All Questions

The "Everdrive" is very intriguing to me. Having been continuously disappointed -- not to say appalled -- by every single emulator I have ever tried, for every single console, I've given up ...

I'm currently working on a project with an old device that exposes at least one V.35 interface. From my understanding and reading. V.35 commonly used a huge, bulky connector that looked like this: ...

https://github.com/libretro-thumbnails/libretro-thumbnails This contains cover art for "most" games. Sadly, they are very low-res, often have bad contrast/color, and are frequently ugly/...

When powered on 1541 reads the disk for a brief moment. Is it used to boot system from floppy? Is it possible to create a bootable commodore 64 floppy?

Commodore 128 / 128D was capable of outupting 80 columns through RGBi, therefore it could compete with other business machines of the time, but was this the case? Was this line of machines ever used ...

I've spent a ridiculous amount of time and effort over the years just trying to figure out what exact IBM product I grew up with. At last, I've finally established for 100% certain that it was a: IBM ...

I'm trying to put a new CPU cooler in my 1999 IBM Aptiva 2163-580 (which has an Intel 440BX chipset, in case that's relevant). The system uses a Slot 1 CPU. The old cooler had a 2-pin connector, which ...

Was ZX spectrum better at handling than later PCs-keyboards without having diodes in its key matrix? I encountered this comment on ycombinator but I fail to understand it. Couldn't be Speccy method ...

In the magical mid-1990s, when we already had got our (second-hand) 486 PC and I had both a NES and SNES, I for some reason got my paws on an old Atari "XE Game System" (8-bit, 1987). It had ...

I have a collection of ROM files for the NES, SNES, Nintendo 64 and others. These ROMs match exactly those games that I own or owned growing up. Recently, I found out about the "No-Intros" ...

https://datomatic.no-intro.org/index.php?page=download This website has the worst, most cryptic and broken interface I've ever seen in my life, but eventually, I managed to download a big archive ...

The Nokia 2760 is a clamshell mobile phone released in 2007 which advertised its Java game support. Ten years ago it was still a very popular phone. There were a number of games either preinstalled or ...

I'm following root42's videos about DOS programming using Turbo C 2.01. I've written my own Soundblaster 1.xx driver following the Creative Labs documentation, and I'm confused about memory allocation....

I wonder if anyone has documentation left on this topic. In the early 80's, I used to be a 3270 terminal operator, and I wrote programs with GIS. I remember that this language was rather mighty but ...

It's not so much about going from full-height drives to half-height drives, but about finer details. Disk rotation drive - when and how was the belt replaced with a direct drive and a flat motor? Who ...

I.e. how can I run xroach on a VM? A search on RC for xroach didn't turn anything up. xroach, as I remember it, ran under old versions of X and had a certain number of cockroaches on the root window ...

I recently rescued my Tandy CGP-115 plotter from the attic and had the idea to try and drive it from a modern machine. I have a FTDI CHIPI-X10 RS-232 adapter and installed drivers on a MacBook. I have ...

Is it possible to run Retropie on the Odroid N2 Plus? I'm particularly interested in the Drastic DS emulator (so alternative ARM OSs that could run that would be fine).

I was looking the other day some NES clone footage, and I was surprised to find out that there is a ton of them. I am wondering, how could they be so many since Nintendo did not use standard off the ...

It strikes me that, in theory, it would be possible to skip the classic approach of emulation and instead literally build a NES, SNES, Nintendo 64 or any console with digital "components", ...

Does anyone know of any bitmap-based 8080/8085 (or, failing that, Z80) computers? Background: In the late 70s and early 80s, there were a few hobby computers with bitmapped displays. For example, the ...

I have written an emulation of the Heathkit ET-3400A microcomputer trainer in Java, mainly to see if I could do it and to get my feet wet in Java. Odd question, but there's a discrepancy (one of many,...

The Intel 8087 supported both single and double precision floating point, but only in memory; the on-chip registers were purely double precision. (Strictly speaking they were actually 80-bit extended ...

Is it possible to run a text-mode DOS program in an emulator under a Unix-like operating system (Linux/*BSD/macOS) such that DOS text-mode input and output is done on a Unix terminal instead of a ...

The ASCII horizontal tab character defaults to 8 columns, which is unfortunate because it's too wide for indenting block structured languages (at least to most people's taste, acknowledging Linus ...

In a talk on the IBM 360 and the computers it replaced the speaker at 39:35 describes the 7070 as 'a dog', and elsewhere contrasts it unfavorably with the 1401 (which considerably exceeded ...

Context at the time Handheld graphing calculator HP 48 series - Wikipedia, produced between 1990 and 2003, include infrared and serial communication ports to send and receive data and programs between ...

https://byuu.org/higan/ https://byuu.org/bsnes/ The domain is called "byuu.org". The emulator is said to be called "higan" or "bsnes". The download link for "higan&...

It is highly unrecommended to write your own code in asm now since, in most cases, gcc -O3 does magic. But in the '80s it was believed that compiled C code takes 4(?) times or more than a well-...

I have an old Sun Ultra workstation from early 2000s, running Solaris with an IDE called sparcworks. I'm trying to revive it (I have some numerical analysis libraries I want to retrieve and re-use), ...

Should C be regarded as an intermediate language on a virtual machine named PDP-11 Architecture (which have a plain memory space and stacks), like opcode to jvm, msil to dotnet, asm.js to v8, which ...

I tried asking this yesterday: How is it possible that video game console emulators perpetually suck? Actually, I asked it earlier in the day, but it was mysteriously "memoryholed", as if ...

In honor of this weekend being 1,600,000,000 (1.6 billion) seconds since the Unix epoch, I was wondering if anyone knows why January 1st 1970 was chosen? According to Wikipedia, The earliest versions ...

Beginning in ~1998, every five years, I make a new round of checking out the latest versions of all the available emulators for NES, SNES, Nintendo 64, and more. (I sort of gave up on PlayStation and ...

Intel invented the original 32/64-bit PCI bus in the early 1990s to replace the decade old ISA bus used in PC's. It was immediately popular (in comparison to Micro Channel or EISA), being both faster ...

If I start vanilla "Mesen-S" and load in Super Mario Kart, it says: This game requires a firmware file for the DSP1B chip. If I feed the emulator that "DSP ROM" file, it then ...

I was first exposed to GUI libraries in the 80's, and all of them initially included typical GUI objects like buttons, checkboxes, edit fields, and so on, but I don't recall being able to write a ...

I have found two different sets of Nintendo 64 ROMs with the same games (which, of course, I physically own). One is labeled "ByteSwapped" and the other "BigEndian". What exactly ...

I have an Intel 8080 core and would like to build the minimal computer system around it to run Tiny BASIC interactively. I am building this computer on an FPGA, so I am not asking about actual ...

I cant find any adapters or secondary connectors, can anybody get me a link to a working floppy controller card that works or possibly a connector that goes from 20 pin male to 34 pin female? i have ...

The most common punch card format was the IBM 80 column by 12 row, with narrow rectangular holes. However, there were other possibilities, such as a later IBM format that used round holes. That one ...

In the fifties and sixties, program source code was typically stored on punch cards, one card per line. The most common card format was the IBM 80 column by 12 row. For source code, this was commonly ...

Who first proposed using a visual cue (of any kind) for hyperlinks the user has already visited? If the individual is not known, what hypertext viewer first offered this feature? My guess would be ...

Over in my question about input devices with character sets suited to Algol 60, I mentioned using an ASR-33 / KSR-33 teletype with the subscript-10 character ₁₀. I have subsequently been unable to ...

EDIT: I realize from reading the comments that I was bit loose in my use of the word "speed" as a property of the tape drive. What I had in mind was the speed of the data transfer, not the ...

I'm looking to port an old game I wrote for the Palm Pilot that relied on the SysRandom function with a predefined game seed. A player could enter a "seed" and the sequence of tiles would be ...

The Motorola 68000 has sixteen integer registers, which was considered a very generous complement at the time it was introduced. They are divided into address and data registers, eight each. Many ...

The IBM 650, one of the first general-purpose digital computers, designed in the early fifties, used decimal digits with bi-quinary representation for reasons discussed here: Why did the IBM 650 use ...

This question was inspired by recent discussion on early keyboards and character sets, and mention in passing about how the COBOL designers were concerned about not using "non-existent" ...

The introduction to Greg Harvey’s DOS for Dummies: Quick Reference (also subtitled Command Reference in the first edition) contains this passage: This book not only gives you the lowdown on each and ...