Monthly Archives: March 2018

Windows 10 ARM64 on QEMU

(This is a guest post by Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox) Microsoft is releasing Windows 10 for ARM64 CPUs and this time, unlike Windows RT fiasco, there will be a full desktop app support including a dynamic binary translator to allow running existing x86 … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

EXEPACK and the A20-Gate

In 1991, DOS 5.0 brought about what’s perhaps the most common manifestation of A20 control trouble… Packed file is corrupt Microsoft published a KB article about this infamous error, but its author clearly did not understand the true cause of the … Continue reading

Posted in Bugs, Microsoft, PC history | 19 Comments

The A20-Gate: It Wasn’t WordStar

Although WordStar was long suspected to be the reason (or at least one of the major reasons) for implementing the A20 gate hardware on the PC/AT and all the associated problems later on, it is now all but certain that … Continue reading

Posted in 286, IBM, Microsoft, PC history, WordStar | 37 Comments

Microsoft Editor

(This is a guest post by Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox) In a recent blog post I lamented the lack of a good console/cmd/PowerShell text editor for Windows. During the process I made a rather interesting discovery, that in a fact … Continue reading

Posted in Development, DOS, Editors, Microsoft, NT, OS/2, Source code, Uncategorized | 23 Comments

Making The Simpsons Sing

The talk is, in case it wasn’t clear, about the Kurzweil VGM MIDI synthesizer board. The two larger synthesizer chips are named Homer and Marge, and the three smaller ROM chips are Bart, Lisa, and Maggie. The VGM looks a lot … Continue reading

Posted in E-mu, Kurzweil, MIDI, Sound | 3 Comments