Category Archives: Oldskool/retro programming

Trackers vs MIDI, part deux

Posted on May 29, 2017 by

The previous post got rather long(winded) already. But shortly after I posted it, I realized that I had not yet said all that I wanted to say. Namely, I mentioned the Yamaha FM synthesizer chips at the start, and I … Continue reading →

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Trackers vs MIDI

Posted on March 29, 2017 by

With all the recent tinkering with audio devices and sound routines, I stumbled across various resources, old and new. One such resource was this article on OS/2 Museum, about the Gravis UltraSound. (And small world, this site is by Michal … Continue reading →

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DMA activation

Posted on March 12, 2017 by

No, not the pseudoscience stuff, I am talking about Direct Memory Access. More specifically in the context of IBM PC and compatibles, which use the Intel 8237A DMA controller. For some reason, I had never used the 8237A before. I … Continue reading →

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A picture says more than a thousand words

Posted on March 5, 2017 by

When I work out ideas, I sometimes draw things out on paper, or I use some test-images made in Paint.NET or whatnot. So I was thinking… my blog is mostly text-oriented, aside from some example images and videos. Perhaps I … Continue reading →

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Putting the things together

Posted on February 24, 2017 by

So, over time I have discussed various isolated things related to 8088-based PCs. Specifically: Using the latched property of the 8253 programmable interval timer to be able to adjust the interval without any jitter/skew, so you can use it as … Continue reading →

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Programming: What separates the men from the boys?

Posted on January 24, 2017 by

I have come up with the following list of topics: Pointer arithmetic Unicode vs ASCII strings Memory management Calling conventions Basic mathematics, such as linear algebra (eg 2d rotations, translations and scaling, things you’ll regularly find in basic GUI stuff). … Continue reading →

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Any real-keeping lately?

Posted on December 11, 2016 by

The 5-year anniversary of my inaugural ‘Just keeping it real’-article came and went. Has it been that long already? It’s also been quite some time since I’ve last written about some oldskool coding, or even anything at all. Things have … Continue reading →

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