Category Archives: Software development

Some results from the modified XDC movie player for 8088/CGA

Posted on January 2, 2024 by Scali

For my modifications to the XDC player, I targeted my Philips 3105 XT clone. It has a turbo mode of 8 MHz, and an ATi Small Wonder CGA clone. The harddisk is a 32MB Disk-on-Module connected to an XT-IDE card. … Continue reading →

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Video playback on low-end MS-DOS machines

Posted on January 1, 2024 by Scali

Playing video on MS-DOS… it kinda was a thing with things such as the GRASP/GLPro and FLIC formats back in the day. But not on REALLY low-end machines, such as 8088s and CGA. Until the demo 8088 Corruption was released … Continue reading →

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A small update on downgrading

Posted on December 19, 2023 by Scali

About a year ago, I wrote some articles on downgrading a codebase, because Windows 10 2015 LTSB did not support any version of .NET higher than 4.6.2 (which also includes the .NET Core-based .NET 5 and higher). At the time, … Continue reading →

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Implementing live video streaming in software

Posted on September 26, 2023 by Scali

Some time ago I wrote about video codecs and implementing GPU-accelerated video decoding in a DirectX application. The reason was that I found that the information may be out there, but it is difficult to find the right information in … Continue reading →

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MartyPC: PC emulation done right

Posted on May 30, 2023 by Scali

I would like to give a heads-up about the new PC emulator on the block. It is called “MartyPC”, which indeed is a reference to Marty McFly from the Back To The Future movies. And indeed, that is a tribute … Continue reading →

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Another adventure in downgrading, part 4: Fixed function

Posted on April 15, 2023 by Scali

A few months ago, I discussed downgrading a modern codebase to .NET 4 and Windows XP. I managed to get the code working to the point that all functionality worked, aside from web views, given that browsers no longer support … Continue reading →

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The DOS SDK

Posted on February 1, 2023 by Scali

A thing I have been working on, on and off, for many years now, is a set of headers and helper routines for programming DOS machines directly on the hardware in assembly and C. As you may recall, my earliest … Continue reading →

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A great upgrade for the PCjr: the jr-IDE

Posted on January 14, 2023 by Scali

Adding a hard drive to a PC was a reasonably standard upgrade even in the 80s. And in today’s world of retro-computing, we have the XT-IDE card, which adds proper IDE support to old PCs. Which also allows you to … Continue reading →

Posted in Hardware news, Oldskool/retro programming, Software development | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

When is a PC not a PC? The PC-98

Posted on January 7, 2023 by Scali

I’ve covered PC compatibility in the past, and tried to explain how just having an x86 CPU and running DOS does not necessarily make your machine compatible with an IBM PC. At the time, this was mainly about the IBM … Continue reading →

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Managers in software

Posted on December 5, 2022 by Scali

This draft was originally made on September 18th, 2018, and contains nothing but the title. So what was it that I wanted to say about managers in software? I suppose some of it may have been covered in the article … Continue reading →

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