Technical Archives

Understanding the low-level interrupt handling required to play digital audio on ISA.

A technical breakdown of the VGA's internal timing mechanism and its role in generating video signals.

How the HGC card provided 720x348 graphics on text-only monochrome monitors.

How Michael Abrash unlocked the hidden power of the PC's graphics hardware.

How John Carmack used Binary Space Partitioning to render 3D worlds on 386 hardware.

How Electronic Arts created the software that defined the pixel art aesthetic.

The card that killed software rendering and introduced the world to bilinear filtering.

How retro artists bypassed hardware palette limits using the science of perception.

How the Amiga's hardware gave birth to the sample-based music tracking scene.

Why 320x200 @ 256 colors was the perfect canvas for a generation of programmers.

How the Atari ST's high-resolution monochrome mode found a niche in desktop publishing and music.

How the shift to 32-bit protected mode and linear memory addressing enabled the 'golden age' of PC graphics.

Before the 486DX, doing math with decimals required a separate, expensive coprocessor.

A technical exploration of the MOS 8364 chip and its unique sample-based audio architecture.

How the GUS challenged the Sound Blaster monopoly with onboard RAM and wavetable synthesis.

The short-lived, high-speed expansion slot that bridged the gap between ISA and PCI.

How Yamaha and AdLib brought music to the PC through Frequency Modulation.

Understanding the color lookup table at ports 0x3C8 and 0x3C9.

How a text-mode file manager defined the UI standards of the DOS era.

How the MOS 8362 chip converted memory data into the Amiga's vibrant video signal.

A look back at physical media, copy protection, and the birth of the cracktro scene.

Why the MOS 6581's analog flaws made it the most legendary synthesizer in computer history.

Inside the custom chip that made 60 FPS 2D graphics possible on the Amiga.

A deep dive into the OCS Copper coprocessor and how it achieved impossible color depths.

Why the Motorola 68000 became the definitive CPU for the 16-bit generation.