The Programmers Aid cartridge was a cartridge that helped you write programs a little quicker.

With the cartridge inserted, on first boot, you see nothing different. You will be presented with the CBM BASIC V2 screen.

Type SYS 28681 and press Return. This will load the cartridge program and display Programmers' Aid.

Now you have some really useful shortcuts.

Say we want F1 to be PRINT instead of LIST, we can do this easily by typing the following command:

And hitting enter. Now when we press F1 it would type PRINT.

The Programmers Aid also has many commands you can type into BASIC to perform tasks faster.

For example, DELETE 20 will delete the line 20.

Typing AUTO 10 will start entering program lines and every time you press Return it automatically adds 10 to the next line, so it would start at 10, then the next line would be 20, 30 and so on. Pressing enter on a blank line will exit.

As well as BASIC commands, there are useful screen commands using the Control key.