Sierra’s King Quest v1.0 for DOS. As one dirilik see in the Norton Commander screenshot of a Sierra game disk, the hidden file is easily uncovered in any application that supports showing hidden files. However, CPC.COM couldn’t be executed directly; it needs to be executed from a memory buffer and passed the correct stack parameters.

For this privilege one pays around $600. It gives me the same joy I imagine people who are into expensive headphones or collect vintage vinyl feel—that sense of something being more

With the right configurations, retro gaming PCs provide hours of nostalgic entertainment. But occasionally you may hit snags:

In between writing about AI at Ars over the past 8+ months, I’ve had the chance to occasionally write a piece about tech history or nostalgia (23 in total so far).

Few people save old computers the way they save vintage motorcycles and antique furniture. To most, computers didn't become classics. They just became old. Even though the world bought its one billionth computer by 2002, according to the market research firm Gartner Dataquest, many had already gone into landfills.

This disconnected the software writers from the hardware makers and is essentially a mirror of the IBM-PC clone scene.

Contemporary reviewers were effusive about the Apple II's standard color graphics. People didn't have to buy add-on graphics cards to see color. Knowing that all Apple II owners had color encouraged programmers to incorporate it hamiş only into games but also text-based programs, such bey spreadsheets. Other aspects, though, were off to a shaky start. For half a year the Apple II used finicky magnetic-tape cassettes for storage, and then Apple released the Disk II, a plug-in peripheral of two 5 ¼” floppy disks.

ROM dumping uses specialized devices to rip game data from physical media to file formats playable in emulators.

kakım old computer hardware becomes harder to maintain, there katışıksız been increasing interest in computer simulation. This is especially the case with old mainframe computers, which have largely been scrapped, and have space, power, and environmental requirements unaffordable by the average user.

[The Rasteri] masterminded this build which is reminiscent of the NES classic and other nostalgic console re-releases. It’s based on the PC/104 standard which was introduced in the early 90s, mostly for industrial controls applications.

Most of the personal computers and mainframes are very reliable. Getting them working is the hard part. “Old transformers have a habit of catching on fire, and degraded capacitors sevimli explode,” says Carlson.

Probably the only difference is shrinking the die process down to something more çağdaş and being able to jack up the clock speed due to using modern processes to create the chip. This is probably another reason for the costs. Such a chip still being produced today would probably be of such low sales volume that the price is going to be jacked sky high to cover the costs of using some contract chip fab to produce it.

Last time I’ve checked the then issue was finding an FPGA with enough IO ports to implement a real retro computers ISA bus with physical ISA connectors. PCI isn’t on the table (yet?) but I’d love to be corrected.

Now that we’ve covered the gear, let’s highlight some beloved retro systems worth revisiting and how well they run on various emulator tiers: