Category Archives: Software development

The DOS SDK

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

Posted in Oldskool/retro programming, Software development | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

A great upgrade for the PCjr: the jr-IDE

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

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When is a PC not a PC? The PC-98

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

This draft was originally made on September 18th, 2018, and contains nothing but the title.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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More donut madness

This draft, created on May 27, 2015, only had a single link: http://www.lugreat.com/ihe/pdfs/v1article3.pdf And the problem with a link that was stored over 7 years ago? It’s no longer available, and it also wasn’t cached by the Wayback Machine. But, … Continue reading

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Isn’t it great when things just… work?

Here is another old draft, apparently made on April 4, 2013. The title is a reference to a Honda advertisement, titled ‘The Cog’: At this point it is clear that the title was a draft: I wrote down the title … Continue reading

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Another adventure in downgrading, part 3: XP

Taking the application down even further than last time. Windows XP? You’re probably thinking: “Direct3D 11, Media Foundation, WIC, that’s never going to work in XP! What are you thinking?” And you’d be right. If the codebase was entirely aimed … Continue reading

Posted in Direct3D, Oldskool/retro programming, Software development | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Another adventure in downgrading, part 2: Vista

Okay, picking up where we left off last time: we have an application that now runs on .NET 4.6.2. So far it’s only tested on Windows 7 and Windows 10 platforms, which the .NET 4.8 version was targeting anyway. But … Continue reading

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GPU-accelerated video decoding

Picking up where I left off last time, I’d like to discuss a few more things when using video decoding libraries in your own graphics pipeline. Actually, the previous article was just meant as the introduction to the more technical … Continue reading

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Video codecs and 4k

Recently I was optimizing some code to reliably play 4k video content at 60 fps through a 3D pipeline on low-end hardware. And it gave me a deja-vu of earlier situations with video. It seems that there is this endless … Continue reading

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