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1500 questions
21
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3 answers
Could a single NES ROM cartridge run on both PAL and NTSC systems?
Most ROMs are labeled with "(Europe)" or "(USA)", meaning PAL or NTSC. However, some are labeled "(World)". At first, I didn't think twice about this, just assuming that that the game was released world-wide identically, with no changes between the…
Preston
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How and why did Intel make the PCI bus "CPU Agnostic"?
Intel invented the original 32/64-bit PCI bus in the early 1990s to replace the decade old ISA bus used in PC's. It was immediately popular (in comparison to Micro Channel or EISA), being both faster and more supportive of auto-configuration (i.e.…
Brian H
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21
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What kind of television set would work with the Commodore 64?
I found out all my SmartTVs don't work because they are too modern for my old computer.
I am a young owner of a Commodore 64, so please bear with me as this machine is a decade older than me.
I do have AV-video-wires that I got from…
Travis Wells
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21
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2 answers
Did playing sounds on the PC speaker keep the CPU busy?
The IBM PC and early successors came with an internal speaker that could play simple sounds. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_speaker
However, because the method used to reproduce PCM was very sensitive to timing issues, these effects…
rwallace
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21
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3 answers
Typical dpi of dot matrix printers available in the 1980s
I have several printouts from what is presumably a dot-matrix printer, dated 1987. When zoomed in on these, you see the usual stair-step patterns on diagonal lines. However, it's difficult to determine exactly where the individual pixels of the…
John O
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21
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4 answers
How did 68k-based Macs (or other contemporary systems) detect how much RAM was installed?
If I upgraded, say, a Macintosh II with larger SIMMs, naturally the machine detected that additional RAM. But how did it perform that check? Does it simply sweep all addresses until it fails? Or does it do something more complex?
user18197
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What happened to the 65832?
In his June 1985 foreword to Programming the 65816 by David Eyes and Ron Lichty, Bill Mensch expresses his hopes for a 6502-derived 32-bit microprocessor: the 65832. WDC is still thriving, but the ‘832 was apparently never released. What happened to…
Jacob Krall
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21
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2 answers
Is the "IBM standard character set manual" around?
From Wikipedia's code page article:
Originally, the code page numbers referred to the page numbers in the IBM standard character set manual
Is any version of this publication available? I'd be content even with a photo of the cover.
Adám
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21
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Why did Socket 3 have more pins than needed for the 486?
Intel's Socket 3, used for 486 processors, was a 19×19 pin grid array socket. However, all compatible processors, to my knowledge, used 17×17 PGA packages. What was the point of the extra pins around the perimeter of the socket? Were they even…
Hearth
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Where did the lookup table in Entombed come from?
Entombed is an Atari 2600 game where you move through an infinite vertically-scrolling maze and try not to die. This maze is procedurally generated, with two bits from a PRNG (underlined) added each row, by looking up five bits from the maze in a…
wizzwizz4
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21
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5 answers
Were the custom chips in the Amiga exploited for their hardware bugs like the ones in the C64 and Atari 8 bit computers were?
Here we are some decades on from the C64, and other 8 bit computers.
New ideas that resulted in some new graphics effect or mode seem to happen, though we may be near the end of all that.
Took a long while though. Longer than I suspect many…
Spud
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How can I overclock my Commodore 64?
My Commodore 64 is running quite slow, and my friends want it to be faster, thus overclocking it. But no one knows exactly how to do that. With our current "modern" stuff, nothing seems to help my retro computer get any faster. Naturally I suggested…
Anthony Pham
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Was the MC6800 based on the PDP-11 or PDP-8?
According to Gordon Bell, the 6800 was based on the PDP-11. According to Chuck Peddle, it was a PDP-8.
Can anyone with knowledge of the PDP's pass judgement?
Maury Markowitz
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21
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9 answers
Why weren't audio decoders used to create a makeshift internet in the 70 and 80s?
I know ARPANET wasn't available to the public until the '90s, but why didn't people just build modems (which most phone companies already had anyway), connect their phone's phone connector to it, dial up a "server" and connect to it that way?
The…
user2741831
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3 answers
How did 36-bit computers format ARPANET packets?
The contract to develop ARPANET, the first version of the Internet, was awarded in 1969; usage of the system expanded exponentially through the seventies.
The size and format of ARPANET packets were specified in terms of octets (8-bit bytes):…
rwallace
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