As the march of time continues on, it becomes harder and harder to play older video games on hardware. Part of this is because the original hardware itself wears out, but another major factor is that modern operating systems, software, and even modern hardware don’t maintain support for older technology indefinitely. This is why emulation […]
When I was a student, I was a diehard Commodore Amiga user, having upgraded to an A500+ from my Sinclair Spectrum. The Amiga could do it all, it became my programming environment for electronic engineering course work, my audio workstation for student radio, my gaming hub, and much more. One thing that was part of […]
Remember the ZEOS Pocket PC? Perhaps you knew it as the Tidalwave PS-1000. Either way, it was a small clamshell computing device that was first released all the way back in 1992, and perhaps most accurately known as a DOS-based palmtop. Over at [Robert’s Retro] on YouTube, one of these fine devices was put through […]
The art of writing has become a cluttered one to follow, typically these days through a graphical word processor. There may be a virtual page in front of you, but it’s encumbered by much UI annoyance. To combat this a variety of distraction free software and appliances have been created over the years. But it’s […]
Despite the latest and greatest Intel-derived computers having multi-core 64-bit processors and unimaginably fast peripherals, at heart they all still retain a compatibility that goes back to the original 8086. This means that they can, in theory at least, still run MS-DOS. The venerable Microsoft 16-bit OS may now be long discontinued, but there is […]
Despite the rise of ARM processors in more and more computers from embedded systems to daily driver PCs, the x86 architecture maintains a stronghold in the computing space that won’t be going away anytime soon. One of the main drivers of this is its beachhead in industrial systems; the x86 architecture is backwards-compatible farther back […]
It might seem like the days of MS-DOS were a lifetime ago because…well, they basically were. Version 6.22 of the venerable operating system, the last standalone release, came out back in 1994. That makes even the most recent version officially 30 years old. A lot has changed in the computing world since that time, so […]
We no longer use floppy disks on the vast majority of computers, but a recent Old New Thing blog post from Microsoft sheds light on one of their possible unexpected legacies. It seems Windows disk cache items expire after two seconds, and as the post explains this has its origin in the development of MS-DOS […]
If you’re a fan of DOS games from the 1990s, you’ve almost certainly used DOSBox to replay them on a modern computer. It allows you to run software in a virtual environment that replicates an era-appropriate computer. That’s great for historical accuracy, but doesn’t do you much good if you’re trying to leverage modern computing […]