link to an updated manual in pdf format for Laser Genius, an assembler for the Commodore 64. Latest revision is from May 2025.
Laser Genius is a macro assembler and monitor suite of applications for developing in assembly language on the Commodore 64. Laser Genius was developed by Oasis and Ocean software companies in the 1980s. These are publishers of other great development software including Basic Lightning (game development in BASIC), Machine Lightning (predecessor of Laser Genius), White Lightning (game development in Forth).
This was created for educational purposes only.
The linked PDF was created from the scan of the original manual, found on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/Laser_Genius_1985_Ocean
That was given as input to Google Gemini 2.5, which converted it to markdown where it was further modified by Gemini and by hand, then imported into Apple Pages for final formatting before being exported as a PDF. Page numbers and some text are different from the original. Formatting has been changed. Some little text was added when things were unclear.
Brief Review of Laser Genius
As far as assemblers go on the Commodore 64, this is one of the best ones I've used. It uses line editing like BASIC, so it's not as easy to edit code as Turbo Macro Pro. However, it has other helpful features like making it easy to print out the results of any command, and it offers what I think is the best debugger experience of any piece of software on the Commodore. In addition, the monitor contains an entire Forth interpreter which hooks into the debugging facilities.
Being a command interface, it offers an experimental approach to software development -- there is no need to break out of the editor to check your math or convert values. For me, it made iterating on ideas and code very easy.
Modern development experiences will always beat what the Commodore can offer, but for those of us who enjoy bedroom coding like it's 1985, Laser Genius won't disappoint.