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1500 questions
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5 answers
Were the classic game consoles *technically* able to play both NTSC and PAL games, if ignoring artificial region lock-in?
I'm not asking if they were region-free; I know they weren't generally.
I'm asking if, given an NTSC-supporting PAL TV, an NTSC game cartridge, and a PAL NES/SNES/N64/whatever, and also given some sort of "workaround"/hack to bypass the region…
D. S.
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Why are the later revisions of the Motorola 68060 heavily sought after by Amiga fans?
I have come across a few sources online in forums and on YouTube information related to using the Motorola 68060 in Amiga accelerators and the difficulty in sourcing genuine late revision parts. Specifically, there are a lot of fake CPUs on eBay…
Dougvj
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What was the first operating system to feature a separate kernel?
Kernels are programs that abstract the hardware of a computer to some extent, allowing other programs to use standardised system calls (e.g. malloc) to perform hardware tasks (e.g. writing to memory, displaying text on a screen) without resorting to…
wizzwizz4
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What did the "programs" that "human computers" executed look like?
The Wikipedia article Computer (job description) says that before the invention of electronic computers, the term "computer" used to refer to people who worked as "computers".
My question is: what did the "programs" that "human computers" executed…
user18890
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How does the NES Light Gun work?
Modern motion detection video game systems (Wii/Wii U, Xbox Kinect, PS Move, etc.) need sensors to read for motion and user input. However, when you play Duck Hunt (and some other games) on the NES, the light gun has no sensor. How does the game…
wcarhart
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Why is a BIOS dump not required to emulate Nintendo 64 games in most modern emulators?
In order to emulate some home consoles (Playstation 1/2, Sega Saturn/CD/32x, etc.) a dump of the system's BIOS is required to emulate the console. Out of the Nintendo 64 emulators I have found online, none require the BIOS for ROM playback. How…
JAL
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Zilog Z80 freezes while binary counting up to 65 536 (2^16)
A few days ago, I got Z80A CPU from eBay. So I tried to run it with classic 555 timer as a clock signal generator. I connected the 8-bit data bus of the CPU to the ground to "simulate ROM" (00 for NOP). I wired up all missing inputs: WAIT pin 24,…
Nogard
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Why does 8 bit truecolor use only 2 bits for blue?
From Wikipedia:
The other form is where the 8 bits directly describe red, green, and blue values, typically with three bits for red, three bits for green and two bits for blue. This second form is often called 8-bit truecolor
What is the reason…
hspil
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6 answers
Is it true that control+alt+delete only became a thing because IBM would not build Bill Gates a computer with a task manager button?
Is it true that ctrl+alt+del only became a thing because IBM would not build Bill Gates a computer with a button specifically for the task manager? Making it so that Microsoft had to develop a workaround.
Neil Meyer
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How did the IEC decide to create kibibytes?
What was the decision making process that lead to the IEC to create "kibibytes", "mebibytes" and so forth?
To me it seems like kilobytes were well established as 1024 bytes, both by programmers using them and by electronic engineers. Indeed, even…
user
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5 answers
Why did the Apple IIe make a hideous noise if you inserted the disk upside down?
When I began high school in 1987 all the computers in the lab were Apple IIe desktop computers. A question has haunted me since then:
if you inserted a floppy disk "upside down" the Apple IIe would make a hideous noise like a vacuum cleaner. Why?…
Snack_Food_Termite
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3 answers
Why does an instruction include the address of the next instruction on the IBM 650?
The IBM 650 seems to be a load-store machine. One advantage of a load-store machine is that the instruction can be shorter because there's less pressure to pack more information into it. But the IBM 650 has two addresses in each instruction: the…
Omar and Lorraine
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29
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9 answers
What was the first mainstream advanced debugger?
What was the first mainstream development toolchain that provided advanced debugging facilities?
By "mainstream" I mean something that was available on home computers, not mainframes or super-expensive workstations. It also implies that it was…
dim
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Proportional fonts on 8-bit computers
Many 8-bit computers had video systems that provided tiles, and when these were available, they were the obvious ways to display text.
However, some 8-bit computers such as the ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC, only had bitmap displays. If you are using…
rwallace
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Why did ones' complement decline in popularity?
Many early computers use ones' complement to represent some kind of signed integer. Examples include the PDP-1, the CDC-6600, and many other popular computers.
The C standard is obviously written with ones' complement machine in mind; for example,…
Omar and Lorraine
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