fredoralive

18 ms·

1.
by fredoralive 1mo ago
The bit about how the AMD Athlon (K7) uses the same bus, and how they planned to make Slot A Alphas where the only adjustment an Althon motherboard would need is a different BIOS. Imagine what might have been, especially as Alpha Windows 20
2.
by fredoralive 1mo ago
I'm pretty sure it was an opt-in thing for individual programs, if an app didn't intentionally use it they kept the old look. I've always thought that it's a bit of an undocumented and slightly forgotten bit of Windows 3
3.
by fredoralive 1mo ago
I think it's just that 16x16 icons didn't become a thing in Windows until Windows 95, and so older apps don't supply one. Windows will then scale down the 32x32 icon instead, and it's never really done it that attractive
4.
by fredoralive 2mo ago
1 gallon is 0.832674 gallons. Or 1 gallon is 1.20095 gallons.
5.
by fredoralive 2mo ago
There are some per-model stats from Germany issued at the end of 1993 (so a few months before Commodore went tits up)[1], and they have ~1 million A500s, and ~100 thousand A1200s (plus circa 10k A4000s). So there's a fair few out there
6.
by fredoralive 2mo ago
That’s because with most modern MacBook touchpads (bar the Neo) the touchpad never really moves much. It’s all force detection and a haptic feedback thingy. If the system crashes, it stops triggering the feedback.
7.
by fredoralive 2mo ago
Implementing mouse cursors as a hardware sprite isn’t that uncommon for 2D accelerated graphics, albeit later than on the Amiga. Something like an ATI Mach32 has one for example. About 15 years ago I had a crappy Dell whose Radeon card woul
8.
by fredoralive 2mo ago
I think the article is sorta wrong about the sound setup, the Mega Drive I does have a sound input on the expansion port, and mixes it into its sound output. Otherwise stuff like RF cables wouldn't get Mega CD based audio (and you can
9.
by fredoralive 3mo ago
Looking at pictures, it appears cameraless iPhones tend to have backs without camera holes / lumps, so some custom work is involved beyond just removing the module. Though there’s going to be a degree of “the government can afford it”
10.
by fredoralive 3mo ago
I’m not sure if Sony has been pushing their video disc formats with PlayStations for a while. PS4 Pro was the “4K” upgrade over PS4, but didn’t support UHD Blu-Ray. And there’s been a disc drive-less PS5 since launch. Stuff like Blu-Ray see
11.
by fredoralive 3mo ago
Closing the online store for older systems simultaneously with announcing the dropping of physical media leaves an interesting question for the future. Even if you’ve never bought an online PS3 or Vita game, you’ll still be able to use the
12.
by fredoralive 3mo ago
Well, I guess that answers the question of whether the PS6 will have an awkward snap on disc drive.
13.
by fredoralive 3mo ago
Seiko can cover a fairly large group of companies, Seiko Epson is a particular subgroup of it (now somewhat detached from the main group).
14.
by fredoralive 3mo ago
Bit of hindsight bias there, DAB was first developed in the mid 1990s, ubiquitous fast wireless IP in everyone’s pockets is at least a decade, perhaps nearer to 20 years in the future. There are quite a few transitionary technologies that w
15.
by fredoralive 3mo ago
Doesn’t RDS mostly solve that for the most common case where frequency changes becomes an issue (car radios).
16.
by fredoralive 3mo ago
As far as I know the medium wave services aren’t transmitted from the same antenna as Radio 4 LW, they have separate antenna, albeit with one of them (5 Live) doubling up as one of the support towers for the large long wave T antenna slung
17.
by fredoralive 3mo ago
It’s interesting that the gate arrays are supplied by Seiko, and the only known MCGA systems apart from IBM are from Epson. The bit of Seiko that made the gate arrays appears to be… Seiko Epson. So is it a coincidence? Sub-licensing? Skulld
18.
by fredoralive 3mo ago
The article mentions that it is brought out to the connector, multiplexed with the monitor ID pins.
19.
by fredoralive 3mo ago
The Disk System RAM Adapter plugged into the cartridge port on a Famicom. The Famicom 15 pin expansion port is just a fancy joystick port (the console is otherwise limited to a pair of hardwired joypads). The NES expansion port on its own d
20.
by fredoralive 3mo ago
It's basically a case of hardware acceleration. Most games consoles and fancier micros have some of dedicated graphics chip that handles the heavy lifting of generating graphics. So for basic game graphics the CPU largely acts as a man
21.
by fredoralive 3mo ago
Roughly how many varieties of module were used for a full 604 system? I suspect quite a few as other "modular" systems in the transistor era like the later IBM Standard Modular System and DEC Flip-Chips ended up with plethora of s
22.
by fredoralive 4mo ago
DOS barely has any concept of processes, let alone threads. So it’ll all be very do it yourself. Of course with everything running in ring 0, there’s not much that’s going to get in the way of you.
23.
by fredoralive 4mo ago
From somewhere in the middle of Nvidia’s endless press waffle: “The RTX Spark superchip features an NVIDIA Blackwell RTX GPU with 6,144 CUDA cores and fifth-generation Tensor Cores with FP4 precision, connected via the NVIDIA NVLink®-C2C ch
24.
by fredoralive 4mo ago
I suspect Windows 2000 (and NT based stuff in general) is too near to modern Windows to be (officially) released. DOS is long dead, but modern Windows still uses the NT kernel and Win32 and so on, and they probably don't want to give a
25.
by fredoralive 4mo ago
Yes, Microsoft had established themselves as supplier of BASIC interpreters to most of the US microcomputer manufacturers. There initial contact with IBM was to provide a version of Microsoft BASIC for the new computer.
26.
by fredoralive 4mo ago
You wouldn’t be getting a protection fault when protection isn’t enabled. I should also note this error is the return code for MS-DOS’s memory management functions (such as int 21h ax 48h / 49h), vaguely similar to malloc() returning N
27.
by fredoralive 4mo ago
MS-DOS doesn’t have memory protection, so another option is that the running program[1] or something like a TSR or driver could have corrupted the headers. [1] I guess in a modern system a process can still trash its own malloc, but not the
28.
by fredoralive 4mo ago
The early 2005 PowerBook G4 was the last pro notebook with DDR surely, as the MacBook Pro your referring to seems to use DDR4.
29.
by fredoralive 4mo ago
It would presumably be the August 1991 coup if it were the Soviet Union, as it was one of the factors leading to the USSR dissolving at the end of the year. The Autumn 1993 coup was in the Russian Federation (and the geriatric plotters in t
30.
by fredoralive 4mo ago
A study commissioned by Microsoft says that Microsoft's offering is better than Apple's? How unexpected. Also, if they're counting a Microsoft college promo offering on their side, shouldn't they be pricing the Neo at $4

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