[Ken] from the YouTube channel What’s Ken Making is back with another MiSTer video detailing the TapTo project and its integration into MiSTer. MiSTer, as some may recall, is a set of FPGA images and a supporting ecosystem for the Terasic DE10-Nano FPGA board, which hosts the very capable Altera Cyclone V FPGA. The TeensyROM C64 cart supports TapTo The concept […]
The x86 CPU landscape of the 1980s and 1990s was competitive in a way that probably seems rather alien to anyone used to the duopoly that exists today between AMD and Intel. At one point in time, Cyrix was a major player, who mostly sought to provide a good deal that would undercut Intel. One […]
For many of us of a particular vintage, the internet blossomed in the ’90s with the invention of the Web and just a few years of development. Back then, we had the convenience of expression on the WWW and the backup of mature services such as IRC for all that other stuff we used to […]
IBM got their PCs and PS/2 computers into schools in the 1980s and 1990s. We fondly remember educational games like Super Solvers: Treasure Mountain. However, IBM had been trying to get into the educational market long before the PC. In 1969, the IBM Schools Computer System Unit was developed. Though it never reached commercial release, […]
Sierra’s King Quest v1.0 for DOS. Many have sought the holy grail of making commercial media both readable and copy-proof, especially once everyone began to copy those floppies. One of these attempts to make floppies copy-proof was Softguard’s Superlok. This in-depth look at this copy protection system by [GloriousCow] comes on the heels of a […]
Ever been working on a project and get stuck on one of those last little details? That’s what happened to [Empire of Scrap]. He’s building an Ohio Scientific (OSI) superboard II replica. He wants it to be accurate down to the dates on the chips. It is quite an impressive build. The problem is the […]
[Mike] from Leaded Solder has a soft spot for old computers, and a chance encounter with a friend sent them deep down the deep hole that is the world of 80s and 90s-era Japanese home computers. Many people playing with these machines have all kinds of issues to deal with, such as rotting cartridges, failing […]
Unlike the today’s consumer computer market, the 1980s were the wild west in comparison. There were all kinds of different, incompatible operating systems, hardware, and programs, all competing against one another, and with essentially no networking to tie everything together. Some of these products were incredibly niche as well, only running one program or having […]
The 8-bit home computers of yore that we all know and love, without exception as far as we are aware, had an off the shelf microprocessor at heart. In 1983 you were either in the Z80 camp or the 6502 camp, with only a relatively few outliers using processors with other architectures. But what if […]
[GloriousCow] has started working on a series of investigations into the various historical floppy disk copy protection schemes used in the early days of the IBM PC and is here with the first of these results, specifically Formaster’s Copy-Lock. This is the starting sector of track 6. It looks empty, but it’s not quite. The […]