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1500 questions
27
votes
4 answers
How to get rid of yellowing in plastics?
I have some old electronics with white plastic that's starting to turn yellow. I know it's caused by flame retardants, UV rays, and so on. How can I restore my electronics to their former color?
snips-n-snails
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27
votes
1 answer
Why did keygens play music?
When running some keygens (i.e. applications that generate working license keys for possibly pirated software), low-quality background music is played while the user waits. See this sample YouTube video.
What history contributed to these musical…
styrofoam fly
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27
votes
4 answers
First use of an OS in gaming consoles?
Early gaming consoles were quite simple machines (from today's point of view). So simple in fact that often the games were the initial "entry point" for the CPU on boot and the games had to set up the hardware first. For example, the game cartridge…
DarkDust
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27
votes
3 answers
Why did the Atari 800 designers choose such a radical system design?
The physical system design of the Atari 800 was pretty radical, when compared to the 3 other canonical home computer designs of the late-1970s: TRS-80 Model 1, PET, and Apple ][.
As the photo of the Atari 800 main and CPU board shows, the main board…
Brian H
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27
votes
3 answers
How did ZX Spectrum games loaders prevent the use of MERGE?
The MERGE command could be used on early games to load the first BASIC program block without it auto-running, but in later games, the use of MERGE caused the machine to hang. How was this achieved?
Paul Markham
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27
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7 answers
Did anyone ever run out of stack space on the 6502?
Unlike its main rival the Z80, the 6502 had a size limit of 256 bytes for the hardware stack. That sounds like a very tight limit, but in my experience, it was never actually an issue; by the time you were trying to do anything complex enough to…
rwallace
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27
votes
5 answers
Did underclocking the early Z80 chips improve yield?
The Z80, one of the most successful and well-known of the 8-bit microprocessors, was released in July 1976 at an initial clock speed of 2.5 MHz.
The TRS-80 Model I, released the following year, is listed on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80…
rwallace
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27
votes
2 answers
Why did the Nintendo GameBoy Color make the name of any game to have a specific checksum?
Inside of the GBCs Cartridge header there is the metadata for the game and the Nintendo logo.
The program that runs on boot (the BIOS or Boot ROM) checks the checksum of the Nintendo logo, and always has, but in the GBC Boot ROM, I noticed an…
Missing User
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27
votes
2 answers
Did MS-DOS ever drop ability to support non-IBM PC compatible machines?
Early MS-DOS versions were designed and indeed adapted to run on machines not fully IBM PC compatible.
However, there seems to be a number of utilities bundled with later versions, that seem not to fully rely on MS-DOS interfaces for device access,…
tuomas
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27
votes
4 answers
Amiga multitasking - different resolution for each program on screen dragging
I'm wondering about screen resolution while having two or more multitasking programs - concurrently on screen using dragging such as:
Dpaint is on a 320x256 screen, 32 colours
Workbench is on a 640x256, 4 colours (at least 4 used, 16 is the max on…
Krackout
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27
votes
6 answers
Why did Western designs suddenly overtake native Russian ones in the USSR?
In the USSR there flourished some very interesting machines, including the БЭСМ and МЭСМ lines, the Сетунь, the ЭВМ Стрела and others.
Maybe the most famous ones are
БЭСМ-4, which is said to have done the first computer animation,
the БЭСМ-6, a…
Omar and Lorraine
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27
votes
9 answers
What were the applications of 5/6-bit serial port formats?
Traditional PC serial ports, based on members of the 8250/16550 UART families (or their clones within SuperIO chips) support some unusual serial data formats, specifically 5- and 6-bit data, and 1.5 stop bits.
Some USB-Serial adaptors (Prolific)…
anon
27
votes
3 answers
Odyssey game console: what's the deal with "English Control"?
I've just read about the original Magnavox Odyssey console. Interesting story. But what I'm wondering about are the game controllers, and in particular the knob labeled as "English". This Lifewire page describes it thusly:
At the top sat a reset…
Nimloth
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27
votes
3 answers
In what ways was the Soviet Strela computer "designed to function during a nuclear winter"? Or at least parts of it?
From Strela computer:
Strela computer (Russian: ЭВМ Стрела, arrow) was the first mainframe computer manufactured serially in the Soviet Union, beginning in 1953.
This first-generation computer had 6200 vacuum tubes and 60,000 semiconductor…
uhoh
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27
votes
2 answers
What operations could early PC 3D accelerators perform?
As I understand it, a modern GPU is actually just a Turing-complete processor which happens to be heavily optimised for massively data-parallel workloads. (You can even buy "graphics cards" that don't generate any graphics!)
As I understand it,…
MathematicalOrchid
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