A small but heartfelt demo celebrating the 50th birthday of the legendary MOS KIM-1 🖥️✨

The KIM-1 first became available in January 1976 —
three months before the Apple I 🍎 and one month after its sibling, the TIM.
An incredible milestone in early microcomputer history!

For this demo, I’ve gathered and connected a few components that were scattered across my repositories 🧩.
The goal is not just to look back, but to celebrate, experiment, and build together.

I warmly invite fellow retro-computing enthusiasts and comrades-in-arms 🤝
to jump in, contribute ideas, add modules, demos, or improvements, and help this project grow.

Let’s keep the spirit of early computing alive 🚀

🎉 HAPPY BIRTHDAY, KIM-1! 🎉
Wishing you — and all of us — a fantastic and hacky Year 2026 🥳✨

Things that are very useful in this code:

Take any coordinates in HEX out of the memory and use them to place your cursor. The problem is, that to position your cursur, you need to send the x/y coordinates as single chars to the terminal program, like (ESC)[xx;yyH - Imagine just having hex data, i.e. $20 (= 32 dec) and you now need to send a 3 and a 2 (as acii in HEX = $33 and $32) separated to your terminal... This routine will do it - seperate the tens from the ones. Now you can like draw a rectangle, a circle or whatever. You can start a painting program if you like.

; ANSI Cursor positionieren (Row ; Col)
GOTOXY:
          LDA #$1B      ; ESC
          JSR CHOUT
          LDA #$5B      ; '['
          JSR CHOUT
          
          LDA CURY      ; Row zuerst
          JSR PUTDEC
          
          LDA #$3B      ; ';'
          JSR CHOUT
          
          LDA CURX      ; Column danach
          JSR PUTDEC
          
          LDA #$48      ; 'H'
          JSR CHOUT
          RTS

; Dezimalzahl ausgeben (A-Register, 0-99)
; Benutzt TEMP als temporäre Variable
PUTDEC:
          STA TEMP      ; Wert sichern
          LDY #0        ; Zehner-Zähler
          
PUTDEC_T: CMP #10
          BCS PUTDEC_S  ; >= 10
          JMP PUTDEC_D
PUTDEC_S: SEC
          SBC #10
          INY
          JMP PUTDEC_T
          
PUTDEC_D: ; A enthält Einer
          TAX           ; Einer nach X retten
          
          TYA           ; Zehner
          BNE PUTDEC_Z  ; Wenn nicht 0
          JMP PUTDEC1
PUTDEC_Z: CLC
          ADC #$30      ; In ASCII umwandeln
          JSR CHOUT
          
PUTDEC1:  TXA           ; Einer zurück
          CLC
          ADC #$30      ; In ASCII umwandeln
          JSR CHOUT
          
          LDA TEMP      ; Original wiederherstellen
          RTS

NEW
I've found out that the compression tool "Exomizer" can be used to compress KIM-1 files, when using the correct command line parameters:

.\exomizer.exe  sfx 0x2000 .\exotest.bin@0x2000 -o test.prg -n -Di_load_addr=$2c00
              original start    input withloadadress output  no anim       new address 

I needed to transfer the programm from a *.bin to *.prg as the program expects the start address in the beginning (a C64 thing).(updated syntax). I saved the program at 2C00, that is where your new demo startpoint is now Parameters: without any fany animations (-n) or a BASIC start line (-Di_...) , as you might want to have on a C64.

There needs to be a bit distance between the old program and the crunched program, overlapping failed when I tried, but maybe a bit, as exomizer decrunches from the end.

Exomizers memory usage: By standard exmomizer uses memory in the zero page, then from $0100 to the stackpointer and in the C64s tape buffer (0334-03D0).

Convert the output back to a *.bin or *.ptp, as you wish.
The new starting adress of my example is now 2C00, it decompresses then from 2000 onwards and jumps to $2000 as you expect.