Let’s Code MS DOS 0x14: Hello World in x86 Assembly

In the last live stream we did some Turbo C inline assembly, which was pretty fun. But let’s today use an actual pure assembler: the Borland Turbo Assembler. And let’s demystify some of the things surrounding assembly language. It is actually not that hard, so let’s write a hello world program, using assembly, for MS DOS!

Retro Game Review 12: Galagon for the Atari 2600

Champ Games has delivered another quality homebrew title for the Atari 2600: Galagon. It’s a port of the arcade classic Galaga. Featuring pretty much 100% spot on enemies, playmodes, sounds and graphics, it is a fun little vertical shooter. The game supports single and two player modes with varying degrees of difficulty. Let’s unbox it and have a look!

Sound Cards On The Printer Port? TNDYLPT and LPTsnd

Today I got a package from fellow retro nerd Matze79, aka Retroianer. He sent me two PCB kits for parallel port sound cards: The TNDLPT and the LPTsnd. The former is Tandy compatible sound device by Serdaco, who sells quite a bit of retro kits, and the latter is a DAC for the printer port by Matze79 himself. The two boards let you add either 3 voice synthesized music or 8 bit PCM playback capability to retro DOS machines. A lot of very old games don’t support SoundBlaster or Adlib cards so these are options for getting better sound with your gaming experience. Also many old laptops of the 386 and 486 era don’t come with builtin sound cards, which is why these devices here are useful as well.