If you’ve got a working Model 33 Teletype, every project starts to look like an excuse to use it. While the hammering, whirring symphony of a teleprinter going full tilt brings to mind a simpler time of room-sized computers and 300 baud connections, it turns out that a Teletype makes a decent AI conversationalist, within […]
The humble serial interface has been around for a very long time, and will stay with us in one form or other for the foreseeable future. It was easy enough to keep track of back in the days when a computer only had one, or perhaps two COM ports. However, in this day and age […]
You’ve probably used Wolfram Alpha and maybe even used the company’s desktop software for high-powered math such as Mathematica. One of the interesting things about all of Wolfram’s mathematics software is that it shares a common core engine — the Wolfram Engine. As of this month, the company is allowing free use of the engine […]
Modern consoles are fun, but there are certain charms to retro gear that keep hackers entertained to this day. The original NES is a particularly ripe ground for projects, being one of the most popular consoles of its era. [kevtris] is one such Nintendo hacker, and decided to get NES games running on an old-school […]
The idea behind a dummy security camera is that people who are up to no good might think twice about doing anything to your property when they think they’re being recorded. Obviously a real security camera would be even better, but sometimes that’s just not economically or logistically possible. Admittedly they’re not always very convincing, […]
Whether it was home-built from scraps or one of the various commercial versions that have popped over up over the years, there’s an excellent chance that the average Hackaday reader spent at least a couple of their more formative summers flying water rockets. You might not have realized it at the time, but with shirt […]
When I went to a hacker camp in the Netherlands in February I was expecting to spend a few days in a comfortable venue with a bunch of friends, drink some beer, see a chiptune gig, and say “Ooh!” a lot at the exciting projects people brought along. I did all of those things, but […]
Computer games have been around about as long as computers have. And though it may be hard to believe, Zork, a text-based adventure game, was the Fortnite of its time. But Zork is more than that. For portability and size reasons, Zork itself is written in Zork Implementation Language (ZIL), makes heavy use of the […]
It takes a lot of work to build a modern video game. Typically an entire company will spend months (at least) developing the gameplay, selecting or programming an engine, and working out the bugs. This amount of effort isn’t strictly necessary for older video game systems though, and homebrew developers are quite often able to […]