Unanswered Questions

Having spent the last however many decades believing Commodore Semiconductor Group was a simple rename of MOS Technology, I just watched a video – quite interesting in its own right – which casually ...

The Z8000 was Zilog's entry in the 16-bit microprocessor market; it was unsuccessful in large part, as I understand it, because it took too long to debug. According to https://thechipletter.substack....

I'm interested in how graphics hardware has worked at different tech levels. Having looked at an annotated die photo of the VIC-II for example, I now feel I have a much better understanding of how it ...

The Super FX coprocessor, released with Star Fox in 1993, provided 3D rendering capabilities that were absent from the SNES itself. Given that 3D gaming was quite widespread by the late eighties, it ...

One pf the pivotal historical events of the 8-bit computer industry was the acquisition by Commodore of MOS Technology in 1976. This gave Jack Tramiel the vertical integration he wanted, and led ...

It seems difficult to find any detailed technical information online for the 85xx chips used in later Commodore 8-bit computers. For example, there's an excellent archive at http://www.6502.org/...

The PlayStation 2 provided backward compatibility with the PS1 by essentially incorporating an entire PS1 on a separate chip. It kept this arrangement permanently. The PS3 started off providing ...

I'm interested in the design of the VIC, the video and sound chip in the Vic-20. (Not too be confused with the VIC-II, which has been discussed elsewhere on the site.) I haven't been able to find an ...

One of the most valuable graphical features on early computers that had it, was hardware scrolling, that allowed the horizontal position of the screen to be adjusted by one or more pixels, thereby ...

This is a problem that has brought me headaches, so I will try to explain as best as possible. I have flashed with a Gbxcart several GBA ROMs in real cartridges (repro), working without any problem, ...