Cathode ray tubes (CRTs) are a fascinating display technology that has been largely abandoned outside of retro gaming and a few other niche uses. They use magnets to steer a beam of electrons rapidly across a screen, and while a marvel of engineering for their time, their expense, complexity, and weight all led to them […]
In the 1970s CPUs still had wildly different approaches to basic features, with the Intel 8086 being one of them. Whereas the 6502 used separate circuits for operations, and the Intel 8085 a clump of reconfigurable gates, the 8086 uses microcode that configures the ALU along with two lookup tables. This complexity is one of […]
Before the modern Internet existed, there were still plenty of ways of connecting with other computer users “online”, although many of them might seem completely foreign to those of us in the modern era. One of those systems was the Bulletin Board System, or BBS, which would have been a single computer, often in someone’s […]
Given the technical specs of the FPGAs available to hobbyists these days, it really shouldn’t be a shock that you can implement a 486 core on one. In spite of knowing that in the technical sense, we were still caught off guard by [maniek-86]’s M8SBC project that does just that– the producing a 486 FPGA […]
[AmiCube] has announced their new PiStorm68K special edition MiniMig accelerator board. This board was developed to replace the 68000 CPU in a MiniMig — a recreation of the original Amiga chipset in an FPGA allowing a real genuine 68000 CPU to operate. The PiStorm68K itself can host a real genuine 68000 CPU but it can […]
In the 1980s there were an incredible number of personal computers of all shapes, sizes, and operating system types, and there was very little interoperability. Unlike today’s Windows-Mac duopoly, this era was much more of a free-for-all but that didn’t mean companies like Microsoft weren’t trying to clean up all of this mess. In 1983 […]
Over the years there have been a few CPUs designed to directly run a high-level programming language, the most common approach being to build a physical manifestation of a portable code virtual machine. An example might be the experimental Java processors which implemented the JVM. Similarly, in 1976 Itty Bitty Computers released an implementation of […]
Did OneWire of DS18B20 sensor fame ever fascinate you in its single-data-line simplicity? If so, then you’ll like PJON (Padded Jittering Operative Network) – a single-wire-compatible protocol for up to 255 devices. One disadvantage is that you need to check up on the bus pretty often, trading hardware complexity for software complexity. Now, this is […]
For the retro gaming enthusiast, nothing beats original hardware. The feel of the controllers and the exact timing of the original, non-emulated software provide a certain experience that’s difficult or impossible to replicate otherwise. To that end, [bit-hack] wanted to play the original EGA, 16-color version of The Secret of Monkey Island in a way […]
Over on the [Behind The Code with Gerry] YouTube channel our hacker [Gerry] shows us how to emulate a 74LS48 BCD-to-7-segment decoder/driver using an Altera CPLD Logic Chip From 1998. This is very much a das blinkenlights kind of project. The goal is to get a 7-segment display to count from 0 to 9, and […]