retrocomputing

This ISA video card doesn't work. There are no schematics so this is going to be an adventure to figure out why this card bad. Get your oscilloscope ready!

Today we're checking out a super weird Pentium laptop with a built in game controller... on the palmrest for some reason!

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/25299294

via https://www.osnews.com/story/142087/sdl2-ported-to-mac-os-9/

Back in 2003, Apple introduced the iSight - a $150 webcam for their newly-updated iChat IM client. I've had one of these things sitting around for years, and thought it would be worth checking out on video. Because the design of this thing really holds up after all this time. In fact, I'd wager to say it's the coolest looking webcam that I've come across.

For Microsoft's 50th Bill Gates wrote this (neatly animated) blog entry, and scanned the original Altair Basic source code print out.

via https://mastodon.social/@dosnostalgic/114314060158724539

Let's explore the Dolch PAC 62 and upgrade it.

PAC-62: Screen size 266mm

It's a good thing I like the SE/30 as much as I do, considering what this one put me through.

If you’re on the US East Coast, you should head on over to Wall, NJ and check out the Vintage Computer Festival East. After all, [Brian Kernighan] is going to be there. Yes, that [Brian Kernighan].

Events are actually well underway, and you’ve already missed the first few TRS-80 Color Computer programming workshops, but rest assured that they’re going on all weekend. If you’re from the other side of the retrocomputing fence, namely the C64 side, you’ve also got a lot to look forward to, because the theme this year is “The Sounds of Retro” which means that your favorite chiptune chips will be getting a workout.

[Tom Nardi] went to VCF East last year, so if you’re on the fence, just have a look at his writeup and you’ll probably hop in your car, or like us, wish you could. If when you do end up going, let us know how it was in the comments!

Since they are both Kyocera machines, would the Model 100's floppy drive work on the NEC machine? Did it have a floppy of it's own?

The demoscene has become a national UNESCO-heritage in Sweden, thanks to an application that Ziphoid and me did last year. This has already happened in several European countries, as part of the international Art of Coding initiative to make the demoscene a global UNESCO heritage. I think this makes plenty of sense, since the demoscene is arguably the oldest creative digital subculture around. It has largely stuck to its own values and traditions throughout the world’s technological and economical shifts, and that sort of consistency is quite unusual in the digital world.

Most people think of machine instructions as the fundamental steps that a computer performs. However, many processors have another layer of software underneath: microcode. With microcode, instead of building the processor's control circuitry from complex logic gates, the control logic is implemented with code known as microcode, stored in the microcode ROM. To execute a machine instruction, the computer internally executes several simpler micro-instructions, specified by the microcode. In this post, I examine the microcode ROM in the original Pentium, looking at the low-level circuitry.