All Questions

Around 1984, Commodore transitioned from using round LED bulbs for power and drive indicators to rectangular ones. Some of these could be quite wide, like the ones pictured for a 1571 disk drive. They ...

I'm trying to track down a replacement faceplate for an IBM PS/2 Model 56. Mine was broken during shipping. Anybody have any ideas where I could find one?

Looking over the 9440 spec sheet, a question arises. The very first line notes that it has eight registers... eight? There's the four AC's, PC, carry bit (all 16-bits for that one!) and... what? On ...

In the Apple II, DMA and IRQ priority is determined by a daisy-chain system, in which a card may only assert an IRQ or perform DMA when all higher-priority cards allow it. I understand the importance ...

The worst imaginable thing you can think of happened. I've tried making a minor repair and it all rolled downhill like a snowball and now I have significant damage. Extent of Damage The pads got ...

I've recently picked up a Toshiba T1910CS 486 laptop. It's in OK shape, with a 500MB hard drive and DOS installed. I also ordered a USB floppy disk drive and some floppy disks so that I could install ...

As near as I can tell, there seems to have been roughly speaking two schools of thought when it comes to graphics hardware among early consoles, what I will call the Atari and Texas Instruments ...

Obviously, crediting a "Director" was borrowed from the cinema industry. It was a new trend in computer game development in the late 1980s and early 1990s to embrace the story-telling aspect of a ...

I understand that only either nonelectromechanical computing devices or electromechanical computing devices were ever developed by humans. I also understand that the first electromechanical general ...

All models of the Commodore PET line had built-in monitors, and at least the U.S. models had 60 Hz refresh. For the European models there was no need for compatibility with European television ...

What is the last VLC Media Player version for Windows 98/98SE/ME ?

This was prompted by a question on the electronics site (which was asking why only an open collector variant of a particularly old part existed and how it could be part of a data bus). This was a ...

I saw this labeled as an Atari 2600. However I thought all 2600s had toggle switches. This has flat switches. Its also all black, while all the ones I've seen have fake wood trim. Is it real?

In 6502 Assembly, we can use INX and INY to increase the value stored in X and Y. They can be decreased with DEX and DEY. However, it seems that there are no such instructions for A, like INA or DEA. ...

Actually, unless there are actual design notes from WDC available, the question is really one too long for the title field: "What, precisely, are the disadvantages of having a version of the WDC 65816 ...

The Sega Dreamcast was released in 1999 (1998 in Japan) at just the time that the competition for 3D graphics on PCs was intensifying. It's my assumption that a high-end 1999 Pentium II PC with 3Dfx ...

Many dialects of 8-bit BASIC allow ‘crunched’ source; that is, most spaces can be ignored between keywords: 10 FORX=1TO10 20 PRINTX,X^2 30 NEXTX After Microsoft BASIC-80 Rev. 5.x, however, spaces ...

A word of caution regarding this question: I'm more a userland than kernel person but have this nagging concern which I think belongs to kernel. When configuring a system one decides on peripherals ...

I have purchased a 64GB compact flash UDMA card and am unable to boot up in DOS. The machine I'm running has a Pentium 1.6Ghz process in it just to give you an idea about how "modern" it is compared ...

The extended memory controller on the PDP-8 (the original one, sometimes called the Straight-8) apparently had difficulty when selecting a datafield that didn't exist: On machines with 8K or more, ...

I am studying basic principles of instruction set architectures and am considering what it would take to not have any instruction decoding at all. I.e., all the control lines of the computer would be ...

On IBM 709/7090/7094 mainframes, the effective address of an instruction could be modified by the contents of an index register specified in the instruction encoding. That much is a fairly standard ...

Many processors have an instruction called "move" (sometimes spelled MOV) which copies data from one location (the "source") to another (the "destination") in registers and/or memory. It does not do ...

The line editor ed in UNIX/Linux has a "command mode" and an "insert mode" and there is no visual way to tell which mode you are in. However, there is a -p option that causes it to display a prompt ...

I have an old MAI DT4315A that my company was going to throw out. I'd love to get it setup as a terminal for a linux based system or raspberry pi, just for fun. However, I've never completed anything ...

I've been connecting my Tandy Model 100 to a serial port on a Linux box via the TELCOM program with some success. The main downside is that in whatever the default terminfo/$TERM setting it gets, a ...

The windows 95 is known for introducing a couple of classic screensavers including: Maze, Pipes and starfield among others. It looks like DirectX is a collection of multimedia APIs but for this ...

In the game you were a spider which could run from one wall to the other. The snake could either destroy your net or you. If you reached another wall the room where snake could move got smaller. If ...

I'd like to setup a Windows 98 SE system that boots into the included MS-DOS 7.1 command line, and which can also run Windows 3.11. I've seen various disjointed posts online that suggest this is ...

I am experimenting with a graphics pen and tablet and it got me thinking about the difference between it and my mouse. One huge difference is that the tablet's working area covers the whole screen, ...

Obviously, given age, doesn't have to be as secure and fancy and the modern builds, but is there there a git build for Windows 9x, just like there is for Windows XP? Also wondering whether there is a ...

I'm asking in Retrocomputing because the Caviar line of HDDs was released in the most recent era of retrocomputing. Does anyone know why they named the line "Caviar"? Why do they associate Sturgeons ...

I remember reading (probably in some issue of the newsletter of the PET Benelux Exchange (PBE)) about a strange effect during tape loading of a PET program. Back in the day, I tried it and it worked. ...

In a well known letter to Philip Timmermann, Robert Yannes describes C64 color generation hardware as capable of producing any color (the palette was fixed, of course, but chosen semi-arbitrarily and ...

I'm curious if there are any extant examples of commercial games for classic consoles (let's say, pre-32-bit era here) which make uses of self-modifying code. As far as I know, all the systems I've ...

I think they represent data because I feel it is a mechanical machine which is fully configured and the holes decide only that the thread related to each hole must be moved or not. Thus the holes ...

Back in the day my copies of Creative Computing always had a two-page add from Dynacomp somewhere in it, like this one. Tracking down some of the programs, it appears they are also almost all also ...

With the exception of DEF FN and the handful of direct-mode commands (CONT, LIST, etc), my interpreter is running most programs, but layout remains an issue. Here are three lines from the BASIC ...

Why can my PC not boot Fat larger than 2GB (Fat32) in legacy mode, but FAT16 and NTFS work fine? It just gives me a non-system disk error, while booting the same (Dos boot disk) files under Fat16 ...

Interesting discussion by someone thinking of procuring a PDP-11/34, though having difficulty finding suitable space for it: https://www.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/comments/dztvci/...

I have got a Snes which is in pretty good shape. My problem is that the RF jack is very dirty and corroted. I haven't tried cleaning it because I think I could accidentally break it. (The jack is ...

Being an Amiga fan, I have a fondness for the Rexx language. On that platform, almost every significant program supported ARexx, allowing a high degree of interoperability and customability. So when ...

According to this paper (translation), one of the early soviet machines, M-1, was only able to print decimal, and not alphabetical numbers. Which other early electronic stored program computers (i.e. ...

Switches are intended for just turning ON or OFF the power supply by either closing or opening the circuit. I often wonder how does mankind got idea to use these switch for sake of processing (simple ...

For a C64 SID project of mine (https://soundcloud.com/c64er) I was using an converter almost 10 years ago, but it is missing now with its name... I researched many sites, but no lucky. Is there any ...

I just took the hard drive out of my old beige Mac G4 (don’t know if it still works). I haven’t used this computer for the longest time and I’m interested to see what is on the drive. Is there an ...

I certainly don't recall this at the time, but I'll ask to be sure. According to the GW-BASIC documentation, a semicolon between the INPUT prompt and the variable suppresses the question-mark prompt. ...

MS-DOS a.k.a. PC-DOS nee QDOS, was commonly just referred to as DOS. But 'disk operating system' is a very obvious acronym; there must have been previous operating systems so called. What was the ...

The Amstrad CPC range of Z80 machines shipped with a ROM BASIC, designed and implemented by Locomotive Software. The most well known competitor was the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, also a Z80 machine, with ...

I was looking over an old article on the 6809 and was perusing the opcodes and noticed that the branch instructions came in two flavors, long and short. That sparked a memory about one of the 6502-...