Amiga and Atari fans used to lord over their Apple-eating brethren the fact that Cupertino never moved to the most advanced 68k processors — so for a while, thanks to 68060 accelerator cards, the fastest thing running Macintosh software was an Amiga (or Atari). After all these years, the Macintosh community is finally getting the […]
In the days of 8-bit home computing, the more fancy machines had sound chips containing complete synthesizers, while budget machines made do with simple output ports connected to a speaker — if they had anything at all. [Normal User] appears to be chasing the later route, making PCM sound by abusing the serial port on […]
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 YouTube [Usagi Electric] shows us how he installed an 84MB hard drive into his PDP-11/44. In the beginning he purchased a bunch of RA70 and RA72 drives and board sets but none of them worked. As there are no schematics it’s very difficult to figure out how they’re broken and how to troubleshoot […]
[Juan] describes himself as a software engineer, a lover of absurd humor, and, among other things, a player of Nethack. We think he should add computer game archaeologist to that list. In the 1990s, he played a game that had first appeared on USENET in 1987. Initially called “Middle-earth multiplayer game,” it was soon rebranded […]
[Bob] calls his custom 16-bit computer “Bob’s Unnecessary Retro Processor” or BURP for short. While we suppose it is technically unnecessary, we love the look of it, and we hope he just used it to get the quirky acronym. When we build custom CPUs they look suspiciously like FPGA development boards, but not BURP. We […]
A while back [Clint Basinger] of Lazy Game Reviews fame purchased a rare 1980s Halikan laptop. When he received the parcel, at first glance, everything seemed in order. Upon opening the original laptop bag, however, it was found that the combination of the heavy power supply in a side pocket and the brittle plastic of the […]
If you’ve ever combed boxes of old tech detritus in search of a nugget of pure gold, we know you’ll appreciate the excitement of discovering, in a dusty University of Utah storeroom, a tape labelled “UNIX Original from Bell Labs V4 (See manual for format)”. If the tape contains what’s promised on the label, this […]
Old parts such as EPROMs will often find themselves for sale on sites such as eBay, where they are sometimes snapped up by retrocomputing enthusiasts in search of interesting code. Vintage Computer Federation forum member [GearTechWolf] picked up a clutch of IBM-labelled chips, and as int10h reports, stumbled upon a previously unknown PC-AT BIOS version […]
Spectravideo is not exactly the most well-known microcomputer company, but they were nevertheless somewhat active in the US market from 1981 to 1988. Their computers still have a fanbase of users and modders. Now, as demonstrated by [electricadventures], you can actually upgrade your ancient Spectravideo machine with some modern hardware. The upgrade in question is […]