Many things were different. One big thing was much broader use of cassette media for program distribution compared to the US. Another is the rise of the Demoscene and I credit some of that to the greater time availability and social policy allowed for more hobby time, or low risk career investment time. Some may be education too.

And I could be wrong, but whatever the reason the fact is a lot of crazy good and distinctive development came from those places. Poland, as an example, remains an Atari 8 bit hot bed.

Bulgaria is where a lot of my best Apple 2 cards came from.

Seeing this thing sprout up from there is no real surprise, other than it existing at all really is!

Had the CGA been shipped with more RAM, it is obvious now many new tricks would be both possible and more practical.

I love the emulation developers too. They really, really wantb to get it right. We really need to thank the sceners for flogging the hardware into fancy tricks and the emulator crews for capturing the subtleties thus making old hardware available for all to explore long term.

Edit: to properly identify the PC, lol thanks to viler

Thanks for answering the call.

I have roughly a decade on you. I really need to explore the Speccy one day. I love bitmap games on the Apple 2 and always felt the Speccy and BBC Micro would be great to explore.

I do have a PAL capable PVM now and must say it looks a bit sharper for sure, but I love my 60Hz!

Retro DOS is my next target. I need to get a 386 or lower machine with ISA slots.

In MSDOS, I was able to use:

A mode line may be needed, and was with a tape punch:

MODE COM3:1200,N,8,1,P

And then, given the cable is setup to exchange the flow control signals: RTS, CTS

Then in MSDOS, this would work:

COPY GCODE.TXT COM3

The punch would start cutting paper tape.

I never did the reverse. Not sure how in MSDOS. I used PROCOM then clean up the capture and save to file.

And if one wants a binary, the /B option is needed so MSDOS will send 8 bits, not 7

Start reading might be operator assisted or automatic depending on the punch / reader and how the operator configured it. Often, the read would be initiated in software, then an operator presses a go button.

Flow control is a thing. Readers and punches will stop and start xon xoff ctrl q ctrl s style too. Edit: Nope. It is RTS, CTS hardware signals in almost all cases. Whoops!

A tape can be punched with block formatting of course. I never saw this happen.

Gcodes can be block expressions!

;This is a comment[eob]

O1324 ;Program number[eob]

G1 X12 Y13[eob]

G3 X50.1 Y3.2343 R12.1 A30.6[eob]

But they are variable and can reach darn near a page of ASCII text (256 bytes )for a single code, but the average might be 32.

Amazingly, I handled paper tape punch stuff until the very early 00's!

I actually love paper tape. It is just fun, and it features an actual bit bucket with punched out bits in it! Good for all manner of work place tomfoolery, but I digress.

Tapes were typically read up to about 9600 baud (fast), with most at half that or less. Punching was 1200 tops if you cared about your gear and uses the black paper tape infused with lubricants.

The most common in manufacturing was Gcode punched to tape as 7 bit ASCII. Most punches could do 8 bits, so it also saw use as file storage, say master data read in to generate specific machine data.

One example I can cite was sheet metal CNC punch programming on a Tek storage tube computer. The application was read from tape and had various modules. Edit, backplot, generate gcode from master, archive, etc...

User would input tool lists and source gcode. That got written to paper tape much like a floppy drive would be used. Then it could be used to generate an actual gcode tape for a real machine. Load the backplotter, then feed it a tool list from paper tape and then the long program tape.

Being a storage tube, the system would simply draw all the tool punches to the screen so the programmer could see the result, correct errors and such. This was a lot more robust than one might imagine. The Tektronix model I used had a 1024x1024 vector space. Some of those could do 4k vector spaces on a large tube. Manage brightness, and it was pretty much effective resolution.

Then take the finished tape to the machine! Really old ones had no program memory, so they literally read the same tape, formed into a loop, over and over to make parts.

Newer ones would read it into their program memory and run from there.