Category: Software Hacks

Retrocomputers need ROMs, but they’re just so read only. Enter the latest incarnation of [Piers]’s One ROM to rule them all, now built with a RP2350, because the newest version is 5V capable. This can replace the failing ROMs in your old Commodore gear with this sweet design on a two-layer PCB, using a cheap […]
You’ve generated a ton of data. How do you analyze it and present it? Sure, you can use a spreadsheet. Or break out some programming tools. Or try LabPlot. Sure, it is sort of like a spreadsheet. But it does more. It has object management features, worksheets like a Juypter notebook, and a software development […]
Over on his blog our hacker [cpt_tom] shows us how to simulate the hardware for a Commodore PET. Two of them in fact, one with static RAM and the other with dynamic RAM. This project is serious business. The simulation environment used is Digital. Digital is a digital logic designer and circuit simulator designed for […]
We can understand why shaderacademy.com chose that name over “the shady school,” but whatever they call it, if you are looking to brush up on graphics programming with GPUs, it might be just what you are looking for. The website offers challenges that task you to draw various 2D and 3D graphics using code in […]
As long as there have been games, there have been crackers breaking their copy protections. “Digital Rights Management” or DRM, is a phrase for copy protection coined near the end of the 1990s, and subverted shortly thereafter. But how? [Nathan Baggs] show us what it took to be a cracker in the year 2000, as […]
There’s long been a push to stop writing code as a sequence of lines and go to something graphical, which has been very successful in some areas and less so in others. But even when you use something graphical like Scratch, it is really standing in for lines of code? Many graphical environments are really […]
Normally, if you change a file’s extension in Windows, it doesn’t do anything positive. It just makes the file open in the wrong programs that can’t decode what’s inside. However, [PortalRunner] has crafted a file that can behave as six different filetypes, simply by swapping out the extension at the end of the filename. The […]
When I was a student, I was a diehard Commodore Amiga user, having upgraded to an A500+ from my Sinclair Spectrum. The Amiga could do it all, it became my programming environment for electronic engineering course work, my audio workstation for student radio, my gaming hub, and much more. One thing that was part of […]
Our hacker [glgorman] sent in their submission for the One Hertz Challenge: an analog software clock for Microsoft Windows. I guess we’d have to say that this particular project is a work-in-progress. There is no final clock, yet. But a number of yak’s have been shaved. For instance, we have code for computing geometric objects […]
Over on his YouTube channel the vivacious [Stephen Hawes] tells us that we never need to buy solder stencils again! A big claim! And he is quick to admit that his printed solder paste isn’t presently quite as precise as solder stencils, but he is reporting good success with his technique so far. [Stephen] found […]