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1500 questions
51
votes
4 answers
What precautions to take when powering on old computer for the first time in years
I have a Commodore 128D that hasn't been powered in about 15 years. I want to begin using it again. It has been stored in cool dry places like attached garages, in a cardboard box.
I hope this question can apply to the general case of anybody who…
nexus_2006
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5 answers
What causes that "organic fade to black" effect in classic video games?
This happens a lot on older consoles than this, but for this specific example, I'm picking what I spotted today: Harvest Moon for PlayStation.
Here is a screenshot of the player just about to exit an area, thus causing a "fade to black":
Here is…
Haramis
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51
votes
4 answers
Was AGP only ever used for graphics cards?
Reading on the AGP spec, the little bits I've found on sites like AGP interface pinout and wiring @ old.pinouts.ru, say:
The Accelerated Graphics Port (also called Advanced Graphics Port) is a high-speed point-to-point channel for attaching a…
Bryan Boettcher
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51
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4 answers
What should we do with manuals from the 80s?
I have access to several meters of manuals of various sorts around CP/M on PCs and various bits on mainframes. These are earmarked to go after decades of "cannot dump that" heartbleed. Most are originals, but also many copies. I helped to put some…
smoe
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51
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3 answers
What was Nintendo's Software Development Environment for NES Games?
(This question was inspired by my previous question What kind of software was used to develop Nintendo 64 titles?)
The NES used a modified 6502 processor and most games were written in Assembly. There are a number of open source tools available for…
JAL
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50
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20 answers
Did personal computers ever support 8" floppies?
When I look at the following picture, it seems a bit awkward to me that personal computers ever supported 8" floppies (unless the size of your computer case was as big as a fridge !):
Am I right or were there any personal computers that supported…
Eric Cartman
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50
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5 answers
Why did CPU designers in the 70s prioritize reducing pin count?
A lot of 70s era microprocessors were packaged in DIP packages with 40 pins. This was a reasonably good fit for 8-bit processors: 16 address lines, 8 data lines, 2 power and clock are all absolutely essential, which leaves 13 lines for control…
Jules
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50
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9 answers
Why were floppy drives not any faster?
180rpm to 360 rpm, unlike 12000rpm on optical discs, was how fast floppy disks got.
I am not sure, whether all drives had the same speed, but 360rpm is not close to the physical stress limitations of floppy disks.
Why were floppy disks not any…
neverMind9
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7 answers
Why did the Motorola 68000 processor family fall out of use in personal computers in the 21st century?
In the '80s and '90s the Intel x86 and Motorola 68000 families were the two leading microcomputer architectures in the 16-bit/32-bit personal computer scene. The 68000s were even preferred by the purists because of its orthogonal instruction set.…
Biff Iam
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50
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3 answers
Why did the PDP-11 include a JMP instruction?
The PDP-11's program counter was addressable in two ways: as a general purpose register or as a memory location.
Still, the PDP-11's instruction set included separate instructions for moving a new value into the PC. Did the designers not realise…
Omar and Lorraine
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50
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11 answers
What is the oldest computer capable of running a modern version of GNU/Linux?
A bit of a trivia question: What is the oldest hardware capable of running a modern Linux-based operating system, including user-space? (Not necessarily GNU userspace, but running a standard GNU/Linux distro would be most interesting.)
By this I…
Jonas Czech
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5 answers
Filesystems with versioning
I've been reading through The Unix Hater's Handbook. It has many, many very valid criticisms. (I'm still raging that terminal escape codes aren't in the terminal driver...)
There is one anomaly though: One of the chapters is complaining that Unix…
MathematicalOrchid
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49
votes
2 answers
Did Windows NT 4 emulate x86 on non-Intel platforms?
I've been trying to find more information about non-Intel versions of Windows NT regarding x86 emulation but found very little about it. There is one sentence about it in the Wikipedia page but the reference link is gone.
Was there any sort of x86…
Eric Cartman
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49
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7 answers
How could early UNIX OS comprise so few lines of code?
I start my journey to become a hardware / software specialist with an internship in two weeks time and decided to start studying the C language early.
I came across this video, Learn C Programming with Dr. Chuck (feat. classic book by Kernighan and…
Neil Meyer
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49
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3 answers
How did varargs in C develop?
C has a feature for variadic functions, my understanding is this feature was originally a hack, relying on the simple stack-based parameter passing used by early C implementations and that some time later it became a compiler feature, allowing it to…
Peter Green
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