While a revolutionary storage system for their time, floppy disks are not terribly useful these days. Though high failure rates and slow speeds are an issue, for this project, the key issue is capacity. That’s because [DocJade’s] goal is playing the video game Factorio off floppy disks. Storing several gigabytes of data on floppy disks […]
[State of Electronics] have released their latest video about ARCTURUS, the 14th video in their series The Computer History of Australia. ARCTURUS was a research computer system developed on a shoestring budget at Sydney University in the 1960s, and was in service until 1975. Particularly the system was developed by [David Wong] as a part […]
Emulating older computers on microcontrollers has been a staple of retrocomputing for many years now, with most 8-bit and some 16-bit machines available on Atmel, ARM, or ESP32 platforms. But there’s always been a horsepower limit, a point beyond which a microcontroller is no longer enough, and a “proper” computer is needed. One of those […]
Today in programming language hacks we have string art rendered in BASIC. String art — also known as pin and thread art, or filography — is an art form where images are invoked by thread woven between pins on the border of an image. In this case the thread and the pins are virtual and […]
Using UV resin as glue for new case clips. (Credit: More Fun Making It, YouTube) As computers like the venerable breadbox Commodore 64 age, their plastic doesn’t just turn increasing shades of yellow and brown, the ABS plastic also tends to get brittle. This is a problem that seems to plague many plastic cases and […]
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 […]
Over on [Ken Shirriff]’s blog is a tricky Commodore PET repair: tracking down 6 1/2 bad chips. WARNING: contains 8-bit assembly code. The Trinity of 1977 which started the personal computer revolution were the Apple II, the Commodore PET, and the TRS-80. In this project it’s a failing Commodore PET which is being restored. In […]
[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 […]
The Commodore 1541 was built to do one job—to save and load data from 5.25″ diskettes. [Commodore History] decided to see whether the drive could be put to other purposes, though. Namely, operating as a standalone computer in its own right! It might sound silly, but there’s a very obvious inspiration behind this hack. It’s […]
Here at Hackaday we love floppy disks. While they are by no means a practical or useful means of storing data in the age of solid state storage, there is something special about the little floppy disc of magnetic film inside that iconic plastic case. That’s why we were so excited to see the tool […]