All Questions

I'm setting up a 486 PC (aiming for around 1994 or so) and I have the following device drivers set up in DOS 6.22: HIMEM.SYS EMM386.EXE ANSI.SYS SBIDE.SYS CTMOUSE.EXE SMARTDRV.EXE DOSKEY.COM MSCDEX....

What's a good way to estimate the total number of 6502 or 8051 chips (or workalikes, pin-compatible or not, but not including software or FPGA emulators) ever manufactured or sold?

I'm working on a custom project, a computer/clock with LEDs and switches with the style of the original Altair 8800. I believe the original was aluminum, with silk screening, and with switches mounted ...

While going through the memoirs of a witness of the Holocaust in Germany, I stumbled upon the passage: there in Rudolfstadt we had a new holorydmachine from the Americans - in the barn of a farmer -...

Many 8-bit processors, such as Motorola's 6800 and MOS Technology's 6502 make use of a single pin to indicate to the rest of the system whether the CPU wishes to read from or write to a memory ...

Among the BESM-6 games there was a "Moon Landing" game; the only one available in both English and Russian versions. The binary survived but it is not runnable (yet). The description said that its ...

I want to tinker a bit with Microsoft Mail for AppleTalk, Version 3.1. I installed the System Extensions, they get loaded and the server itself shows up in the chooser with it's serial number. To ...

I was playing around with an emulated Apple /// and while looking at the color demo I noticed that unlike the Apple ][, the /// did not implement red as one of its supported colors. Ignoring strange ...

How can you attach a CD-ROM drive to an Amiga 500. Will any external SCSI drive do? Are drivers necessary and available?

A well known feature of Amiga is the ability to have multiple Intuition screens (ViewPorts in graphics.library parlance) that coexist and can be laid out on the screen so that they overlap vertically. ...

I was surprised to note recently that the Sinclair ZX Spectrum used an internal speaker. I knew the BBC Micro used one, presumably because it was designed to be optionally used with a monitor which ...

I have a DOS program M10_SCR.COM that loads as a TSR and allows the use of fonts. It works with its own basic built-in fonts, so now I am trying to convert .ttf fonts into .fnt so I have more fonts to ...

Early computers often had hardware support for decimal arithmetic. This was usually in the form of BCD, 1 decimal digit per 4 bits, e.g. the 6502 and Z80, tightly constrained by transistor count as ...

Mode 7 on the BBC Micro is very different to the other seven display Modes (0-6). From the programmer's point of view, the BBC Micro's mode 7 looks like 'oh, there is also a character cell mode that ...

I have a Sam Coupé and the last time I turn it on, i noticed a smell of components overheating. After opening the power supply I came to the conclusion that is the resistance R1 (50ºc with IR ...

I've always wondered why the Commmodore 64 had discrete keys dedicated for the ← and ↑ symbols. If I remember correctly, they weren't used in BASIC at all, and were not very useful for drawing, ...

What was the reason that the UCSD P-system filesystem was designed in such a way that it was limited to 77 files per volume?

Was it possible to send data over the phone-line without a modem? Clarification Was it possible to send data over the phone-line without a modem, either by connecting computers directly to the ...

A few weeks earlier I have purchased an "as is" but working model 100 laptop. I've fixed some of the issues by soldering new capacitors for the screen, but the lines are still there. Would buying a ...

Intel IA-32 architecture a.k.a. x86 offers hardware task switching capabilities since 80386. It includes TR (task register), memory segmentation features such as Task State Segment, task gates, call ...

The 8087 has many instructions - too many, it seems, to be encoded as part of the 8086 instruction set. How did the Intel 8086 interface with an Intel 8087 FPU that a user added? Consider the ...

I have had two Macs, a 512K and a Plus, in storage since they failed the smoke test in a spectacular manner a few years back. I have finally learned how to solder and de-solder, so I think its time to ...

I recently got some old motherboards. I was able to fix a damage caused by a leaked battery on a 486 board by soldering a bypass (to fix not working keyboard plug). Another board is in a good shape ...

Amiga OS resident modules (libraries, devices, etc...) are location-agnostic, in that it is technically possible to compile them as location-independent code to be loaded at runtime from disk, or to ...

Wikipedia says: A residue numeral system (RNS) is a numeral system representing integers by their values modulo several pairwise coprime integers called the moduli. Bit widths of each of those "...

How do you compare two signed numbers in Z80 assembly? According to this site, To compare stuff, simply do a CP, and if the zero flag is set [then] the argument[s] were equal, else if the carry ...

Fractions like a third, a fifth, a tenth and so on cannot be precisely represented in binary, because those would be recurring fractions and so would never fit in a (reasonable) data structure. And ...

I am looking for detailed info on the low-level floppy disk structure of an MSDOS-compatible 720k Double Sided Double Density disk. Stuff like GAP/SYNC patterns, ID and CRC Field structure, standard ...

Most video game consoles allow you to connect multiple controllers to them, for multiplayer gaming. Handheld game consoles, on the other hand, were designed to be used by one person at a time, but ...

The American Standard Code for Information Interchange is a 7-bit character encoding. Work on the standard began in 1960 and the first edition was published in 1963. The standard attempted to ...

I have a Commodore PC-1 with a busted power supply. I have no desire to fix it as I don't have the know-how it is already 30 years old It is difficult to debug / find replacement components So I ...

I'm starting to learn how to program in assembly (z80) on the Amstrad CPC computer. As an high level developper i find it pretty fun and i learn a lot of things about computer and CPU architecture. ...

On a US-layout PC keyboard, the symbols above the number keys are as follows: Whereas the keyboard on an Apple II is different: Note, for example, the '(' and ')' symbols are now above 8 and 9, and '...

What AppleTalk adapters can bridge LocalTalk to Ethernet? There are some adapter that allow LocalTalk printers to show up on ethernet, but I want to allow computers to talk. My IIgs has LocalTalk but ...

I started tinkering with a Timex Sinclair 1500 I was given awhile ago. When I first tried starting it, I got a K prompt in the lower left of the screen. I turned it off and did not return to it for a ...

The Video Game Crash of 1983 is well known for the effect that it had on the video game console market in North America. A prime example is Atari burying thousands of unsold game cartridges in ...

When I enter: STAT ALL On my Epson HX-20, I get the following output: P1: 419 Bytes P2: 86 Bytes P3: 0 Bytes P4: 0 Bytes P5: 0 Bytes RAM FILE 256 Bytes MEMSET 2624 105 Bytes Free As I ...

Virtual memory, which allows an operating system to run several machine code programs isolated from each other, came to the desktop during the eighties. But full virtualization, which lets the ...

With the advent of microcomputers, there was a large number of manufacturers entering the home computer market. The ability to network these computers together wouldn't be very useful (or affordable) ...

If we look at something like LLVM or the GNU Compiler Collection, Dalvik and many others, their intermediate representation (IR) uses SSA (Static Single Assignment form), as part of their Data-Flow ...

Machine language (and Assembly language) don't have the concept of data types, so if you want to add an int and a float variables in Assembly, you have to use the appropriate Assembly instruction that ...

When I run PC-DOS on my 4 core AMD Phenom chip, does it take advantage of the extra parallel CPU's? If not, is there a way to coax DOS to use all available CPU's or does this require specific ...

Terminal escape codes can be used for various functions such as positioning the cursor or querying the size of the screen. What was the largest resolution (in columns and rows of characters) ...

Shamelessly stolen from BobDenford on Reddit. I recapped my SE/30 but mistakenly reversed the polarity of the two axial capacitors (C2 and C11). Prior to my error, the machine was fully functional ...

The ZX Printer was made to work with both the ZX81 and the Spectrum (or rather, the Spectrum was made to work with the ZX81's printer!), but these computers have different expansion ports. What I ...

While the Amiga could be used with a TV in a pinch, it was primarily intended for use with an RGBA monitor; memory says, and Google seems to confirm, that was the 1084. Commodore made color monitors ...

In the BESM-6, there is an instruction (045) to add index registers, but not to subtract them, however, there is a nearby unused opcode 047, which is made synonymous to 045 (in fairness, that's true ...

Can someone please help me understand the floating point to readable decimal conversion algorithms of the Z1 and Z3? There is a patent in German containing all the information but I can't speak German....

The acronym ENIAC stands for Electrical Numerical Integrator And Calculator. The fact that it was simpy a numerical computer means it probably could be used to perform numerical integration in some ...

Researching for this question I ran across this 1978 advertisement for Sperry: Sperry Computer Ad 1978: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I74sVdw7gkc The computer is nicknamed "B.C." and the actor ...