as "black boxes", were available under the counter; these connected two C1530 tape decks together at the C64's connection point, permitting a copy to be made whilst loading a game. This overcame the difficulties in direct dubbing of later games using the high-speed loaders that were developed to overcome the very long load times. BASIC Like most computers from the late 1970s and 1980s, the Commodore 64 came with a version of the BASIC programming language. It was used for both writing software and for performing the duties of an operating system such as loading software and formatting disks. The onboard BASIC programming language offered no easy way to tap the machine's advanced graphics and sound capabilities. Accessing these associated memory addresses to make use of the advanced features required using the PEEK and POKE commands, third-party BASIC extensions, such as Simons' BASIC, or to program in assembly language. Commodore had a better implementation of BASIC but chose to ship the C64 with the same BASIC 2.0 used in the VIC-20 to minimize cost. This, however, did not stop countless people making thousands of programs in the BASIC V2 language, and teaching people their first steps in computer programming. Music The MOS Technology 6581 SID is the sound chip for the C64, for which many music software programs were written. One musical software tool for the C64 was Kawasaki Synthesizer, created in 1983. Development tools Aside from games and office applications such as word processors, spreadsheets, and database programs, the C64 was well equipped with development tools from Commodore as well as third-party vendors. Various assembler solutions were available; the MIKRO assembler came in ROM cartridge form and integrated seamlessly with the standard BASIC screen editor. The PAL Assembler by Brad Templeton was also popular. Several companies sold BASIC compilers, C compilers and Pascal compilers, and a subset of Ada, to mention but a few popular languages available for the machine. The likely most popular entertainment oriented development suite was the Shoot'Em-Up Construction Kit, affectionately known as SEUCK. SEUCK allowed those non-skilled in programming to create original, professional-looking shooting games. Garry Kitchen's Gamemaker and Arcade Game Construction Kit also allowed non-programmers to create simple games with little effort. Text adventure game tools included The Quill and Graphic Adventure Creator development suites. The Pinball Construction Set gave users a pinball machine to design. Modern-day development tools Software development on the Commodore