All Questions

Of course the unthinkable happened and I lost one cap key spring while cleaning the keyboard. I am still searching but assuming all things went south, what would be the best solution to replace them? ...

Back in the day, SCSI was the way to go. I remember my high school having a single 5Mb Sider hdd connected to an Apple //e - which seemed awesome after endlessly swapping floppies. Not long after, I ...

While it is not used as much nowadays, wave soldering was a big advance in the productivity of manufacturing electronics, compared to soldering all the components by hand. It consists of placing all ...

I am quite a newbie to retrocomputing, and I don't know if such a question should be asked here. But I hope maybe some of you could help me. I started reflecting on ways to send data without the ...

I am definitely at the very beginning of my refurb-journey and learning every step now on the way ... I struggle with the following: I saw a video by Noel's Retrolab where he troubleshooted a CPC. He ...

I recently got my first Amstrad CPC and started refurbishing it. Now I wonder, I saw a video, on someone using the RPM test tool for the Amstrad. I found the download online, but this question might ...

The IBM/360 Macro Assembly language was quite powerful, allowing non-trivial compile-time string manipulation. Did macro packages exist which would facilitate programming at a (slightly) higher level, ...

On the Apple II, system beeps were typically just the 'Control-G' beep noise. However, many ProDOS-based applications from Apple Computer abandoned the firmware-based beep routine and instead used a ...

I just happened upon this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tNizdyx-DE It's a selection of Amiga music produced using a program I've never heard of before: "Symphonie Pro". Does ...

I definitely remember that sometime after OS/2 was introduced - while it was still in its very early days - after the breakup from Microsoft, long before Warp - IBM announced with great fanfare a ...

Many early computers were sold as self-assembly kits (you get a box of parts and an instruction leaflet and have to solder them together yourself). For example, the Altair was priced at $439 kit, $621 ...

Cassette, being cheaper than a floppy disk drive, was a popular storage medium in the 8-bit era. Some computers such as the Sinclair Spectrum, just provided a port to plug in an existing cassette deck....

According to https://jamiestarling.com/project-8088-the-8088-cpu-pinout/ One thing to note – the 8088 registers are made from dynamic memory cells – they have to be refreshed. The minimum clock speed ...

I have fond memories of programming the 6502, though I never did any hardware hacking with it. I notice that the Altair, with its iconic front panel, was based on the Intel 8080, and from then on, ...

I have been retrogaming with Octapolis on an emulated Commodore 64. Starting up the game presents a menu offering a choice between one or two players, and between music and sound effects. But I don't ...

The test command on Unix-like systems provides two special syntax forms for checking whether a string is empty or not: test -z "$foo" # the length of $foo is zero test -n "$foo" # ...

In 1985, Intel released the 80386, a particularly complex and sophisticated microprocessor for its day, consisting of 275,000 transistors, a rather large number for the day. How many transistors went ...

In the old days, game consoles were usually sold with a pack-in game, including some iconic titles like 2600 Combat and NES Super Mario Brothers. This makes sense; it provided clear value for the ...

In a fit of nostalgia I decided to boot SunOS 4.1.4 up under emulation using qemu-system-sparc. It all seems to work, but I'm trying to remove an annoying manual step. I'm starting qemu-system-sparc ...

I am trying to understand the trade-offs between scalar and vector machines, the threshold of complexity/transistor count/performance at which vector machines started to make sense. As data points, ...

I am considering taking my nostalgia for the eighties to the next level and getting hold of a green monochrome monitor. In particular, the nine inch monitor of the Apple IIc, but maybe something else ...

In a nutshell, could the Z80 address 64 KB of ROM and 64 KB of RAM, or just 64 KB for both RAM and ROM? Unfortunately, I couldn't find an exact and a direct answer to my question while searching. ...

Does anyone know what kind of device this is? I found it in my late dad's stuff, probably from the 1970s. It has no number, type, model, serial number or anything else on it that could be used for ...

Some weeks ago I got a non-working Powerbook 145b for 20€ (~23USD). The first thing I did was to test the power supply, which was giving a good 7.8V. I saw that the battery was still in place and I ...

This question asks about endian issues of the S-100 bus. A peripheral card that has a register larger than one byte (e.g. a 16-bit or larger word) would need to be read/written by more than one ...

After trying out FS-UAE on my Fedora Linux system, which worked quite nicely, I got to thinking. Even though when the Amiga was originally released in the middle 1980s, it was revolutionary in its ...

Qix was a quite unique Taito arcade video game that saw ports to nearly any home computing platform of its time. At first glance, the game mechanics seem to be targeted at low-performance hardware - ...

One of the big turning points in the history of the industry was IBM choosing the Intel 8088 over the Motorola 68000. Given that most people outside IBM considered the 68000 preferable, there has been ...

On this page about "An S-100 68000 CPU Board" it is said: From a hardware perspective there are some very significant differences how Intel and Motorola CPU's talk to the world. Somewhat ...

The S-100 bus was extremely versatile; originally designed for the 8080, computers using it had no trouble with the Z80 as a drop-in upgrade, and it even went to 16-bit with the 8086. To my surprise, ...

The Z80 was (except for a handful of tiny incompatibilities) a superset of the 8080, adding a number of new instructions as well as the alternate register set. It seems therefore that it must have at ...

I asked this question on Super User, but the community at the site told me to redirect to this site. If this is again an off-topic question, do not blame me please! I am sorry if the control ...

I'd like to identify a game I played on my first PC (x386, 2MB RAM) which I built in 1991. It was also one of the first, if not the first game I ever played on a PC. The game was heavily, and I mean ...

Nowadays floating point is usually either 32 or 64 bits, sometimes 16, occasionally 128. But of course, the Basic interpreters on the 8-bit machines, having to implement floating point in software ...

Checking the MS-DOS interrupt list we see INT 0x20 "Terminate the program" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS_API) but if we check the same page we see INT 0x21 with function 0x4C will &...

I am looking at this Tiny BASIC dump which seems to consist of two sections, the first being a list of symbol addresses, and the second one containing Intel Hexadecimal records with a leading space: ...

Example: https://youtu.be/E9QJZSBpvg0?t=80 The road turns not only left and right, like in the classic Pole Position, but also goes up and down. Other than the cars and the road, there are numerous ...

I'm trying to work out what is wrong with this laptop. There is a hissing sound coming from the power board mid left. The laptop screen remains off and there is no output to external VGA unless it ...

The 8080 starts running code at location 0 on reset. The natural layout of memory on a computer using that CPU is therefore ROM at the bottom of the memory map and RAM at the top. CP/M demands the ...

The most controversial part of the IEEE 754 floating-point standard is gradual denormals. Typically they trap to software rather than being implemented in hardware. In the common case where a workload ...

In 1974, a major semiconductor company released its first 8-bit CPU that was good enough to build a serious computer around. In 1975, a smaller company built a computer around it, a horizontal box ...

In 1974, Intel released the 8080, which basically was the first microprocessor good enough to build a serious computer around. That led to the Altair 8800 the following year, which was the beginning ...

Reading on the AGP spec, the little bits I've found on sites like https://old.pinouts.ru/Slots/agp_pinout.shtml, say: The Accelerated Graphics Port (also called Advanced Graphics Port) is a high-...

I got a working ZX Spectrum 48k (issue 6a) with the original power supply. Before hooking up the power supply I tested with my multimeter to see if it was good. The power supply specifies it outputs ...

I lately wanted to try some of the Commodore 64 games I have kept as D64 files on my Fedora Linux system using VICE. I have lately upgraded the system from Fedora 26 to Fedora 32. After I started up ...

The Altair 8800 was based on what came in later years (much to the displeasure of MITS) to be known as the S-100 bus, because it had 100 lines, because MITS found 100-pin edge connectors were ...

I have a memory setup where the whole address space can be exchanged (default 2 slots with 2 banks each, but may change depending on "expansion cards" plugged in). Banks are switched by ...

In this question, it's mentioned the Apple II's slot 7 was used by third party graphics cards. Is there any documentation on those? What were those cards and what were their capabilities?

Was there any equipment which could directly print out the program or data on a stack of punchcards, without first loading the deck into a general-purpose computer? In other words, a transfer from the ...

VisiCalc represented numbers in BCD to be able to handle decimals precisely. But how did it decide how many decimal places to display? In some screenshots like https://www.researchgate.net/figure/A-...