Questions tagged [software-development]
For questions about the software development process on retrocomputing platforms
64
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8
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1
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Why does the boot-up screen for Cruis'n USA (arcade version) display this strange text?
(I originally asked this in the "gaming"/Arqade section. However, it was suggested by a commenter that I should instead migrate it here. Since I don't know how one "migrates" a ...
- 207
17
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2
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What contemporary hardware was available for the development of Atari 2600 (or other 2nd gen) games?
The Atari 2600, along with others like the Odyssey 2 or Intellivision, were among the first programmable home game consoles. They existed alongside personal computers like the Apple II and Commodore ...
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5
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1
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A SunOS kernel configuration file in the CSRG ISOs?
Does anyone know why there is a SunOS kernel configuration file in the 4.1c.1 BSD directory tree in the CSRG ISOs?
How to see that this file exists:
McKusick sells the CSRG ISOs. But let's face it, ...
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5
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5
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861
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Are there any statistics or data showing how much more productive the C programming language is compared to x86 assembly language?
I found out today that a large project like Microsoft Windows 1.0 took 80 man-years to develop. And this one was written in x86 assembly language.
Is there a form or rule of thumb that states how much ...
- 1,068
21
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7
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4k
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References for the complexity of the COBOL language
One thing that struck me about the design of COBOL was that it was surprisingly complex, particularly for the era. As in, if I were trying to squeeze a compiler into a few tens of kilobytes of memory, ...
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10
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1
answer
545
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What were the typical game development toolchains for the pre-i386 IBM PC era
On i386 and beyond (assuming MS-DOS as the target OS and IBM PC as the target platform), my impression is game developers most typically used Watcom C / DJGPP plus one of the DOS extenders (DOS4GW, ...
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15
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1
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Why would an implementation of getwd call mktemp?
As mentioned here the book Expert C Programming contains the claim that there was a bug in SunOS 4.0.3's version of lpr, (a printing program) caused by a custom mktemp function overriding the library ...
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41
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12
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When did assembly source code begin to be written in lowercase?
In nearly all the assembly source files and published listings I read up to the early 1980s, the labels, mnemonics, and operands were written in all uppercase. Just a few years later, I noticed 80x86 ...
- 1,540
3
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0
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227
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What would "Special Makeup" design have been in the 1988 arcade game, Splatterhouse? [closed]
Upon beating the Namco arcade game Splatterhouse, released in November 1988, the following is shown in the credits along with the expected programmers and artists:
SPECIAL MAKEUP DESIGNED
...
- 60
10
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4
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Anecdote in Weinberger's Psychology of Computer Programming: is it ARPANET?
Gerald Weinberger, in the 1971 book The Psychology of Computer Programming, gives the following anecdote:
The numerous stages [of reporting?] can produce interesting effects, as a result of filtering ...
- 1,660
5
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2
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565
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ResEdit Decompilers
What de-compilers were available for ResEdit? A friend used a de-compiler to break the copy protection on F/A-18 Hornet and I remember having one to examine how programs worked. To clarify by de-...
- 2,472
18
votes
3
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795
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When and where was the ‘dotted sequence of integers’ version numbering scheme invented?
Probably the most widespread software version numbering scheme in use today takes the form of a dotted sequence of integers. Variants of this scheme usually share the following characteristics:
...
- 23.2k
11
votes
5
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Belated ascendancy of dynamic linkers
Old computer systems were supplied—by our present notion—with very little memory, thus conservation of both RAM and storage room has been tremendously important during those years of austerity. ...
- 217
4
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1
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How do I detect if AmigaDOS dos.library/CurrentDir() fails?
It seems that the primary system call to change a new directory within an Amiga process is dos.library/CurrentDir(lock) but the documentation does not tell me how to detect if it succeeded.
Quoting ...
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10
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2
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What HyperCard extensions did Myst use?
The original Macintosh version of Myst was written in HyperCard.
According to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20549685
Adding useful features, such as uploading those HTML files to a web server, ...
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