17 Oct
2007
17 Oct
'07
8:39 a.m.
Rumor has it that Jim Leonard may have mentioned these words:
Roger Merchberger wrote:
Maybe in your circles, certainly not mine. With most of the machines I used
the system clock was tied to the main color burst freq. crystal,
"overclocking" meant "no video" and when was the last time you'd
seen a
paper tape reader or teletypewriter hooked up to a CoCo3? ;-)
No, most of the hacking done that I knew about was adding more storage
(RAM/Magnetic/etc.) than the computer was originally designed to handle...
256K in a CoCo1/2, 1 or 2 Meg in a CoCo3, ditching the 160K drives and
going to DSDD or DSQD drives, hard drives, etc.
Today's computers (beyond overclocking...
pffft.... that's not hacking)
just aren't that hackable.
You're conveniently forgetting that most of the hacking done on 8-bitters
was to overclock them. That, or expand their I/O options... which is already
built-in to modern
machines. So what kind of "hacking" would you like to perform on modern
machines that you cannot, but *can* on 8-bitters?
Offtopically, show me an Intel 810 chipset motherboard that can take more
than 512Meg RAM. If you can, it was _modified_ to do it, and I'd like to
meet the individual that hacked it in. ;-)
However, you are right about the expanded I/O: I was about to say "Add an
A/D converter" but then I remembered the audio in on a PC sound card. Done.
Laterz,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger
--
Roger "Merch" Merchberger | "Bugs of a feather flock together."
sysadmin, Iceberg Computers | Russell Nelson
zmerch at 30below.com |