
[Computing nostalgia] Ask HN:What are your historic tips and tricks? - supermatou
Things like &quot;always use pkunzip -d&quot; or &quot;compact the registry with regedit &#x2F;c&quot;, that made life much easier 20 years ago (or more)<p>Personally, I remember that I knew some tricks with CP&#x2F;M, but for the life of me, I couldn&#x27;t tell today what those were :-(
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wj
I remember having to use a floppy with custom autoexec.bat and config.sys
files to run a lot of games on my 486sx25 with 4mb ram.

idkfa made single player Doom a lot easier :)

~~~
mobiplayer
iddqd ftw :)

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stevekemp
Feels stupid even taking the time to write this down, but back in 1992 or so I
was on a work-placement in the UK, from Sixth-Form.

I was placed in a British Rail office, where people were writing code to do
things I don't think were ever explained to me. My "job" seemed to be to make
tea/coffee and pretend to understand things people barely explained. There was
lots of head-nodding, and similar.

Over the course of casual conversation it became apparent that one of the
developers machines took significantly longer to compile the code-base than
their colleagues.

I pressed the "turbo" button. The speed increased. People were happy.

That was my sole memorable contribution in the two-week placement. That and an
overriding belief that wearing a tie in a development environment felt
pointless.

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throwmeaway32
\- To plot a pixel in VGA Mode 13 it was quicker to do memaddress = (y<<6) +
(y<<8) + x rather than (y * 320) + x to index into the frame buffer. Bitshifts
are nicer than muls.

\- Precompute your sin table into an array of 255 entries and then access it
using index&255 to wrap around to avoid those pesky floating point
calculations.

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joeclark77
When playing Karateka on the Apple ][ (don't you dare write it _Apple II_ ),
if the game starts to get boring, try flipping the floppy disk over to the
other side.

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mobiplayer
Award BIOS master password: AWARD_SW

All the jaws dropped after I "guessed" their BIOS password... 11 year old me
felt like a magician! :-)

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pesfandiar
Don't forget to park the head before moving the computer!

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cr0sh
Well - when I was a kid, writing in MS BASIC on my computer, it was a list of
PEEKS-n-POKES. My computers at the time were a TRS-80 Color Computer 2 and a
Tandy Color Computer 3. I forget most of them, now, but I do recall the most
important:

TRS-80 Color Computer 1 & 2:

POKE 65495,0 - high-speed poke (1.79 MHz - double-speed) POKE 65494,0 - low-
speed poke (0.895 MHz - normal-speed)

Tandy Color Computer 3:

POKE 65497,0 - high-speed poke (2.00 MHz - double-speed) POKE 65496,0 - low-
speed poke (1.00 MHz - normal-speed)

It should also be noted that the POKEs for the CoCo 1 & 2 would also enable a
"double-speed" on the CoCo 3 - but IIRC, it only sped up a portion of the
system, not everything. There was also an issue on all systems where if
running in double-speed, cassette tape and floppy access would have problems
(less so on the CoCo 3, as OS-9 Level 2 always ran at double speed). Also,
despite what Wikipedia says, the CoCo 3 ran at a true 1 or 2 MHz clock (vs the
older CoCo 1 & 2).

Ultimately - these were important because in a system where the CPU did
virtually everything (including sound - arguably one of the many reasons it
wasn't as successful in the marketplace - though much of that could also be
contributed to Tandy/Radio Shack's lack of marketing prowess for the machine -
which also competed against their more expensive business models, like the
Model 3 and 4).

More PEEKs and POKEs can be found in a few books published back in the day,
that can be found on Archive.org and other sites, scanned to PDF for
preservation, if you care to look for them.

Virtually all personal computers of the time had these special commands (which
were really commands to read (PEEK) and write (POKE) values into memory -
useful for a BASIC program to load up and run a machine language program
encoded as a series of hex bytes), plus a few others (the Apple series also
had the CALL command - CALL -151, was important; it enters the ROM monitor!)

PEEKs, POKEs, EXECs, CALLs, VARPTRs, etc - all important when BASIC just
wasn't enough for some purposes; it was the way to give your BASIC code more
power. It was also hell at times; anybody of that era can attest to spending
hours (days in some cases!) painstakingly typing in row after row after mind-
numbing row of DATA statements in a BASIC machine code loader, only to RUN it
and have it error out (or get all the way thru, and crash the system - and woe
unto you if you had been too foolhardy to save it first!). But you did it to
get more powerful features in BASIC (I recall everything from extended
graphics routines, to more disk commands, better sound output, etc).

Some links for those who care:

Color Computer PEEKS-n-POKES:

[http://www.colorcomputerarchive.com/coco/Documents/Books/500...](http://www.colorcomputerarchive.com/coco/Documents/Books/500_POKES_PEEKS_'N_EXECS.pdf)

[http://www.colorcomputerarchive.com/coco/Documents/Books/300...](http://www.colorcomputerarchive.com/coco/Documents/Books/300%20Pokes%20Peeks%20'n%20Execs%20for%20the%20CoCo%20III%20\(Microcom%20Software\).pdf)

[http://www.colorcomputerarchive.com/coco/Documents/Books/](http://www.colorcomputerarchive.com/coco/Documents/Books/)

Apple PEEKS-n-POKES:

[http://apple2.org.za/gswv/USA2WUG/FOUNDING.MEMBERS/HOME.PAGE...](http://apple2.org.za/gswv/USA2WUG/FOUNDING.MEMBERS/HOME.PAGES/EDHEL/texts/pokes.html)

[http://www.apple2.org.za/gswv/a2zine/GS.WorldView/Resources/...](http://www.apple2.org.za/gswv/a2zine/GS.WorldView/Resources/GS.TECH.INFO/MEGA.PEEKS.AND.POKES.html)

Damn I miss those days...

