使用说明
TDZ C64 Knowledge
MCP server for managing and searching Commodore 64 documentation. Ingest PDFs, text, Markdown, HTML, Excel, and web pages into a searchable knowledge base accessible via Claude Code or other MCP clients.
🚀 Quick Start
# 1. Install
python -m venv .venv
.venv\Scripts\activate
pip install -e .
# 2. Configure Claude Code
claude mcp add tdz-c64-knowledge -- .venv\Scripts\python.exe server.py
# 3. Add documents
.venv\Scripts\python.exe cli.py add-folder "C:\c64docs" --tags reference --recursive
# 4. Search via Claude Code
# Ask: "Search the C64 docs for VIC-II sprite registers"
See QUICKSTART.md for detailed setup.
Features
Search & Retrieval
- FTS5 full-text search - 480x faster queries (50ms vs 24s)
- Semantic search - Find by meaning, not keywords (e.g., "movable objects" → "sprites")
- RAG question answering - Answer questions by synthesizing docs with citations
- Fuzzy search - Typo tolerance ("VIC2" → "VIC-II", "asembly" → "assembly")
- Progressive refinement - Search within results to narrow down
- Hybrid search - Combines keyword + semantic with configurable weighting
- Similarity search - Discover related documentation automatically
- Query preprocessing - NLTK stemming and stopword removal
- Smart tagging - AI-powered tag suggestions by category
- Table/code search - Search extracted tables and code blocks
Document Management
- Multi-format - PDF, TXT, MD, HTML, Excel, web scraping, and (optional
markitdownextra) DOCX, PPTX, EPUB, CSV, JSON, XML - install withpip install -e ".[markitdown]"; disable at runtime withTDZ_MARKITDOWN=0even when installed. PDF and ZIP (HVSC SID archives) never route through markitdown - seedocs/ARCHITECTURE.md's "Extending File Type Support" for why. - Duplicate detection - Content-based deduplication
- Chunked retrieval - Get specific sections without loading entire docs
- Metadata extraction - Author, subject, page numbers
- Persistent index - Documents stay indexed between sessions
AI-Powered Features
- Entity extraction - Extract hardware, memory addresses, instructions, concepts (5000x faster with C64 regex patterns)
- Relationship mapping - Co-occurrence analysis with distance-based strength scoring
- Document comparison - Side-by-side analysis with similarity scores
- Natural language query translation - Parse queries into structured search parameters
- Anomaly detection - ML-based baseline learning for URL-sourced content (3400+ docs/second)
- Temporal analysis - Event detection, timeline construction, historical context (5 event types, 8 date formats)
- Advanced visualizations - 3D knowledge graphs, hierarchical bundling, Sankey flow diagrams
Wiki Export (NEW in v2.23.15)
- Static HTML wiki - Export entire knowledge base to browsable website
- Document similarity map - 2D visualization using UMAP/t-SNE dimensionality reduction
- Interactive timeline - Horizontal scrollable timeline with zoom levels and event filters
- Knowledge graph - D3.js force-directed graph (178 entities, 20 relationships)
- Enhanced UI - Explanation boxes, prominent ASK AI button, file type detection
- Clickable clusters - Browse k-means clusters with linked documents
- No server required - Pure client-side JavaScript, works offline
- Full-text search - Fuse.js powered search across all content
- See WIKI_EXPORT_GUIDE.md for usage
REST API (Optional)
- 18 endpoints - Full CRUD, search, analytics, export
- OpenAPI/Swagger docs - Interactive API at
/api/docs - API authentication - Secure via X-API-Key header
- See docs/REST_API.md for details
Performance
- Scalability - Tested to 5,000+ documents
- Concurrent throughput - 5,712 queries/sec (10 workers)
- Lazy loading - 100k+ document support
- Search caching - 50-100x speedup for repeated queries
Installation (Windows)
Prerequisites
- Python 3.10+ - https://python.org (check "Add Python to PATH")
- uv (recommended) or pip:
pip install uv
Setup
cd C:\Users\YourName\mcp-servers\tdz-c64-knowledge
# Using uv (faster)
uv venv
.venv\Scripts\activate
uv pip install mcp pypdf rank-bm25 nltk
# Or using pip
python -m venv .venv
.venv\Scripts\activate
pip install mcp pypdf rank-bm25 nltk
# Test
python server.py # Press Ctrl+C to stop
Configuration
Claude Code
claude mcp add tdz-c64-knowledge -- C:\path\.venv\Scripts\python.exe C:\path\server.py
Or add to .claude/settings.json:
{
"mcpServers": {
"tdz-c64-knowledge": {
"command": "C:\\path\\.venv\\Scripts\\python.exe",
"args": ["C:\\path\\server.py"],
"env": {
"TDZ_DATA_DIR": "C:\\c64-knowledge-data"
}
}
}
}
Claude Desktop
Add to %APPDATA%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json:
{
"mcpServers": {
"tdz-c64-knowledge": {
"command": "C:\\path\\.venv\\Scripts\\python.exe",
"args": ["C:\\path\\server.py"],
"env": {
"TDZ_DATA_DIR": "C:\\c64-knowledge-data"
}
}
}
}
Environment Variables
| Variable | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|
TDZ_DATA_DIR |
Database directory | ~/.tdz-c64-knowledge |
TDZ_MCP_TRANSPORT |
stdio (client spawns the server) or http (one hosted instance serves several machines) |
stdio |
TDZ_MCP_HOST |
Bind address for the HTTP transport | 127.0.0.1 |
TDZ_MCP_PORT |
Port for the HTTP transport | 8765 |
TDZ_API_KEYS |
Comma-separated API keys; shared with the REST API. Required to bind the HTTP transport off loopback | (unset) |
TDZ_MCP_ALLOW_INSECURE |
Disables a refusal. 1 permits the MCP HTTP transport to bind off loopback with no TDZ_API_KEYS configured, i.e. no authentication at all |
0 |
TDZ_MCP_ALLOWED_HOSTS |
Host values accepted by DNS-rebinding protection; * disables it |
(unset) |
TDZ_MARKITDOWN |
Set to 0 to disable the markitdown fallback extraction (.docx, .pptx, .epub, .csv, .json, .xml) even when the markitdown extra is installed |
1 |
TDZ_ALLOW_CWD |
Widens the path allowlist. 1 adds the process's current working directory to the paths add_document/scrape_url may use, on top of ALLOWED_DOCS_DIRS |
0 |
TDZ_REST_ALLOW_INSECURE |
Disables a refusal. 1 lets the REST API (rest_server.py) bind with no TDZ_API_KEYS configured, i.e. no authentication at all |
0 |
TDZ_RESPECT_ROBOTS |
Honour robots.txt when scraping. 0 overrides it (self-hosted mirrors only) |
1 |
TDZ_USER_AGENT |
User-Agent string sent on outbound scrapes | tdz-c64-knowledge/<version> (+https://github.com/Thordanielz/tdz-c64-knowledge) |
TDZ_DEEPSID_BASE_URL |
Base URL for DeepSID ingestion (add_deepsid_document/add_deepsid_folder) |
https://deepsid.chordian.net |
TDZ_DB_BUSY_TIMEOUT_MS |
SQLite busy-timeout, in ms, for WAL-mode concurrent server processes | 30000 |
TDZ_TOOL_TIMEOUT_S |
Max seconds an ordinary MCP tool call may run before it is aborted; 0 disables the bound (unbounded, not zero seconds) |
600 |
TDZ_LONG_TOOL_TIMEOUT_S |
Same bound, applied instead of TDZ_TOOL_TIMEOUT_S to tools flagged as long-running; 0 disables it |
0 (unbounded) |
TDZ_TOOL_LOCK_WAIT_S |
Max seconds a tool call waits to acquire the shared dispatch lock before giving up; 0 disables the bound |
600 |
TDZ_PROGRESS_INTERVAL_S |
Seconds between progress notifications on a long-running tool call | 15 |
TDZ_EMBEDDINGS_LOAD_TIMEOUT_S |
Max seconds to wait for the sentence-transformers model to load on first semantic-search use before continuing in the background | 20 |
TDZ_NLTK_IMPORT_TIMEOUT_S |
Max seconds to wait for the lazy NLTK import/download before giving up | 5 |
TDZ_STDERR_LOG_LEVEL |
Console log level; INFO restores pre-quiet-mode verbosity |
WARNING |
TDZ_RECOVER_EXTRACTION_JOBS |
Recover interrupted extraction jobs found stale at startup. 0 disables recovery |
1 |
TDZ_EXTRACTION_STALE_MINUTES |
Minutes since last update before an in-progress extraction job is considered stale and eligible for recovery | 60 |
TDZ_EXTRACTION_RECOVER_LIMIT |
Max number of stale extraction jobs recovered per startup pass | 100 |
USE_FTS5 |
Enable FTS5 search (recommended) | 0 |
USE_SEMANTIC_SEARCH |
Enable semantic search | 0 |
SEMANTIC_MODEL |
Sentence-transformers model | all-MiniLM-L6-v2 |
USE_BM25 |
Enable BM25 fallback | 1 |
USE_QUERY_PREPROCESSING |
Enable NLTK preprocessing | 1 |
USE_FUZZY_SEARCH |
Enable fuzzy search | 1 |
FUZZY_THRESHOLD |
Fuzzy similarity (0-100) | 80 |
USE_OCR |
Enable OCR for scanned PDFs | 1 |
TESSERACT_PATH |
Tesseract exe or its directory, when not on PATH | (unset) |
SEARCH_CACHE_SIZE |
Max cached results | 100 |
SEARCH_CACHE_TTL |
Cache TTL (seconds) | 300 |
ALLOWED_DOCS_DIRS |
Document directory whitelist | None |
EMBEDDING_WINDOW_WORDS |
Words per encoder window when building embeddings (0 = whole chunk, no windowing) | 200 |
EMBEDDING_WINDOW_OVERLAP |
Word overlap between consecutive embedding windows | 40 |
RAG_CONTEXT_TOKENS |
Token budget for answer_question's LLM context |
8000 |
HYBRID_FUSION |
rrf (rank fusion) or weighted (legacy normalized-score blend) |
rrf |
RRF_K |
Rank-fusion damping constant for hybrid_search |
60 |
USE_RERANKER |
Rerank hybrid/semantic results with a cross-encoder | 0 |
RERANK_MODEL |
Cross-encoder model for reranking | cross-encoder/ms-marco-MiniLM-L-6-v2 |
RERANK_CANDIDATES |
First-stage candidates fed to the reranker | 30 |
USE_ANSWER_VERIFICATION |
Check answer_question's cited claims against their source before trusting them |
1 |
VERIFY_PASSAGE_CHARS |
Max characters per cited source shown to the grounding check | 800 |
USE_NLI_VERIFICATION |
Use a local NLI cross-encoder for claim verification instead of a second LLM call | 0 |
NLI_MODEL |
Cross-encoder model for NLI-based claim verification | cross-encoder/nli-deberta-v3-base |
NLI_MAX_LENGTH |
Max input tokens for the NLI model | 512 |
Search Features
FTS5 Full-Text Search (Recommended)
Enable with USE_FTS5=1 for maximum performance:
- 480x faster than BM25
- Native SQLite BM25 ranking
- Porter stemming tokenizer
Semantic Search
Enable with USE_SEMANTIC_SEARCH=1:
- Meaning-based search (e.g., "movable objects" finds "sprites")
- FAISS vector similarity with sentence-transformers
- ~7-16ms per query after embeddings built
- Pre-build embeddings:
pip install sentence-transformers faiss-cpu
Phrase Search
Use double quotes for exact phrases:
search_docs(query='"VIC-II chip" registers')
Fuzzy Search
Handles typos automatically with USE_FUZZY_SEARCH=1:
- "VIC-I" → "VIC-II" (83% similarity)
- "grafics" → "graphics" (88% similarity)
- Configurable threshold (default: 80%)
OCR for Scanned PDFs
Automatic with USE_OCR=1:
- Detects scanned PDFs (< 100 chars extracted)
- Uses Tesseract OCR
- Install:
pip install pytesseract pdf2image Pillow+ Tesseract binary - ~1-2 seconds per page
Temporal Analysis & Visualizations
Extract events, construct timelines, and visualize knowledge graphs.
Event Detection
Automatically detect significant events in documents:
- 5 Event Types - Product releases, company milestones, technical innovations, cultural events, version updates
- 8 Date Formats - Full dates, month-year, year ranges, decades, parenthetical dates
- Confidence Scoring - Pattern matching with proximity-based confidence (0.0-1.0)
- Entity Association - Automatically link entities to events
# Extract events from a document
result = kb.extract_document_events('doc_id', min_confidence=0.7)
# Returns: event_count, filtered_count, stored_count, events list
Timeline Construction
Build chronological timelines with flexible querying:
- Automatic Timeline Building - Chronologically sorted by date (YYYYMMDD integer sort)
- Category Organization - Group by decade-type combinations (e.g., "1980s-release")
- Importance Levels - 1-5 scale based on confidence
- Date Range Filtering - Query events by year range, type, importance
# Build timeline from events
timeline_result = kb.build_timeline(min_confidence=0.5)
# Query timeline
timeline = kb.get_timeline(start_year=1980, end_year=1989, min_importance=3)
# Get historical context
context = kb.get_historical_context(year=1982, context_years=2)
Interactive Visualizations
Generate interactive HTML visualizations with Plotly and NetworkX:
Timeline Visualizations:
- Interactive Timeline - Horizontal timeline with zoom/pan, color-coded by event type
- Event Network - Spring layout showing event relationships
- Trend Charts - Multi-subplot dashboard (bar chart, stacked area, cumulative line)
Advanced Graph Visualizations:
- 3D Knowledge Graph - Interactive 3D entity-relationship graph with rotation controls
- Hierarchical Bundling - Circular layout with curved edges bundled through center
- Sankey Diagrams - Topic flow over time (decade or year grouping)
# Generate visualizations
kb.visualize_timeline(start_year=1980, end_year=1990, output_path="timeline.html")
kb.visualize_knowledge_graph_3d(max_entities=50, output_path="graph_3d.html")
kb.visualize_hierarchical_bundling(max_entities=30, output_path="bundling.html")
kb.visualize_topic_flow_sankey(time_period='decade', output_path="flow.html")
MCP Tools for Timeline
4 timeline-specific MCP tools:
extract_document_events- Extract and store events from documentsget_timeline- Query chronological timeline with filterssearch_events_by_date- Search events by date range and typeget_historical_context- Get events around a specific year
See PHASE3_TEMPORAL_ANALYSIS.md for complete documentation.
Tools
95 MCP tools organized by category. Key tools listed below.
Search Tools
search_docs - Full-text search
search_docs(query="SID register", max_results=5, tags=["sid"])
semantic_search - Meaning-based search
semantic_search(query="How do sprites work?", max_results=5)
hybrid_search - Combined keyword + semantic
hybrid_search(query="SID chip", semantic_weight=0.7, max_results=10)
answer_question - RAG-based Q&A with citations
answer_question(
question="How do I program sprites on the VIC-II?",
max_sources=5,
search_mode="auto"
)
search_figures - Search text OCR'd out of document figures
search_figures(query="raster interrupt", max_results=10)
Finds content that exists only inside images - memory-map diagrams, register tables, pinout drawings - which plain document search cannot reach. Requires a figure-OCR pass first (see below).
Figure OCR Tools
Ingest-time OCR only runs on PDFs detected as entirely scanned. A normal text PDF gets its text layer indexed while its embedded figures are never read - and in C64 documentation those figures are often where the reference data actually lives. These tools run a background batch pass over PDFs already in the knowledge base, extracting each embedded image and OCRing it into searchable text stored separately from the document's own text.
batch_ocr_figures - Queue the whole knowledge base
batch_ocr_figures(limit=50, reprocess=false)
Returns immediately; work proceeds on the background worker.
ocr_document_figures - Queue one document
ocr_document_figures(doc_id="89d0943d6009")
figure_ocr_status - Coverage and pending-job report
figure_ocr_status()
get_document_figures - List one document's figures with OCR text
get_document_figures(doc_id="89d0943d6009", with_text_only=true)
Requires PyMuPDF, Tesseract, and USE_OCR=1. Note this path does not
need Poppler - it rasterizes with PyMuPDF rather than pdf2image, unlike the
scanned-page OCR fallback. figure_ocr_status reports exactly what is missing
if the feature is unavailable. If Tesseract is installed but not on PATH,
point TESSERACT_PATH at the executable or its directory. Tuning:
TDZ_FIGURE_MIN_WIDTH, TDZ_FIGURE_MIN_HEIGHT (ignore images too small to be
figures) and TDZ_FIGURE_MIN_CHARS (discard OCR noise).
By default only embedded images are read. Typeset manuals usually draw their
schematics, memory maps and timing diagrams as vector paths, which embed no
image at all - set TDZ_FIGURE_RASTERIZE_PAGES=1 to also render each page's
drawing regions (at TDZ_FIGURE_RASTER_DPI, default 200) and OCR those. Only
the clustered drawing regions are rendered, never the whole page: a full-page
render would OCR the body text a second time on top of what the PDF's own text
layer already contributed. Clusters covering more than
TDZ_FIGURE_RASTER_MAX_AREA (default 0.9) of the page are treated as borders
and skipped. Each row records its source (embedded or vector).
Rasterizing is much more expensive per page, so pair it with
TDZ_FIGURE_OCR_WORKERS (default 1): OCR blocks in a tesseract subprocess
rather than in Python, so a pool scales roughly with core count.
fuzzy_search - Typo-tolerant search
fuzzy_search(query="VIC2 asembly", similarity_threshold=80)
search_within_results - Progressive refinement
# Broad search, then refine
results = search_docs(query="VIC-II", max_results=50)
refined = search_within_results(results, "sprite collision", max_results=5)
find_similar - Find related documents
find_similar(doc_id="abc123", max_results=5)
Document Management
add_document - Add a file
add_document(
filepath="C:/docs/c64_ref.pdf",
title="C64 Programmer's Reference",
tags=["reference", "memory-map"]
)
add_documents_bulk - Bulk import
add_documents_bulk(
directory="C:/c64docs",
pattern="**/*.{pdf,txt}",
tags=["reference"],
recursive=true
)
list_docs - List all documents
get_chunk - Get specific chunk
get_chunk(doc_id="abc123", chunk_id=5)
remove_document - Remove a document
remove_documents_bulk - Bulk remove by IDs or tags
remove_documents_bulk(tags=["outdated"])
check_updates - Check for file changes
check_updates(auto_update=false)
URL Scraping
scrape_url - Scrape documentation website
scrape_url(
url="https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/VIC",
tags=["wiki"],
depth=2,
threads=5
)
rescrape_document - Re-scrape for updates
rescrape_document(doc_id="abc123", force=false)
check_url_updates - Check all scraped docs
check_url_updates(auto_rescrape=false, check_structure=true)
AI & Analytics
extract_entities - Extract named entities
extract_entities(doc_id="abc123", confidence_threshold=0.6)
search_entities - Search across entities
search_entities(query="VIC-II", entity_types=["hardware"])
get_entity_analytics - Comprehensive entity statistics
extract_entity_relationships - Extract co-occurrences
extract_entity_relationships(doc_id="abc123", min_strength=0.3)
search_entity_pair - Find docs with entity pair
search_entity_pair(entity1="VIC-II", entity2="sprite")
compare_documents - Side-by-side comparison
compare_documents(doc_id_1="abc", doc_id_2="def", comparison_type="full")
suggest_tags - AI-powered tag suggestions
suggest_tags(doc_id="abc123", confidence_threshold=0.6)
get_tags_by_category - Browse tags by category
translate_query - Parse natural language queries
translate_query(query="find sprites on VIC-II chip")
Export Tools
export_entities - Export to CSV/JSON
export_entities(format="csv", output_path="entities.csv", min_confidence=0.7)
export_relationships - Export relationships
export_relationships(format="json", output_path="rels.json", min_strength=0.5)
System
kb_stats - Knowledge base statistics
health_check - System diagnostics
Data Storage
SQLite database with 22 tables:
- documents - Document metadata
- chunks - Chunked content (1500 words, 200 overlap)
- document_tables - Extracted PDF tables
- document_code_blocks - Detected code blocks
- document_entities - Extracted entities
- entity_relationships - Co-occurrence tracking
- Plus: summaries, extraction_jobs, monitoring_history, etc.
Benefits:
- Lazy loading (metadata at startup, chunks on-demand)
- ACID transactions
- Scalable to 100k+ documents
- FTS5 full-text indexes
Default location: ~/.tdz-c64-knowledge or TDZ_DATA_DIR
Usage Examples
Ask Claude Code:
- "Search the C64 docs for SID voice registers"
- "What does the memory map say about $D400?"
- "Find information about sprite multiplexing"
- "Add C:/docs/mapping_the_c64.pdf with tags memory-map, reference"
- "How do I program raster interrupts on the VIC-II?" (uses RAG)
Suggested Tags
Organize docs with consistent tags:
reference,memory-map,basic,assemblysid,vic-ii,cia,kernalhardware,disk,graphics,sound
Troubleshooting
"pypdf not installed" - Run: pip install pypdf rank-bm25
"mcp module not found" - Run: pip install mcp
Server not responding - Use Python from virtual environment, not system Python
PDF extraction issues - Use OCR or add plain text version
BM25 issues - Check logs in TDZ_DATA_DIR/server.log, try USE_BM25=0
Development
Testing
pip install -e ".[dev]"
# Run all tests
pytest test_card_updates.py test_pdf_viewer.py -v
# With coverage
pytest test_card_updates.py -v --cov=server --cov-report=term
Test Coverage:
test_card_updates.py- Card upsert/supersede semantics and chunk cleanup on removetest_pdf_viewer.py- PDF viewer support (requires PyMuPDF)
A larger suite (35 files) lives under archive/tests/ but is not currently wired into CI. CI
itself only runs test_card_updates.py; test_pdf_viewer.py is included above for local runs
but requires PyMuPDF (pip install -e ".[dev]" covers it).
CI/CD
GitHub Actions workflow tests on Python 3.10/3.11/3.12 across Windows/Linux/macOS with Ruff code quality checks.
Documentation
Core Documentation
- README.md (this file) - Installation, features, tools, usage
- QUICKSTART.md - Fast setup guide (5 minutes)
- ARCHITECTURE.md - Technical deep dive, database schema, algorithms
- CONTEXT.md - Project status, quick stats, version history
- CLAUDE.md - Quick reference for Claude Code integration
- CHANGELOG.md - Complete version history
Feature Documentation
Browse docs/ for detailed guides on specific features:
API & Integration:
- REST API - FastAPI REST server (18 endpoints)
AI-Powered Features:
- Entity Extraction - Extract hardware, memory addresses, instructions
- Anomaly Detection - ML-based URL content monitoring
- Summarization - AI-powered document summarization
Data Sources:
- Web Scraping - Scrape documentation websites
- Web Monitoring - Track URL-sourced content changes
Setup & Deployment:
- Deployment Guide - Production deployment
- Docker Setup - Docker configuration
- Environment Setup - Environment variables
- Poppler Setup - Poppler installation for PDFs
User Interfaces:
- GUI Guide - Streamlit web interface
Development:
- Testing Guide - Test suite and CI/CD
- Examples - Usage examples and performance analysis
- Monitoring Setup - Scheduled monitoring configuration
- Roadmap - Future improvements and features
Version History
v2.23.0 - RAG Question Answering & Advanced Search (Phase 2 Complete)
- RAG-based answer_question with citations
- Fuzzy search with rapidfuzz
- Progressive search refinement
- Smart tagging system
v2.22.0 - Search Improvements (Phase 1 Complete)
- Enhanced entity analytics
- C64-specific regex patterns (5000x faster)
- Performance optimizations
v2.21.0 - Anomaly Detection
- ML-based baseline learning
- 1500x performance improvement
v2.18.0 - REST API & Background Processing
- FastAPI REST server (18 endpoints)
- Background entity extraction
v2.15.0+ - Entity Intelligence
- Entity extraction, relationships, analytics
See CONTEXT.md for complete version history.
License
MIT License - Use freely for your retro computing projects!