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1500 questions
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4 answers
Why did Mac OS 7 perform poorly with virtual memory enabled?
A comment in another question about supervisor and user modes in the Motorola 68000 processors, claimed that "performance was abysmal" with virtual memory enabled. An InfoWorld article about System 7 corroborates this by saying,
To avoid slow…
snips-n-snails
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Why does NT4 fail on boot if you give it an x64 CPU?
I tried to install Windows NT4, and I gave it the highest available CPU in QEMU (because that's the default, and of course it's an x64 capable CPU), and it crashed after text mode install. It did not produce a normal panic screen but rather it…
Joshua
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What's the most recent version of AmigaOS?
Simply as the heading states. What is the most recent version of AmigaOS?
Richard Downer
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25
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1 answer
Why does the Commodore 64 have 4K of non-banked RAM at $C000?
I wonder why the Commodore 64 memory map was created as it was. Naively, it seems to be that it would have been more logical to put I/O and the character ROM at $B000 to $BFFF, have the ROMs in a continuous block from $C000 to $FFFF as in the…
TeaRex
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4 answers
What exactly was the Amiga Ranger?
Amiga's history includes something called "Ranger" that supposedly was either meant to be the next generation system to be released after the Amiga 1000 was released, or the codename for the next version of the custom chipset.
The name was in use…
user180940
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3 answers
When did HTTP start compressing text?
HTML tends to compress well, typically consisting of text interspersed with repetitive tags. Transparently compressing it for download is a fairly obvious optimization to save bandwidth.
When did Web servers start routinely doing this? Mozilla's…
rwallace
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25
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2 answers
Did any DOS compatibility layers exist for any UNIX-like systems before DOS started to become outmoded?
Quoting from Jim Hall's "FreeDOS turns 25 years old: An origin story":
Around 1994, Microsoft announced that its next planned version of Windows would do away with MS-DOS. But I liked DOS. Even though I had started migrating to Linux, I still…
ArrayBolt3
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3 answers
How were Amiga games cracked circa 1987?
I remember getting my Action Replay MKIII cartridge on my A500 in 1992, and from there I could remove protections (manual/code & physical) of a lot of games.
The MKI & MKII existed before 1991 but not before 1989. Also CPUs with a vector base…
Jean-François Fabre
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25
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4 answers
Did something like floppy disk jukeboxes for home computers exist in the 70s or 80s? Would that have been a feasible concept?
Many home computers in the 1970s and 1980s had two floppy disk drives, or owners bought a second drive, to reduce having to play disk jockey. A second drive was especially popular with Commodore Amiga owners, as many games around 1990s came with…
scrØllbær
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What was the first piece of software to be called an engine?
Nowadays I hear a lot about graphics engines, game engines, physics engines etc. but don't remember the term being used much, if at all, back in the 80s and the 8-bit era.
I'm not including Charles Babbage's Difference Engine or Analytical Engine,…
user3570736
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Why did the stock Amigas not have a battery for keeping the time/date?
The Amiga computers were advanced machines meant to do all sorts of things, including file management. They had a GUI OS (Workbench) and everything right from the very start. They were not some games-only console such as the NES or SNES.
In spite of…
Superfrog
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What is 'Adaptive Tile Refresh' in the context of Commander Keen?
The question Did John Carmack really invent "Adaptive Tile Refresh"? asks about the origins of the scrolling and drawing techniques used to allow an MS-DOS PC to provide a NES console-like gameplay experience with an eight-directional free scrolling…
knol
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25
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2 answers
Was leaving all xxxxxx11 opcodes unused on the 6502 a deliberate design choice?
The 6502, like many 8-bit processors, has a somewhat arcane opcode-mode restrictions. On most such processors, the restriction is a clear result of trying to pack a lot of instructions into a limited number of opcodes. On the 6502, however, the…
supercat
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Windows 98 fails to install with 'Windows Setup requires 7340032 by' error in console
If you install Windows 98 from CD-ROM by first booting from a start-up floppy (such as a Windows 98 Startup Disk) and run setup.exe, it will inform the user that it is going to check the hard disks, and then it is possible that you will get a…
knol
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4 answers
Do instruction exercisers exist for 8086 and 68K (and other) CPUs?
For some of retroCPUs there exist exhaustive instruction exercisers, i.e. programs that are capable of catching the implementation errors when run on the emulator under development or on the newly made hardware like FPGA recreation.
Usually tests…
lvd
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