Part of the reason is timing. Early- and mid-80s arcade machines didn't have anywhere near the hardware capabilities of modern systems. You couldn't just load an MP3 of background music into RAM and ...

Just plug it in, making sure the red and black wires are the ones on the pins. The connector should be keyed to enforce this. The yellow wire is for monitoring the fan's speed, and isn't required ...

Click on the application icon, select "Get info" from the "File" menu, and adjust the memory allocation in the window that pops up.

The HFS filesystem stores file metadata in a single large file called the "catalog file", with one record for each file or directory. Creation and modification times are stored as 32-bit unsigned ...

The Meltdown attack is about figuring out what's in protected memory (typically, kernel memory) by arranging for it to be speculatively read, and then looking for residual side effects after the ...

Mostly no. Pre-XP versions of Windows are certainly vulnerable to targeted attacks, such as you'd see from Metasploit -- if you're the sort of high-value target that attracts such attacks, don't run ...

That's the ubiquitous 1.44MB 3.5" floppy. Any modern floppy drive should be able to read it; the hard part is finding software that understands the format -- Mac-formatted disks aren't readable by ...

The MindDrive and other "mind-reading" input devices that don't include an EEG headset work by reading your stress levels in the form of skin conductivity. The program initializes its state by ...

If you went with VirtualBox's default settings for an MS-DOS system, you've got both: an Intel 440FX northbridge providing a PCI bus, and an Intel PIIX3 southbridge connected to that bus, providing an ...

What's lacking is mostly raw number-crunching ability. The MP3 format is relatively lightweight, and can be implemented using only fixed-point math (no FPU required), but it still takes a fair amount ...

Macs of the Quadra 800 era store the default boot drive in a section of battery-backed RAM called "PRAM" (you'll occasionally see "clear the PRAM" as a troubleshooting tip). By default (eg. if the ...

It's not particularly "retro", but many x86 computers in the early Pentium IV era could be permanently damaged in a matter of weeks by setting the operating voltage and frequency too high. This would ...

What you're missing is that early computers didn't generate their video signals the way that modern computers do. You're probably picturing a C64 working in much the same way that a VGA adapter does: ...

Linux still supports the 80486 SX: the SX was simply a DX without the FPU, and the FPU emulation code is still present (Processor type and features->Math emulation). Finding a distro is a bit ...

Babbage's analytic engine was designed to do arbitrary-precision aritmetic. For multiplication, two 50-digit inputs produced a 100-digit output, with the lower 50 digits on the Egress Axis and the ...

There are a number of possibilities, though most of them involve stretching the definition of "computer" somewhat: The Zuse Z1, Z2, and Z4 computers used slotted metal strips as memory. Of these, ...

The Atari 2600 has an unregulated transformer. Transformers of this type only produce their design voltage under load; if you're just connecting a voltmeter between the output wires, it's going to ...

The usual way to debug a program is with a debugger. The usual low-level debugger for classic MacOS was MacsBug. I've never tried using it to debug an extension during startup, but I see no reason ...

This is the pinout of a Nintendo 64 cartridge (from here). The Nintendo 64 used a multiplexed address/data bus with a three-stage access protocol: write the high word of the address you want to ...

For older hardware, leave it on. Moving parts can be fixed or replaced. The problem comes from wear to non-moving parts: the circuits inside the microchips. This wear takes two forms: thermal ...

Typical register sizes varied wildly among the early computers. For example, ENIAC's early design had nothing but registers, and these were ten decimal digits wide. The Harvard Mark I was also ...

The HFS Utilities package looks like it will let you format the disk from a Linux system; modern Windows may also be supported (it says "95/NT", which means you may run into permissions errors on ...

Those look like 144-pin SO-DIMM memory modules. It's a very old memory technology. If the computer you pulled them from isn't working, your best bet is to find a known-working laptop of about the ...

Any power supply within about 5% of the rated voltage should work, so a 16V supply (or a 17V one) should work. If you're getting a modern switch-mode supply, you want the amperage rating to be at ...

It's a bit misleading to call them "undocumented opcodes". "Accidental opcodes" would be more accurate. Instead of using microcode, the 6502 family used a programmable logic array as a lookup table ...

"Incomplete decoding" means that the address decoder only pays attention to a few of the address lines: the high bits indicating the PPU chip and the three low bits selecting a register on that chip. ...

Old games like these don't have much that can go wrong with them just from powering them up. The biggest problem with old electronics in general is that any electrolytic capacitors will dry out in ...

Your best option is probably to skip Windows entirely. A Linux livecd will be able to read your filesystem, and has the drivers to use your USB ports built-in. My personal preference would be for ...

It's not possible. VirtualBox only supports emulating IBM-compatible x86 and x86-64 systems. The Commodore 64 uses a 6510 CPU and a wildly different architecture. In order to run Commodore 64 ...

C:\msdos\DISKS\144UPG1.IMG C:\msdos\DISKS\144UPG2.IMG C:\msdos\DISKS\144UPG3.IMG From your listing, I believe these are 1.44 MB images of the installation floppies. In that case, installation is ...