All Questions

FORTRAN had an 'assigned goto' statement. Firstly, a statement number is assigned to a variable: ASSIGN 42 TO L Subsequently, one can obey GOTO L which (given the preceding ASSIGN) would transfer ...

Background: Multimedia/Internet keys are additional function keys on PC keyboards that either invoke specific applications like browser, e-mail, media player, etc. or invoked certain function for ...

I have personally always been of the opinion that it would make sense for the default integer type to be unsigned, though it's been a long time since that would've been a live issue for debate; C in ...

All the 8 bit home computers I'm aware of, had BASIC in their ROMs. A notable exception was Jupiter Ace, a british home computer, which used Forth. Were there any other 8 bit home computers that came ...

In the movie Licence to Kill, James Bond breaks into Felix Leiter's house and gets a CD out from behind a picture. He then sticks a CD in an absolutely massive CD drive. It was about three times the ...

It's long been an established fact that the EGA only had four memory planes, which limited the number of colors on the screen to (24) 16. The best compatible monitors at the time had six TTL color ...

I had a PlayStation. Not some "slim" version or "late-era model". The original. The real one. It had a built-in CD player with a rather elegant, if "blocky", GUI. In the ...

For the C64, there are a lot of emulation devices floating on (Euro) ebay that allow you to load programs from SDcard via emulated serial floppy or/and tape interfaces, simulating the insertion of a ...

I've found a text formatting tool, under the name of SCHEMA, which would accept an input language like *RED *0STA*NN*RG*1RL*0MCS1 20 *3/ *MDLorem ipsum dolor sit amet, *MDconsectetur adipiscing elit, *...

Is it possible to boot Workbench 3.1 on CDTV from floppy, provided Kickstart was updated to 3.1 and still have access to CD Drive from WB or does it require disabling Extended Rom altoghether?

Note: I've attempted to ask this question several times in the "Arqade" category. Just like with the "History" category, anything I ask there is deleted by their broken bots soon ...

I found out all my SmartTVs don't work because they are too modern for my old computer. I am a young owner of a Commodore 64, so please bear with me as this machine is a decade older than me. I do ...

When I was growing up, I played a game for the Atari 800 entitled "Jupiter Mission 1999", which has as a premise that you wake up in the middle of the night with astronauts at your door and ...

I'm fixing a game (TV Sports Basketball) that tries to write in audio data (using the range $DFF0A0 to $DFF0D0) but for some reason (bad programming), the index is sometimes (not always) bogus MOVEA.L ...

In Windows 9x, the MSDOS.SYS configuration file contains a [Paths] section whose contents usually look like this: [Paths] WinDir=C:\WINDOWS WinBootDir=C:\WINDOWS HostWinBootDrv=C Both WinDir and ...

Back in 1984, I was commissioned to write some games for ZX-Spectrum. They were sold together. To my amazement I found that someone is selling a copy online. I thought of buying it but it is in the ...

I found this question asking about the origin of 0x to denote hexadecimal to be interesting. However, when I cut my teeth programming on 8-bit 65xx systems in the early 80's everything I saw used a $ ...

By the early 1980s, C was using 0x as a prefix to indicate integer literals expressed in hexadecimal, e.g., 0xCAFE. This did not exist in B as of 1972, though B did support octal integer literals via ...

Sega must have thought about upgradability prior to the Genesis’s release, as there is a expansion slot to the right of the unit when looked at from the front. Is this the only expansion slot? Is it ...

I'm currently trying to use the nj32disk.sys driver to use my USB stick as a virtual hard drive. The problem is that the driver acts like a floppy disk. My question is: Is there a documentation about ...

Apparently the first microcomputer capable of working with the Chinese language in Chinese characters was the Microprofessor II (or MPF-II-C), a Taiwanese Apple II clone from 1982. Now I'm 99% sure ...

Availability I most likely played it in the late 90s (1997+). It might have been the early 2000s as well, but it's less likely. My computer at the time was running Windows 95 or 98. The game came on a ...

I am looking for information on a training language called "WhatDoesItDo". It was used in 1978 at Austin Community College on a Motorola 6800 CPU. If anyone has any information, I would ...

I've been reading manuals for BASIC implementations and the earliest reference I can find to PEEK, POKE, and USR is in the Altair BASIC 3.2 manual, published in 1975. This morning I came across this ...

The question of ownership of Amiga-related intellectual property post-Commodore is famously difficult to answer. My question is: does anyone "own" Commodore's semiconductor IP now, and if so,...

I implemented a differential equation solver on my Dragon 32 (which uses Microsoft Extended Color BASIC) but the results I get quickly diverge from those I expect, which are the same as those I get ...

In the 1998 Swedish comedy musical "Åke från Åstol", there's a moment toward the end when a man is pushing around some sort of Amiga-looking computer with a monitor and mouse on a ...

In the early days of computer CD-ROM drives, aside from SCSI interfaces, there were a number of proprietary interfaces developed by individual manufacturers. This was exemplified by PC sound cards ...

This question is related to this one. I realise not all keyboards have the NumPad, but why do those who do have a NumPad have two sets of keys for numbers ( the numbers above the letters and below the ...

I need a way to write on floppy disks from my modern PC (motherboard GIGABYTE z730p). I own a Panasonic JU-257A606P I took from an old machine of mine, and before buying a USB floppy drive I wanted to ...

I just found out that emulators for the Coleco Adam use a disk image file format with the DSK file extension. This is a very very overused extension on many different disk formats. Though a few DSK ...

In the episode Lisa Gets an "A" of The Simpsons, there is a fictional computer called Coleco: Is that computer based on a real one or are there any records of computers resembling that?

I'm trying to hook up my EUR N64 to a TV that handles both Composite and RGB SCART alright (A1200, CDTV, Megadrive). The picture is very dark and I can only make out the shapes and contours. There is ...

The control codes (my C64 handbook actually calls them ASCII codes) for color changing on the Commodore 64 are as follows: Color Control Code Color number BLACK $90 0 ...

A while ago I asked about the possible origin of a Russian version of the "Lunar Lander" game. No definitive answers were given. Meanwhile, I was able to decompile the binary into a semi-...

Many songs in the so called "tracker" format quite popular in the early 90s (think .MOD, .S3M, .XM, .IT and the like) seemingly used sound samples from real synthesizers. This sometimes ...

When we load any game on ZX Spectrum from cassette player... Should red stripes move smoothly for better result or they should be static for perfect result? What is the theory?

I was trying to take apart a Toshiba T1950ct laptop to replace slim floppy drive:s belt. Unfortunately, I broke the delicate flat flex cable (ffc) which is non standard 26 pin floppy cable. ...

The 6502 was released in 1975 with an advertised speed of about 1mhz but I can't find reliable information on what year faster versions became available (was 2mhz possible at launch?) or what the true ...

As software for micros developed, you could use the BASIC interpreter just to CLOAD and RUN assembly language programs. Those might call BASIC ROM routines (say, for converting ASCII input to binary ...

I was reading the user manual for an old program "UNRAVEL": http://www.ml1.org.uk/pdf/Unravel_User_Manual_1971.pdf. On page 9, it describes the syntax for integer constants: Unsigned ...

I was looking at this emulator of a Intel 4004, and I noticed something with the RAM. It had something called "Status Chars". There were 4 of them per memory line and all were 4-bit numbers ...

Datasheet for the Intel 8008 CPU mentions that the Carry (C) flag is affected with the logic operations (AND, OR, XOR), but it does not make any sense. I believe Carry will be zeroed, but I have no ...

Intel 8008 CPU has an internal stack, implemented as an 8 x 14-bit scratchpad. How does it work exactly? Is there any "invisible 3-bit stack pointer"? I want to know what happens when the ...

What happens when I8008 CPU reads the "undefined" opcode (22h, 2Ah, 32h, 38h, 39h, 3Ah)? Are these opcodes evaluated as a NOP instruction, or lead to some side effects (RESET, etc). How many ...

Where are the missing signals that I can't pair between amiga external drive connector and gotek drive? I'd like to connect GOTEK to CDTV, there is a way to do it directly (caddy died), but I can't ...

Warning: There are flashing images below, do not scroll down if you are sensitive to them! According to various sources (for example this for the Plus/4), both the C64 and Plus/4 have a "jiffy&...

I would like to blank out a couple of lines between two given rasterlines. Above that I'm planning to have a scrolling background and sprites, below that is a textual info area. I'm thinking of a ...

I keep telling to everyone who wants to hear it (or not) that my personal IT education as a kid in the 80s was superior to what kids are exposed to today (to the degree that I can observe that as a ...

The DEC VAX has a set of 256 instructions set aside for user addition via microcode edits. Were extension sets ever commercially produced and sold, or was this functionality mostly used in-house? ...