test please delete

[BrilloPad]

Program about Sir Alan Sugar on BBC2

#146900
BrilloPad
GreatestOfDads

Century

[TheFaQQer]

And on that note, it's time to call it a day

[BrilloPad]

And on that note, it's time to call it a day

[voodooflux]

Just burning that Windows 7 beta onto a DVD so I can install it for a laugh. I need to get out more don't I.

Well that was painless, very quick install and seemed to find most of the important drivers. Posting right now from IE8 on Windows 7

[NickFitz]

And on that note, it's time to call it a day

[voodooflux]

Lot 89 - GEORGIAN BISCUIT BARREL

Any biscuits left in it?

[voodooflux]

Lot 112 - 3 GLASS TOFFEE JARS

Any toffees left in them?

[voodooflux]

That's the lot.

[voodooflux]

And on that note, it's time to call it a day

Cheerio FaQ

I'm gonna head off soon and catch up on the last couple of Stargate Atlantis episodes before the last ever (*sniff*) episode on Tuesday.

[NickFitz]

The Amstrad PC1512 (and PC1640) preserved registers across BIOS calls. This fact was clearly documented in the Amstrad Technical Reference Manual.

What wasn't clearly documented was that, in doing this, it differed from every other IBM PC (and compatible) BIOS except Compaq's.

As a result, when I was first writing games, we shipped a game to the publisher which, as part of initialising the display when the game started, would make a BIOS call with registers that had been modified by the previous BIOS call, with the result that it switched the CGA card from graphics to text mode, thereby totally buggering things up

I could only debug it by walking up to the Tandy shop and asking the salesman to let me check it on one of their display models. Furthermore, I had to make sure that the fix occupied the same number of bytes as the original code, for easy patching of the disks that had already been duplicated

It didn't take long to sort it out - I just replaced the BIOS-calling code with code that hit the hardware directly, went back to Tandy to check it, and shipped the patch.

On the bright side, the offending code had been written by another chap before I started at the company - I'd taken the project over when I was hired