- Wolfenstein 3D is a first-person shooter video game developed by id Software and published by Apogee Software and FormGen. Originally released on May 5, 1992, for DOS, it was inspired by the 1981 Muse Software video game Castle Wolfenstein, and is the third installment in the Wolfenstein series. In Wolfenstein 3D, the player assumes the role of Allied spy William “B.J.” Blazkowicz during World War II as he escapes from the Nazi German prison Castle Wolfenstein and carries out a series of crucial missions against the Nazis. The player traverses each of the game’s levels to find an elevator to the next level or kill a final boss, fighting Nazi soldiers, dogs, and other enemies with a knife and a variety of guns.
- How the 8086 processor determines the length of an instruction (righto.com)
The Intel 8086 processor (1978) has a complicated instruction set with instructions ranging from one to six bytes long. This raises the question of how the processor knows the length of an instruction.1 The answer is that the 8086 uses an interesting combination of lookup ROMs and microcode to determine how many bytes to use for an instruction. In brief, the ROMs perform enough decoding to figure out if it needs one byte or two. After that, the microcode simply consumes instruction bytes as it needs them. Thus, nothing in the chip explicitly “knows” the length of an instruction. This blog post describes this process in more detail.