The Tandy 1000 and IBM PC Jr utilized the cheap Texas Instriuments SN76489 programmable sound generator. While it never caught on as a sound standard outside of these machines, many DOS games from the 1980s still supported this chip. What if you wanted to listen to video game music using the original chip, no emulation, but you had only a serial or USB port? Well, now there is a solution for you!
Month: March 2026
Floppy Disk Punch
Back in the 1980s floppy disks were expensive. And many early floppy disk drives were only single sided, which means they only had one read/write head and would only use one disk side. Both Commodore and Apple-II users quickly figured out that you could flip the disk around, if you punched a hole into the other side of the disk. This is a quick explanation on why this helped to double your disk capacity and some other differences between Commodore and IBM disk drives.