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Vintage computers, preservation, and old hardware magic. Unofficial automated fan feed. Content belongs to its respective owners; not affiliated with source publishers.

Last Notes

2026-10-29 08:57:04 GMT

2026 Retrocomputing Challenge: Custom RISC-V Processor For Retro System
Although once little more than an academic endeavor, the RISC-V architecture is slowly supplanting applications that would have normally gone to ARM. Even a few microcontrollers have chips running this open-source instruction set now, and we expect it to grow in the future since it doesn’t require the licensing of an ARM or x86 chip. [M_Jagadeesh97] is getting ahead of the curve with this retro gaming system built on a custom-designed RISC-V system.
Most of us, presumably including [M_Jagadeesh97], don’t have access to chip fabrication tools, but what we can get is any of various FPGAs. This RISC-V CPU is built on a Terasic DE0-Nano board with 32 MB of RAM available to it, and boots to a launcher with 32 games available. There are a few limitations with this low-power system which was largely solved by limiting the display to 64×32, which lets it maintain the same aspect ratio as the original DOOM as well as the same aspect ratio for many of the older games, while still maintaining 45 FPS.
The project writeup goes deep into the design of a system like this, from the bare metal, the CPU design, the timing of the video signals, and how to implement a Wolfenstein-like raycaster. After adding a small display it looks to be fairly portable as well and is an excellent demonstration of how powerful inexpensive boards like this FPGA can be with the proper amount of effort.
https://hackaday.com/2026/10/28/2026-retrocomputing-challenge-custom-risc-v-processor-for-retro-system/
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#system #arm #cpu
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2026-10-22 03:21:02 GMT

The Age of Altair
I recently got the Amazon Christmas toy book in the mail, and it is definitely the modern version of the Sears Christmas Wish Book for last century’s youth. Or at least the majority of last century’s youth. For the true hacker, we had a different set of wishes. Recently, I found something I’ve clung to for over 50 years: the 1975 “The Age of Altair” catalog from MITS. Now that was a wish book!
The poor thing has been dragged around for decades and, I’m sad to say, it looks it. It isn’t totally trash, but I decided I should scan it. Then I realized that Bitsavers has already done it for me and with a much nicer copy, too. The images in this post are from their scan instead.
About the Altair
The magazine that started it all (World Radio History).
If your first computer ran Windows, you might not get the significance of the Altair. Back in 1974, the idea of having your own computer was practically ludicrous. Sure, Radio Electronics had published plans for the Mark 8 in July of that year. But it used an anemic 8008 CPU, and it wasn’t easy to get all the parts you’d need to build one. Other limited computers, like the Kenbak-1 or the occasional surplus minicomputer, ended up in personal hands. But you couldn’t just decide you wanted a real computer, plunk down some money, and have one delivered unless you had extremely deep pockets.
To stay on magazine stands longer, old print mags would come out earlier than their cover date suggested. The January 1975 Popular Electronics arrived, actually, in December of 1974 — just in time for the holidays. It showed a computer you could buy as a kit or assembled: the Altair 8800. Many of us were mesmerized by the idea of owning an actual useful computer.
Reality Check
Of course, the problem is, it wasn’t actually a useful computer. All by itself, it was a bunch of switches and LEDs with a CPU. You’d need memory, and even a little was super expensive. But it was still cheaper than anything else. Want a terminal and enough memory to run BASIC? That’s going to be even more.
In those days, magazines had “bingo cards.” Each ad had a number, and if you wanted more information, you circled that number on the card and mailed it to the magazine. A while later, you’d be rewarded with mail from the company in question. I have no idea how many of the “Age of Altair” catalogs were sent, but I know I got one.
The machine on the cover didn’t look much like the machine in the magazine. The story is that the original machine was sent to the magazine for photography and was lost in the return shipping. But either way, it looked like a small minicomputer of the era.
Micro
The CPU board used what would later be called the S-100 bus.
The catalog notes a cycle time of two microseconds, or about 500 kHz. That’s a little misleading. The CPU actually ran at 2 MHz, but each instruction took multiple clock periods, and some instructions required several machine cycles. Even a simple NOP took two microseconds, while more complex instructions could take considerably longer. It wasn’t a speed demon.
One nice thing about the Altair is that it had a card cage, and you could plug in whatever you wanted with what would later be called the S-100 bus. Of course, to save money, you might not get all the card guides and connectors.
If you had deep pockets, you could get fast static memory. This would cost more and provide less memory, but the chips stored bits in flip-flops, and it was fast. Or you could opt for more dynamic memory, which stored data in tiny capacitors on its memory chips. The downside is that the memory had to periodically refresh itself, stealing cycles away from the already slow CPU.
Down with Switches
The Comter 256 showed a whole 32 characters at a time!
Naturally, you didn’t want to flip switches all the time. MITS offered the Comter 256 terminal. It had 256 bytes of its own storage and a whopping 32-character display. It even had holes to stick your phone in, if you wanted to talk to a remote computer.
This was, of course, not very practical. Your best bet was a TeleType. The TeleType Model 33 had a printer and a keyboard. The ASR variant had a paper tape reader and punch, too. Mass storage and a printer that operated at 10 characters per second. No screen, though. Everything you did was on paper. And it was pricey, too.
Software
The catalog offered a 4K and 8K BASIC along with “Extended” BASIC, which needed 12K but got you double precision math, PRINT USING, and disk I/O. There was also a single page of 8080 instructions in binary. I remember fixating on that page, trying to understand how you’d program this machine. There was a lot of missing detail.
Pricing
For as cheap as these were compared to the alternatives, they were still out of reach for many people, especially a kid. The computer itself was just a bit over $600 unless you wanted to build it yourself. Then you could save just under $200.
You couldn’t do anything without memory, though. A board that could hold 1 kB of static RAM (but only came with 256 bytes) was $134 assembled, plus $61 for every 256 bytes after that. If you wanted the board fully loaded, they discounted that to $209. The slower 4 kB dynamic RAM board was a cool $338. If you didn’t have paper tape, you probably wanted the interface to load and save programs from cassette. That was another $174.
Wanted something with a keyboard? The Comter terminal was $885, but for $35 more, you could get one that would also work with your cassette recorder to save and load things. Or opt for the TeleType for $1,500. You might be tempted by the 88-VLCT (the “low cost terminal”) at only $169. But if you saw it, it only had seven numeric keys (for octal) and two other buttons.
That’s not all. Those terminals had to plug into something. That board would run you around $140, depending on which variant you wanted. Even something like a real-time clock was an extra purchase.
The base computer price had four available slots, one of which held the CPU. So if you had a CPU, two memory cards, and a serial I/O card, you were full unless you bought more slots. To make it easier, you could buy a bundle. The cheapest was just shy of $3,000.
Perspective
Why are the addresses backward? Part of the PEMON monitor from the November 1975 Popular Electronics.
I know. It is easy enough to spend $3,000 on a state-of-the-art computer today and, at the time, this was pretty state-of-the-art. But in today’s dollars, that’s about $19,000. A new car was about $5,000, and $3,000 would get you a very nice used car. An average home ran about $42,000, and $3,000 would be a hefty part of a down payment. The median income in 1975? Under $14,000.
Still, these were the first real computers you could at least imagine buying. It wouldn’t be long before the prices of even better machines dropped considerably.
I wasn’t the only one who wanted one of these machines. I conspired with friends to pool money to get one, but we never managed it. I pored over machine code listings in later magazines and the instruction reference in the catalog, trying to puzzle it out. I finally did. In those days, you couldn’t just download the manuals or watch a video about it.
Then again, the value of an original working Altair 8800 today makes it, again, out of reach for most of us. There are always faithful recreations. Or even less-than-faithful ones. I have plenty of these recreations and simulations now, but I still have kept the catalog I pored over so many years ago.
https://hackaday.com/2026/10/21/the-age-of-altair/
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2026-10-19 12:02:36 GMT

Thunderbolt Strikes Windows98
If there’s one thing everyone hated about Windows 98, was the lack of USB4.0 support. We remember vividly the cries of anguish at the launch party when we found out that 21 years in the future, the operating system wouldn’t support the then-undreamt of speeds of the thunderbolt-based fastest USB protocol. After two decades of living with this crushing disappointment, [Yeo Kheng Meng] has delivered the goods: the most modern of USB interfaces on some very much not modern versions of windows.
This builds on [Yeo Kheng Meng]’s work on xHCI drivers for USB2.0 support, which we covered at the time. Like that hack, this one applies to Windows 98 through 7, and has a similar level of LLM-wrangling involved. There are actually a few parts to it– one is a USB3.0 driver, which replaces the old xHCI98 driver and is available on GitHub. On Windows98, USB3.0 speed caps out around 200 MB/s, likely restricted by Windows98’s maximum request limit of 64kB on USB transfers. Even with the faster bus in action, it can only gobble those tiny blocks of data so fast.
There’s also experimental USB4.0/Thunderbolt support, as stated above. While not as stable as the USB3.0 portion, we’re kind of impressed it runs at all. Thunderbolt is more than just a faster data bus, after all– you have to support multiple protocols. To handle all that you can install xhcicm.sys and have the surreal experience of accessing an docked NVMe drive from the last century’s best Windows via his Stor98 driver. That’s based largely on [SweetLow]’s NVMe9x project, which he forked but is going to be bundled into the main repo.
What might be more helpful to the community than these drivers is [Yeo Kheng Meng]’s fork of QEMU11 that emulates USB4/Thunderbolt hosts and devices. Having a working emulator seems like it would be a huge boon for this sort of semi-automated development. That’s available in its own repo.
Aside from the already-linked USB2.0 drivers, [Yao Kheng Meng] has an impressive retro-computing record, that includes Swift on the Apple II and turning DOS into llama.c habitat. It should be noted that that llama.c’s TinyStories is not the LLM that assisted with this project.
Thanks to [Yeo Kheng Meng] for the tip!
https://hackaday.com/2026/10/18/thunderbolt-strikes-windows98/
https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/xhci98-tb3-nvme-98se.jpg?w=800
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#khengmeng #yeokheng #windows #usb #like
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2026-10-17 19:20:41 GMT

2026 Retrocomputing Challenge: Oldputer Gives Old Eyes Relief with E-ink Display
Modern computers are towers of glass and metal with very few large deviations from one to another. Monitor A will go against B, except you can’t tell them apart unless they’re on. At least, that is, compared to how different the old bulky monitors look compared to the new. [Andrzej Górski] seems to agree with this sentiment with his Oldputer, a blast from the past.
[Andrzej Górski]’s inspiration came from one component, and the main component of the project, an old e-ink display. When life gives you one of the slowest versions of a display, there really isn’t too much else to do other than pair it with slow old computers of the past. From that inspiration, there isn’t entirely a whole lot to do other than throw in an ESP32 and some LEDs for indicator lights. Put all this into a fun case, and you get one pretty desk ornament for whatever information you wanna display.
If you want to replicate the past again, you might want to look for the project GitHub here. If you’re looking for something even older, check out the replica of the MCM/70!
https://hackaday.com/2026/10/17/2026-retrocomputing-challenge-oldputer-gives-old-eyes-relief-with-e-ink-display/
https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/Screenshot-2026-10-16-203011.png?w=800
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#andrzejgorski #display #old
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2026-10-17 01:07:20 GMT

Simplifying Slide Rule Calculations with Trig
[Bob the Science Guy] remembers how to use a slide rule. Even after all these years, it is pretty easy to remember how to multiply and divide. If you can’t remember, you can usually work it out, as long as you understand how slide rules work. But what about sine, cosine, and quadratics? [Bob’s] been making videos about topics like this, and if you’ve wanted to put your slide rule collection to practical use, you’ll enjoy these videos. You can see one below.
The trick to the slide rule is that it is deceptively simple. You are in effect adding logarithms and then taking an antilog. The issue is that you still have to have some intuition about the scale of the answer since 2×3 works out the same as 2×3000 or 200×300.
But it is even trickier than that. Adding and subtracting is not easy on the slide rule. [Bob] shows how to use your math skills to convert problems that might have been addition problems into trig problems. So while it might seem more complicated to use trig, it may help work the problem on the slide rule.
We like slide rules. If you don’t have one, try this one in your browser (hint: go full screen and show both sides).
https://hackaday.com/2026/10/16/simplifying-slide-rule-calculations-with-trig/
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#sliderule #scienceguy #bob #trig #even #adding
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2026-10-15 18:44:49 GMT

C64 Hardware Simulator Isn’t (Just) For Playing Around
If you want to play old Commodore games, there are C-64 emulators available for just about any platform– but most of them are so high level, they’re really meant for just that: playing games. [antirez] has a different goal with his c64-hw-sim project— it’s a lower-level emulation that simulates every chip and every connection on an ASSY 250407 motherboard, and all the chips on it, too. Ever wondered what happens when a specific chip is missing, or a random pin is shorted to ground or forced high? You can do all that in software, with no risk of harming antique hardware.
While that might be a fun bit of faffing about for a certain sort electronics sadist, the real utility is to learn about the hardware, both in the abstract and to help you troubleshoot a board you might have. It’s likely that many given failure modes reproduce the same effects– lots of things can knock out the display output, for example–but at least if you’ve reproduced a flaw in software you can try testing the hardware to see if that’s the cause of your problem. Assuming the simulation covers your hardware issue, anyway.
There’s cycle-accurate chip emulation for the processor, CIAs, SID and VIC-II via code by [Andre Weissflog], a.k.a. [flooh]. Meanwhile analog circuitry in the video, audio and power sections are not simulated so not everything fault will be replicable here. Still, it might be a neat tool– just don’t try and run any games on it, because even on high-end modern hardware it only runs at about one-third speed. That’s fast enough for diagnostics, but not so much for Maniac Mansion, never mind Elite.
Speaking of Elite, did you know the source– both of the port and the original– is available with comments? If you want an emulator you can play, you can get it on everything from microcontrollers like Teensy to your personal computer.
Thanks to [Salvatore] for the tip!
https://hackaday.com/2026/10/15/c64-hardware-simulator-isnt-just-for-playing-around/
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2026-10-15 01:35:20 GMT

Using a Waffle to Check the Health of your Wii U’s NAND Flash
Game consoles tend to have a weak spot or two that will take certain units out sooner than they would due to normal parts aging. In the case of the Wii U it’s the eMMC storage IC with the console’s firmware and any user data that likes to keel over, with the SK Hynix variant reportedly developing faulty cells much sooner than the Samsung and Toshiba chips. If you want to check the health of these eMMC ICs in your Wii U, you can do so easily now with the Wafel Installer project by [zer00p].
This doesn’t take much more than navigating to the wafel.xyz URL on the Wii U to launch the installer on any (unmodified) Wii U, or alternatively starting it from an SD card if you’re running a homebrew-enabled console. This can also install the Stroopwafel CFW, ISFSax and the Aroma homebrew environment, but the NAND testing option in the installer’s menu is what you want to select if you’re not into homebrew or have already cracked open the console for said sweet homebrew action.
All of this is covered in this video by [FunkyScott47], whose Wii U’s Samsung-branded eMMC is fortunately still all fine, but it shows off the variety of tests available. Unless the eMMC is already quite cooked this should take only a minute or two, so it’s pretty good for ease of mind.
With the heavily waffle, syrup and stroopwafel-coded naming scheme for these tools we can not be held responsible for a sudden case of the munchies, of course.
https://hackaday.com/2026/10/13/using-a-waffle-to-check-the-health-of-your-wii-us-nand-flash/
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2026-10-15 01:29:53 GMT

2026 Retrocomputing Challenge: USBSID-Pico has Two SIDs, Many Inputs
We’ll give you three guesses what the most important bits of silicon in [LouD]’s USBSID-Pico are, and two don’t count. Yes, there’s a Raspberry Pi Pico, and a pair of the unforgettable SID chips from MOS– the sound chip of the C64, the die that launched a thousand chiptunes. Well, unless you build it with a hardware SID replacement, but the goal of this device is to get SIDs hooked up to modern hardware.
To that end, USBSID-Pico can be controlled via USB– obviously– in the form of CDC/WebUSB/WebSerial but also MIDI, and even ASID, which is a specific protocol for streaming SID register data over MIDI. You might be wondering the point, since surely you can get cycle-accurate SID emulation on an RP2040, right? Well, not everyone agrees that cycle-accurate emulation is accurate enough; like the people who swear by the subtle distortions tube amplifiers introduce into the sound, some say the chip’s own inaccuracies give the sound out of the physical device a unique vibe emulators don’t match. That’s a fight for others to litigate; we just appreciate the work that went into getting these old sound chips talking to modern hardware, and getting the project certified as Open Source Hardware.
This combination of old sound and new microcontroller makes the USBSID-Pico a good entry for our ongoing retrocomputing contest, particularly the retro-modern category. Just be aware of PAL and NTSC differences with these old chips, or your beeps and boops might be out of tune. They haven’t made them in decades, but there are more than a few modern replacements for the MOS 6581.
https://hackaday.com/2026/10/13/2026-retrocomputing-challenge-usbsid-pico-has-two-sids-many-inputs/
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