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For questions about the software development process on retrocomputing platforms

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Installers for DOS applications, particularly ones which interface with particular hardware or provide networking services, often have to add lines to CONFIG.SYS and/or AUTOEXEC.BAT. Obviously there's ...
Sneftel's user avatar
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I'd like some help creating a retro DNS server, and I have a few questions: How do I get the pages in the wayback and put them in my DNS? How do I point the server to mount these pages? I would like ...
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(I originally asked this in the "gaming"/Arqade section. However, it was suggested by a commenter that I should instead migrate it here. Since I don't know how one "migrates" a ...
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The Atari 2600, along with others like the Odyssey 2 or Intellivision, were among the first programmable home game consoles. They existed alongside personal computers like the Apple II and Commodore ...
David's user avatar
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Does anyone know why there is a SunOS kernel configuration file in the 4.1c.1 BSD directory tree in the CSRG ISOs? How to see that this file exists: McKusick sells the CSRG ISOs. But let's face it, ...
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I found out today that a large project like Microsoft Windows 1.0 took 80 man-years to develop. And this one was written in x86 assembly language. Is there a form or rule of thumb that states how much ...
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One thing that struck me about the design of COBOL was that it was surprisingly complex, particularly for the era. As in, if I were trying to squeeze a compiler into a few tens of kilobytes of memory, ...
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On i386 and beyond (assuming MS-DOS as the target OS and IBM PC as the target platform), my impression is game developers most typically used Watcom C / DJGPP plus one of the DOS extenders (DOS4GW, ...
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As mentioned here the book Expert C Programming contains the claim that there was a bug in SunOS 4.0.3's version of lpr, (a printing program) caused by a custom mktemp function overriding the library ...
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In nearly all the assembly source files and published listings I read up to the early 1980s, the labels, mnemonics, and operands were written in all uppercase. Just a few years later, I noticed 80x86 ...
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Upon beating the Namco arcade game Splatterhouse, released in November 1988, the following is shown in the credits along with the expected programmers and artists: SPECIAL MAKEUP DESIGNED ...
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Gerald Weinberger, in the 1971 book The Psychology of Computer Programming, gives the following anecdote: The numerous stages [of reporting?] can produce interesting effects, as a result of filtering ...
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What de-compilers were available for ResEdit? A friend used a de-compiler to break the copy protection on F/A-18 Hornet and I remember having one to examine how programs worked. To clarify by de-...
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Probably the most widespread software version numbering scheme in use today takes the form of a dotted sequence of integers. Variants of this scheme usually share the following characteristics: ...
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Old computer systems were supplied—by our present notion—with very little memory, thus conservation of both RAM and storage room has been tremendously important during those years of austerity. ...
Incnis Mrsi's user avatar
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It seems that the primary system call to change a new directory within an Amiga process is dos.library/CurrentDir(lock) but the documentation does not tell me how to detect if it succeeded. Quoting ...
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The original Macintosh version of Myst was written in HyperCard. According to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20549685 Adding useful features, such as uploading those HTML files to a web server, ...
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According to Joel Spolsky, I will give the Internet Explorer team credit. With IE versions 3.0 and 4.0 they probably created software about ten times faster than the industry norm. This had nothing ...
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According to his 1984 interview with Byte magazine, Steve Wozniak created the BASIC for the Apple 1 computer before he actually built the computer: I sat down and wrote the BASIC first, and that took ...
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I am looking for impressions, memoirs, articles, guidelines - everything that is possible about the unusual direction of software migration. I am interested in non-Unix related code, and preferably ...
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I've been reacquainting myself with classic Mac OS programming (e.g. the Toolbox, MacsBug, THINK Pascal/C, etc.) and became curious how software engineering best practices were ...practiced... using ...
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Example: https://youtu.be/E9QJZSBpvg0?t=80 The road turns not only left and right, like in the classic Pole Position, but also goes up and down. Other than the cars and the road, there are numerous ...
Liamm's user avatar
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I primarily know Shadowgate from the wonderful NES port, which was ported by some Japanese company and whose Japanese musician composed the beautiful, iconic music which I frankly thought was there ...
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Refal is a language from the 1960s that is based on the concept of pattern-matching with many features that could be considered advanced even today- it is functional, garbage collected, and supported ...
Daniel Moskovich's user avatar
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I am developing some software for the Commodore 64, and I am concerned about its runspeed. Is there an emulator that can report, after running my code, where exactly it spent most of its time? I'm ...
Omar and Lorraine's user avatar
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14 votes
12 answers
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I'm quite unfamiliar with how operating systems used to be written but its clear to me that operating systems were clearly written for these systems. I'm particularly interested in how operating ...
Jake's user avatar
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4 answers
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I am wondering if anyone has a pointer to a good source of "classic" BASIC programs, in text format. One would think this would be easy to find, but unfortunately VB so pollutes the results as to ...
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During the latest gaming press release, Square Enix released remastered versions of all of the classic Final Fantasy games excluding Final Fantasy VIII. The alleged reason is due to the lost source ...
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1 answer
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In the eighties, there was a vast flowering of small independent software companies. Business and productivity software for the IBM PC, all manner of novelties for the Macintosh, games for the ...
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35 votes
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I'm specifically interested in the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis, which used a 68000 CPU, but also a Z80, mainly used to control the sound hardware and provide backward compatibility with the Master System. ...
Michael Stum's user avatar
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MS DOS Ver 1.0 did not have OS support for device drivers. DOS ver2 added support for device drivers in the config.sys file during boot with the "DEVICE=[path][filename][parameters]". Did CP/M have OS ...
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81 votes
14 answers
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When hobbyists wanted to write software for e.g. the Commodore 64, they either used the built-in BASIC interpreter (with all its limitations) or some native tools, like compilers for other languages ...
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7 votes
2 answers
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I am trying to write a program in C# that will re-create the type of dithering used in many of the old Sierra and LucasArts games. I have looked up many different dithering algorithms and none seem to ...
Synaps3's user avatar
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I thought all Atari 2600 games had been programmed in 6502/6507 assembly language (plus whatever activated the Stella sound system), but at a party recently, a friend indicated that some 2600 ...
Aaron Brick's user avatar
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28 votes
9 answers
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What was the first mainstream development toolchain that provided advanced debugging facilities? By "mainstream" I mean something that was available on home computers, not mainframes or super-...
dim's user avatar
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19 votes
9 answers
3k views

My colleague and I have just had a conversation and we were wondering how the process of developing an application was done in the era of cassette tapes. Today we have HDDs, backup HDDs, FTPs, ...
jacek.ciach's user avatar
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16 votes
4 answers
6k views

In the mid 1980's computers began to be advertised as having or being capable of "Fuzzy" logic. How was "Fuzzy" logic added to a computer and what was it suppose to do better than a computer without ...
jwzumwalt's user avatar
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13 votes
2 answers
2k views

Almost all old home computers tend to offer non-square pixels, from wide-pixel graphics modes on the C64/CPC/BBC Micro to CGA's weird not-quite-square 320x200 mode with a pixel aspect ratio of 5:6. ...
hexwab's user avatar
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19 votes
3 answers
2k views

The PDP-11 MARK instruction was intended to be used as part of the standard PDP-11 subroutine return convention. MARK facilitated the stack clean up procedures involved in subroutine exit. To use it, ...
Leo B.'s user avatar
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5 votes
0 answers
437 views

The N64 SDK provides the makerom tool to create a ROM image given a file describing the ROM layout called spec and the various object files it refers to such as the N64 OS, RCP microcode, and the game'...
Allie's user avatar
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19 votes
10 answers
5k views

While not strictly adhered to, this is somewhat of a generalization of computer listings found in the more popular magazines of the time - BYTE, Kilobaud, PC Computing, etc. This explains the ...
jwzumwalt's user avatar
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22 votes
5 answers
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It seems that right from the outset, the plan for Windows development was that it would be done with a separate set of compilers specifically equipped for that purpose. The Windows SDK comes with 7 ...
rakslice's user avatar
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39 votes
4 answers
23k views

The C Programming Language was originally developed by Dennis Ritchie who also co-designed the Unix operating system with which development of the language was closely intertwined. Is there a ...
jwzumwalt's user avatar
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19 votes
2 answers
1k views

Everyone knows how important documentation is -- for a project to grow past a certain point, it's a must-have. However, almost every software project of any size nowadays comes with at least a README ...
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It is generally agreed that Microsoft stole parts if not entire blocks of intellectual property from Digital Research, Xerox, Apple, and several other major corporations. To keep it simple, lets ...
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25 votes
9 answers
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It was common with Commodore BASIC (and others, I'm sure) to have machine language encoded in BASIC programs using POKEs or READ/DATA. This was needed for both performance and to access certain ...
Brian H's user avatar
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9 votes
1 answer
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Traf-O-Data was the first business partnership between Paul Allen, Bill Gates and Paul Gilbert. In order to develop the software for their custom-built Traf-O-Data machine (Intel 8008 Inside™), ...
wizzwizz4's user avatar
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7 votes
1 answer
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Altair BASIC, the first version of Microsoft BASIC, was developed using an Intel 8008 emulator, modified to emulate an Intel 8080, running on a PDP-10 computer. This emulator was originally designed ...
wizzwizz4's user avatar
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11 votes
1 answer
886 views

Back when Mac OS was called "System" and preemptive multitasking was a distant fantasy, I had a small collection of Macintosh programming books. For the life of me, though, I can't remember what one ...
David Rubin's user avatar
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9 votes
3 answers
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I see a very large fan-base and hear a lot (especially here on retrocomputing) about how great the Commodore 64 was. Growing up in the Windows 95/98 era, I seemed to have missed a great era for ...
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