Retrocomputing questions and answers

My father is a retired programmer. When I was in high school in the late 1970s, he purchased a TRS-80 model 1 (on which I learned to program in BASIC). At some point in the early 1980s it, together with various accessories, was put in a box and stored in ....

Is it possible to use a system with a modern, multi-core CPU with older operating systems that only support single core operation? Is this something that needs to be set in the BIOS? Does it depend on the CPU, the BIOS, the OS, or something else? ....

Trying to access one byte in memory using segment/offset, like this union REGS in, out; struct SEGS segs; int v; char _far* p; ... int86x(...,&in,&out,&segs); p = (segs.es << 16) + out.x.bx + 4; v = (int)*p; and get "warning C4047: different levels of indirection" (and the value of v ....

In the 90s and in Western countries, you were able to buy import software for pretty much every video game system, for instance, Super Nintendo, Mega Drive, PC Engine, PlayStation and so on. To run them, you generally needed either an adapter for cartridges or a modchip for CD-ROMs. But ....

In Windows 9x, the MSDOS.SYS configuration file contains a section whose contents usually look like this: WinDir=C:\WINDOWS WinBootDir=C:\WINDOWS HostWinBootDrv=C Both WinDir and WinBootDir point to the Windows installation directory, which usually is C:\WINDOWS, and HostWinBootDrv points to the drive letter containing it. Having distinct settings suggests that potentially these could ....

I see on the schematic (https://rc2014.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/RC2014-Micro.pdf) that /M1 and A7 go to CS0 and CS1 respectively. As I recall, both of these need to be high for the chip to be selected. And A6 goes to CS2, which needs to be low for the chip to be selected. And of ....

The Wikipedia page on Mostek (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mostek), one of the original fabricators of Z80 chips, includes the following claim: When Vin Prothro, President, and L. J. Sevin, Chairman of the Board, discovered that Zilog had modified the recipe for Z80 chips to keep the yields low, thereby buying Zilog time to ....

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 strange, half-formed ....

When I was a kid, the "real" computers in movies looked so cool with that 80-column monochrome green text. My first computer was a VIC-20 it always felt very "toy" to me because of its 22 columns of fat text. Later my C64 was a better 40 columns, but still ....

Sinclair released an add-on for the Spectrum called the ZX Interface 2 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX_Interface_2) that provided joystick ports and a cartridge slot. It wasn't successful and only a few cartridges were ever produced. In the US, Sinclair partnered with Timex to make the not very successful Timex Sinclair 2068 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Sinclair_2068), which ....