Ever been working on a project and get stuck on one of those last little details? That’s what happened to [Empire of Scrap]. He’s building an Ohio Scientific (OSI) superboard II replica. He wants it to be accurate down to the dates on the chips. It is quite an impressive build. The problem is the […]
[Mike] from Leaded Solder has a soft spot for old computers, and a chance encounter with a friend sent them deep down the deep hole that is the world of 80s and 90s-era Japanese home computers. Many people playing with these machines have all kinds of issues to deal with, such as rotting cartridges, failing […]
Unlike the today’s consumer computer market, the 1980s were the wild west in comparison. There were all kinds of different, incompatible operating systems, hardware, and programs, all competing against one another, and with essentially no networking to tie everything together. Some of these products were incredibly niche as well, only running one program or having […]
The 8-bit home computers of yore that we all know and love, without exception as far as we are aware, had an off the shelf microprocessor at heart. In 1983 you were either in the Z80 camp or the 6502 camp, with only a relatively few outliers using processors with other architectures. But what if […]
[GloriousCow] has started working on a series of investigations into the various historical floppy disk copy protection schemes used in the early days of the IBM PC and is here with the first of these results, specifically Formaster’s Copy-Lock. This is the starting sector of track 6. It looks empty, but it’s not quite. The […]
When we think of programmable hardware, we think of FPGAs. But they’re not the only option. [Oliver Schmidt] has been exploring how the Raspberry Pi Pico can serve in such a role for the classic Apple II. The talk was presented at the KansasFest event this year, and it’s well worth diving into! [Oliver] has […]
The Macintosh Plus is not exactly known as particularly relevant in the worlds of chiptune or electronic music more broadly. That’s not to say it can’t do anything that sounds cool, however. As [Action Retro] demonstrates, it’s got some really impressive tricks up its sleeve if you know what you’re doing. The video centers around “Music Mouse”, […]
Using a disk drive today is trivial. But back “in the day,” it was fairly complex both because the drives were simple and the CPUs were not powerful by today’s standards. [Thomas] has been working on a 68000 Mac emulator and found that low-level floppy information was scattered in different places. So he’s gathered it […]
You might think that TV stations or production houses would be great at archiving, but it’s not always the case. Particularly from the public access perspective. However, if you’re a fan of The Famous Computer Cafe, you’re in luck! The beloved series has now been preserved on The Internet Archive! If you’re not familiar with the show, […]
For those of us who lived through the early 8-bit computing revolution — the tail end, in our case — it’s hard to believe that there’s a second wave of retrocomputing nostalgia underway. But as this bit-banged TRS-80 birthday bonus pack shows, the first generation did a pretty good job passing the retro torch. With […]