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Retrocomputing

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Programming aspects of retro systems and historical programming languages. Please check for language-specific tags first and use those instead, if applicable.

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My question seeks to understand some vintage source code used in the mid-80's to program a Programmable Array Logic device. The functional production code (see below) contains quite a few sub-...
Pandaphonium 'Bob''s user avatar
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After reading this, I wonder how the position of every sprite in the screen was calculated in games with several sprites moving around in the screen (enemies, shots, ...). It seems like too many ...
neutrino's user avatar
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In FORTRAN, before FORTRAN-90 with its RECURSIVE keyword, there was no standard way to write recursive subroutines, as all local variables were "static", as a C programmer would say. Of ...
Leo B.'s user avatar
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are there people here who can assemble such old programs? I have only 2 such codes that I would like to assembly but I don't know how. Is this even possible? 1 Link: https://web.archive.org/web/...
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Recently I asked a question about an error in the Spy format expert program when starting. Then they helped me fix this program, but there are still some mysteries and questions related to it. The ...
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I would like to write some interesting programs in assembler but I don't know where to start and how to do it. I would like a guide in simple language for dummies. Does anyone have a list of such ...
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How does one decompile to source code a program that decrypts itself? This particular program runs on an Apple IIgs.
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I'm trying to display error messages like a lot of MS-DOS (4.0+) utilities do. They don't embed messages like "Too many parameters" and "Invalid switch" in the executables, but ...
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Don't get me wrong! viruses are bad... But I don't have a standard virus problem. I caught one virus called Odyssey 2001 and it's a very kind virus that displays a message in SHGR on IIgs on some ...
David Johnson's user avatar
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I encountered a problem on the GSPlus emulator. When I want to run a program, the message appears on the screen: SHGR buffer already allocated. After that, the GS reboots and the program does not ...
David Johnson's user avatar
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Ok, I know this is a very old computer but just for fun. I have figured out how to read keyboard (0177560 for checking, 0177562 for reading) and print it (0177564 for checking, 0177566 for writing). ...
Codesynth's user avatar
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I have read it in an old "hacker test" fun text, about in the middle 90s. It was about 4. Today googling refers to the idea that maybe it had been about writing into a read-only intended ...
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In COBOL there are three picture clauses, A for alpha, X for alphanumeric, and 9 for numeric. But why is it called PIC or PICTURE. I am wondering where the name comes from?
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I'm analyzing a Fortran IV program written for a PDP-10. I was briefly acquainted with the language but had never studied it. Now I have a couple Fortran reference manuals (IV and 77), and I'm ...
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I am trying to reproduce a program I wrote for a Office of Surface Mining scientists back in 1985 that was written on a commodore 128 in BASIC 7.0. The program performed a Monte Carlo simulation of ...
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The parody essay Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal (1983) states: What kind of tools does a Real Programmer use? In theory, a Real Programmer could run his programs by keying them into the front ...
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After searching for the file system for this computer I have gained interest in this machine and development for it. I have found a C compiler but anything else. So basically I would like to ask if ...
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I have a physical copy of "Professional Symbian programming : mobile solutions on the EPOC platform" by Martin Tasker. The book originally came with a CD containing source code; but mine is ...
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I'm pretty sure I've seen references to these words as placeholders, variable names, etc. going back to at least the 1970s. I always guessed there was a connection to "FUBAR" there somewhere,...
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In my boot sector code, I'm using the following code to read a sector from disk (floppy if DL == 0, HDD if DL == 0x80): mov ax, 0xfe1 ; Read destination segment. mov es, ax mov ax, 0x201 ; Read 1 ...
pts's user avatar
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The link here is a youtube video of Exidy's Car Polo from 1977 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMljzipOy4s What blew me away when seeing it in action was the game's hitbox detection for all 4 ...
Hash's user avatar
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I'm writing a very small .exe program in assembly, targeting DOS 2.0 (or, if it doesn't work, DOS 3.00 is also fine). It has to be able to run other DOS .com and .exe programs, wait for them to finish,...
pts's user avatar
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When I write a program for MS-DOS, and I know at most how many bytes of stack space my program needs, then how many extra bytes of additional stack space should I reserve (in the assembly source code ...
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I'm starting to write some machine language programs for my Kyocera 85-family systems, starting with my TRS-80 Model 100 and NEC PC-8201. My understanding is that the .CO files contain the binary code ...
cjs's user avatar
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On Wikipedia's entry for ENIAC, it states the ENIAC had 5 programming languages. I believe some of those are just names for different graphing systems, but ARC Assembly and Curry Notation System seem ...
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I'm running the example code from Assembly Lines chapter 5 programs 2A and 2B which print the entire character map for the Apple II and then are supposed to break, however my code is looping ...
Eric Noble's user avatar
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It seems that MS-DOS was primarily written in assembly even in its last versions. I understand that new versions of Windows such as the NT-based versions currently in use, and Windows 95 .. ME which ...
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The Wikipedia page describing specifics of row-major vs column-major storage order for multi-dimensional arrays, mentions, among others, C/C++ (*1), Pascal and PL/I for the former, and, surely, ...
Leo B.'s user avatar
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In Microsoft Visual C++, I can use the macros _MSC_VER for compiler identification and _MSC_FULL_VER for its version number to retrieve the data of the used compiler at runtime of my C program. But ...
Coder's user avatar
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Think of the most currently "awesome", popular programming language that everyone wants to learn, and is going to "take over the world"... From the late 1990's to early 2000's ...
Kingsley's user avatar
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I'm working on a disassembly tool for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum and want to do things "right" when possible. I remember seeing lists of ROM routines, system variables, and memory addresses ...
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27 votes
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Negative indexing is a well-known feature of Python, for example a[-1] gets the last element of list a. Which programming language was the first to do this? (FORTRAN has supported arbitrary indexing ...
qwr's user avatar
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10 answers
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At some point it became easier and faster to write high level code than assembly. I'm curious about the transition - right now a full time assembly programmer is rare indeed, although there are still ...
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While looking through a very old codebase, I found some preprocessor defines and comments referring to something called "Mac SLM" or "ASLM". From the context, it appears to have ...
Mark's user avatar
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In Charles Lindsey's “A browse through some early bulletins”, he mentions (regarding Knuth's Man Or Boy test): As a postcript to this whole episode, it may be noted that a couple of years later Bekic ...
texdr.aft's user avatar
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On the PDP11/70, in the XXDP BKTCB0.BIC program I saw the following code: 012716 177777 mov #-1,(KSP) 006627 MTPI (PC)+ According to the comments in the source-code, this triggers a trap....
Folkert van Heusden's user avatar
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2 answers
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I've been setting up a Basilisk II emulator to try my hand at developing apps for 68k System 7 systems, and have set up the Macintosh Programmer's Workstation (v.3.5 Gold Master from ...
gorgo's user avatar
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62 votes
3 answers
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In the Sierra On-Line game "Leisure Suit Larry 2" there's a part in the game where the main character (Larry) has to write a program in 8088 assembly language as part of his tribal ...
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I am currently trying to create a FPGA styled simulator of the 8080 in C. I have a couple of questions regarding the D0-D7 pins. As far as I can see the D0-D7 lines are used in order to store data (a ...
cdunku's user avatar
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4 votes
2 answers
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I made a Key Tester using the STDIO header included with GBDK. It works... Until it doesn't. All the keys register and print to the screen, except the Left(5) and Right(4) Directional Keys, which ...
OPM eStudio's user avatar
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14 votes
1 answer
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Back in the day I bought SAS/C for the Amiga. I seem to recall that before that there was Aztec C, Manx C, and Lattice C that were the major commercial C compilers for the platform. I never used them. ...
hippietrail's user avatar
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8 votes
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I'm trying out some 6502 assembly language, specifically using Kick Assembler. I have the following routine that just sticks a character on the text screen at a specified x and y, it's taken from the ...
Alan B's user avatar
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16 votes
4 answers
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I'm curious as to how exactly some of the logical and arithmetic operator signs were decided? The plus and minus operators make sense, but how was decided that / was the division operator or that * ...
Neil Meyer's user avatar
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6 answers
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The ENIAC was the first programmable, electronic, general-purpose digital computer. However, it was programmed by "rewiring", and this is what I do not understand. When we say "...
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I'm trying to draw the vector objects from the original coordinates of the Asteroids arcade game, starting with the ship from here, but I'm having trouble figuring it out and getting weird results. E....
Martin's user avatar
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I recently listened to a podcast of Carmack and he said that in early DOS days he mostly uses assembly. The host asked him about Pascal and he said back then only Wizardry was written in Pascal. I ...
Nicholas Humphrey's user avatar
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6 votes
2 answers
640 views

I want to write an application for DOS using small code/data model, but I would like to use far pointers for some selected memory blocks. I would like to use the OpenWatcom C++/16 compiler. So, for ...
antekone's user avatar
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23 votes
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In 1977, Guy Steele published a paper entitled Debunking the “expensive procedure call” myth or, procedure call implementations considered harmful or, LAMBDA: The Ultimate GOTO. The paper was the ...
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In the late 70s and early 1980s, computer magazines and books usually distributed program codes via program listings, which the user then had to type into his computer. Today these are also known as ...
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6 votes
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Way back in the mid-80s, I worked as a programmer for the Apple II family, Commodore and Atari machines. I remember programming them using a big intimidating box branded Kontron stacked on top of my ...
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