All Questions

I'm trying to implement the CHANGE command from Dartmouth BASIC v4 and later. It allows you to convert a string into an array of numbers and back again. One key bit of the concept is that the length ...

From Gary B. Little's "Apple ProDOS: Advanced Features for Programmers", pages 176 - 188: "Since the ONLINE command handler is not inherently relocatable, all references to internal ...

The Atari 400 and 800 came out in 1979. The hardware included the ability to overlay sprites ("players" and the smaller "missiles") over the display. AFAIK, this capability is ...

I'm trying to get into MS-DOS development for fun, and I'd like to use SciTech's SVGAKit library. The last version of it is still downloadable via the Internet Archive here. However it seems to be ...

Am I missing something or is Z80 weird in its use of the B and C registers? If I want to copy memory, I have this super cool LDIR instruction which copies (HL) to (DE) BC times and incrementing HL and ...

I am asking this here because from the history the principles might become much clearer than looking at the latest and greatest CPUs. Of course I know that "cache speeds up memory access" ...

Back in the days of MS-DOS, when I needed to type a special character that wasn't part of the keyboard layout, I would press down the left Alt key and type out the character code on the numeric keypad ...

My little Z80 breadboard project got stuck in the mud where I am pulling my hair out. It looks like the CPU is making a calculation error on a relative jump. Here is my code, and I don't think ZX ...

New to Z80, coming from 6502, the instruction set appears hugely CISCY. And yet, I cannot find a simple method to inspect the PC (transfer PC to a general purpose register, e.g., HL). I need this to ...

As the title states, what would be the job title of a vacuum tube replacer? Vacuum tube operator? Vacuum tube engineer? If your job had you spending most of your time replacing vacuum tubes, what ...

CRT-Screen-Compact-Desktop-Calculators of the 60's, could versions of this tech have been made as word-processors or even video-games? Word-Processors - How difficult would it have been to save what ...

Python's heapq.__about__ variable contains an anecdote (François Pinard, circa 2000): [1] The disk balancing algorithms which are current, nowadays, are more annoying than clever, and this is a ...

The context is that I have additional data in the .exe file and wish to access it. I know this is possible, as plenty of programs would store extra data after the loadable part of an MZ .exe — most 32-...

I am trying to install Windows 98 on a pretty modern computer, from 2010. Why? Because I want to see if I can. Anyway, I am booting off a USB flash drive with FreeDOS on it. I formatted the USB flash ...

While discussing a question about the origin of Zero as value for the default exit code for success, I reflected if there is any Instruction Set Architecture or implementation thereof where testing a ...