Recent content by vwestlife

In this video I measured the power consumption of a 486 IBM PS/2. The computer itself draws 55 watts regardless if it's sitting idle or running at 100% CPU load. The 14" color VGA CRT monitor draws between 52 watts with a full white screen and 39 watts with a mostly black screen:

A typical CRT monitor really doesn't generate any more heat than the computer itself does. The older Tandy 1000 models have a composite video output, which is fine for games (and can give you more on-screen colors than RGB), but may be unreadable in 80-column text mode. Also Tandys use 225-line...

8-Bit Show and Tell has a video about the VIC-10 and VIC-30:

OS/2 Warp's equivalent of Safe Mode is recovery mode, accessed by pressing Alt-F1 when the OS first starts booting. https://www.os2world.com/wiki/index.php/PSM:_OS/2_Warp#Enhanced_Boot_Options In OS/2 2.x you can boot from the installation diskette and then access a command prompt.

The Atari 400/800 had BASIC commands for graphics and sound and a full-screen, menu-driven DOS in 1979. I also had an Atari 800 before I got a C64... another reason why I never really warmed up to it, no matter how good the SID sounds for music. And as for resurrecting obsolete 8-bit machines...

That was the biggest letdown to me when I switched from a C16, which did have real commands for graphics, sound, and disk functions, to a "far superior" C64. The BASIC sucks because Tramiel was too cheap to pay Microsoft for an upgraded version of it, and the default blue-on-blue color scheme is...

Even the 1000RLX has the same problem -- even though it has Tandy sound at the original address, the lack of Tandy graphics (it has standard VGA) causes some games to not give you Tandy sound either.

See: If there was some kind of SDK for it, you could write your own programs for it, save them to .APL files, and then it would be able to run third-party code.

So the new hardware that was released by Barry Altman's "Commodore USA" doesn't count? This is beginning to feel like when a classic rock/pop group splits up, and several of the members form their own splinter groups using the same name, each claiming to be the "original" group. Just let...

It's almost certainly to use a VGA card with an older MultiSync-type monitor, many of which had a DE9 video input.

I once had a case whose speed display came with an ISA card that somehow attempted to measure the system's actual clock speed and put that on the display. But it was useless to me because it maxed out at 25 MHz and I put a 33 MHz board in it. What really made it cool is that it had little LED...

The popular claim that "pushing the turbo button slows down your computer" is a misleading oversimplification:

There's a small program called VMODE which lets you switch between 200-line, 350-line, and 400-line text mode on VGA.

A real EGA monitor is strictly dual-frequency: 21.8 kHz for 350-line mode and 15.75 kHz for 200-line mode. Putting out a signal somewhere between those two modes wouldn't work, unless you're using a multisync-type monitor.

I'm all for a non-capitalist economy, but the proliferation of AI is the exact opposite of the way to bring it about. This modern era of AI is a purely capitalist venture. Companies wouldn't be creating it, forcing it on their users, and replacing their human workers with it if they didn't think...