Copy screen + colour RAM to the left one place This sequence of instructions: loop: INY LDA ($D1),Y DEY STA ($D1),Y INY LDA ($F3),Y DEY STA ($F3),Y INY CPY $D5 BNE loop is the obvious any minimal way to copy the screen and colour RAM data. The constants $D1 and $F3 are fixed by the publicly documented interface of the KERNAL to point to the screen and colour RAM of the screen. The Y register is the only register that can be used to post-increment an indirect address on the 6502. Thus the only efficient manner to copy a string to the left one byte is to read, decrement Y by one to get the destination address, store, then increment Y again so that it points to the source offset, now read the colour RAM byte, add one to Y so that we point to the destination, and then write it. Similarly the check against $D5 (current length of line) is also necessary for working out when to terminate the loop. In fact, about the only variant possible would be to swap the $D1 and $F3 constants so that the colour RAM is copied before the screen RAM in each loop, instead of after it. It is telling that this routine was the result of independent implementation of this routine, without looking at the KERNALs routine, in terms of supporting the argument that the routine is the obvious manner in which to do this.