No, but that's an easy enough mistake to make :) — It's called 38-column mode, and when enabled the VIC shrinks both borders in by 8 pixels, and then offsets the screen according to the x-scroll register bits.
[Edit: another source says it's actually 7-pixels hidden on the left, and 9 on the right. But whatever: same principle, the screen is shrunk by 16 pixels in total horizontally]
Which meant that at most only 39 characters were visible across the screen — with two of those, one at each end of the row, being partially visible — and that applies to both the character screen and its associated colour RAM. Only 38 characters were visible when the x scroll register was zero, and as soon as one shifted to a value of 1-7, the 39th column became visible (and the 1st one became partially offscreen). But the 40th column is never visible when in that mode.
"When scrolling in the X direction, it is necessary to place the VIC-II chip into 38 column mode. This gives new data a place to scroll from. When scrolling LEFT, the new data should be placed on the right. When scrolling RIGHT the new data should be placed on the left. Please note that there are still 40 columns to screen memory, but only 38 are visible."
— But it's discussed on a handful of other pages too, if you google.
[Edit: another source says it's actually 7-pixels hidden on the left, and 9 on the right. But whatever: same principle, the screen is shrunk by 16 pixels in total horizontally]
Which meant that at most only 39 characters were visible across the screen — with two of those, one at each end of the row, being partially visible — and that applies to both the character screen and its associated colour RAM. Only 38 characters were visible when the x scroll register was zero, and as soon as one shifted to a value of 1-7, the 39th column became visible (and the 1st one became partially offscreen). But the 40th column is never visible when in that mode.
For more info see:
http://www.devili.iki.fi/Computers/Commodore/C64/Programmers...
"When scrolling in the X direction, it is necessary to place the VIC-II chip into 38 column mode. This gives new data a place to scroll from. When scrolling LEFT, the new data should be placed on the right. When scrolling RIGHT the new data should be placed on the left. Please note that there are still 40 columns to screen memory, but only 38 are visible."
— But it's discussed on a handful of other pages too, if you google.