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Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for the ‘8086’ Category

Karateka IBM PC Model 5150 Longplay – YouTube

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/11/28

Karateka (which appeared way before the even more famous Prince of Persia which appeared 5 years later) memories of the past, for which I totally agree with the conclusion: the game on Apple ][ was way better:

[Wayback/Archive] π”Έπ•Ÿπ•’π•₯𝕠𝕝π•ͺ π•Šπ•™π•’π•€π•™π•œπ•šπ•ŸπŸ’Ύ on Twitter: “@textfiles Jordan’s opinion on the IBM version”

JULY 31, 1986 Just looked at the JULY 31, 1986
Just looked at the “final” version of PC Karateka. It seemed OK, I guessed, except for overall sluggishness, frequent disk accesses, and a few minor graphics glitches. Then I booted up the Apple version to compare… and it was so smooth, it made me want to cry.
The PC version is maybe 50% of what it should be. I can’t even tell these guys s what to fix… it’s a million little things, and they’re just not up to the hassle. That kind of attention to detail is why the Apple version took me two years. This version is probably the best I’ll ever get out of them.

You can play the PC version online atΒ [Wayback/Archive] Karateka IBM Version 1986-01-30 (1986-02-04) (ID 0873) : Jordan Mechner : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Internal Alpha version (1986-01-30) of the IBM port of Karateka by Jordan Mechner.

It was ported to many platforms, and there was a great documentary too. So there are more YouTube links below than [Wayback/Archive] Karateka IBM PC Model 5150 Longplay – YouTube which has this great description:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in 6502, 8086, 8088, C64, Commodore, History, IBM PC Model 5150, Power User, Retrocomputing | Leave a Comment »

Pentium FDIV bug – 25 years ago; Ken Shirriff reverse engineerded the cause under a microsope

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/12/31

A small introduction is the Pentium FDIV bug – Wikipedia article which already has some of the highlights..

Ken Shirriff however went all the way in, and used a microscope to focus in on to the actual cause.

He wrote two Mastodon threads on it watching (most recent first, with a link to his blog post) making a good year’s end read:

And there is of course this, that predated his microscope work [Wayback/Archive] Ken Shirriff: “I recently saw an amazing Navajo rug…” – OldBytes Space – Mastodon Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in 8086, Development, Hardware Development, History | Leave a Comment »