JamesD

touch pad or x-pad? Wasn't the touch pad that pad that attached to the joystick port?

For those that don't know, Jeri Ellsworth is one of the people responsible for the Commodore 64 in a Joystick.

If you've never seen them before, Taylor and Amy's youtube channel is always clever, hilarious, fun, and now I'm pretty sure they are gonna blow up the classic computer forums with this one.

I've never seen the Model I/III source code, just disassemblies of it. The original CoCo code isn't available, but the source for the Dragon is, and it could be reorganized to match the coco.

I haven't specifically targeted the eZ80. If you skip DMA the code is mostly the same as HD64180/Z180, only faster. The 24 bit registers might cause some issues with some Z80 optimizations, but I'm not sure.

I think it was cheaper to piggyback chips if your machine came with 32K.

Sound cards, graphics cards, EGA, VGA, SVGA, VESA local buss, PCI buss, AGP, 3D Graphics cards, USB, IDE, ATA, SATA... Windows 95, Windows 98, WindowsXP,... DirectX I think there was an evolution, and there's no exact moment. The main transition was in the time between Windows 95, and Windows XP when the machines were recognized as Windows boxes rather than DOS, but there were still issues after that. Getting Tomb Raider to work with my graphics and sound cards was a pain in the neck, and that machine had PCI, and USB. (I don't think AGP was out yet) I think that was Windows 98. Even as late as when the XBOX 360 was introduced (2005), there were still some game compatibility issues. Game devs focused on ATI or NVidea, and sometimes you had issues getting a game to work on the other cards. I remember buying a PS2 Simline model around that time for just over $100. You could buy a bunch of cheap games for it, and they just worked. Greatest hits titles were under $20 at BestBuy. You didn't have to fiddle around with settings, and drivers for every game on consoles. After my 2nd XBOX360 died, I went back to PC gaming. I haven't had any of the compatibility issues I had 15 years earlier. You still have major frame rate differences between NVidea and AMD on some titles due to what platform they targeted, but at least the games work.

There isn't a PC-6000. They have the PC-6001 with a chicklet keyboard, and the PC-6001A & TREK that have a regular keyboard. PC-6000 series just means all those models. The PC-6001 MKII is backwards compatible but adds new graphics modes, so I guess some of the manual would apply to it as well, but it came later.

The 3DO was awesome! Too awesome in fact as it was introduced at $700 with very few games on introduction. That's about $1500 adjusted for inflation

Check out the World of Spectrum. https://worldofspectrum.org/

I keep hoping someone scans the manuals for these. I had a set with mine but they got destroyed.

Apparently, the Laser PC5 has some of it's built in software with a Copyright of 1995. It's Z80. It had built in applications, and BASIC. The Amstrad PCW still beats that since it was produced till 98. It did include BASIC and Logo, so it's not like it was just marketed as a word processor. The TurboR was introduced in 1990/1. Pretty sure they weren't produced until 98. I doubt it was even around by the time the Laser PC5 came out.

FCC standards required pretty strict levels, but it didn't require heavy aluminum. I'm guessing the aluminum was to serve as a heatsink. Later designs that met the same standards used lightweight metal that had holes for ventilation. I think it's just a matter of knowledge at the time. The standard was pretty new when Atari released the machines, RF testing is expensive, and nobody had to deal with it before that.