It’s Elite, For The Commodore Pet

November 11, 2026 by 7 Comments

A few times in the life of someone interested in technology, there comes along something which after seeing it, you know the field is never going to be the same again. For a teenage future Hackaday writer this came in seeing Elite, on a BBC Micro. Nowadays an open world game is normal, but in the mid-1980s it was mind-blowing. Of course, such a powerful piece of software couldn’t be ported to any old computer, so owners of less capable machines were left envious of their more well-heeled friends.

It will be a surprise to Commodore Pet owners then, that over four decades later, [David Given] has ported the game to their platform. It’s not such a leap, as the Pet has the same (albeit slower) 6502 as the BBC Micro, and the game requires the Commodore machine to have 32k of memory.

So what you get is Elite, but with the Pet’s block graphics rather than the higher-resolution you’d have seen on the newer machines. He admits it doesn’t play well and that the code is something of a mess, but we suspect 32k Pet owners in 2026 won’t be too bothered by this. All the code and disk images are there in the repository, and you can see it at work in the video below the break. Meanwhile if you’re curious about the Elite codebase, you can take a look at it yourself.

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FLOSS Weekly Episode 883: Telnet Broke Us

November 11, 2026 by 3 Comments

This week Jonathan chats with Sattyam Jain about Agent Audit Kit and Agent Airlock. We’re in a brave new world, where anyone can use AI to generate an AI agent. But what keeps those builds secure? And what can we do to prevent AI jailbreaking where it matters? Listen to find out!
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Modular, 3D Printed Train Whistles For Everyone

November 11, 2026 by 8 Comments

If the word “train” didn’t grab your attention, you’re probably not the target audience for this project. If it did, then there is no need to explain why [AeroKoi] has come up with a modular 3″ train whistle, available on Thingiverse and well explained in the video embedded below. It’s a train whistle. Who doesn’t want their own train whistle?

The great part of this design, aside from requiring less air than his earlier, larger-diameter iterations, is the modularity. With adjustable bell caps, you can alter the size of the resonant chamber and thus the notes the whistle plays on the fly. That’s the key difference between a train whistle, as used in the steam era, and a modern train horn — whistles use a resonant chamber, while a horn uses a diaphragm to create the vibrations we call sound. By using the movable chamber caps to change the resonance, you can go from a Santa Fe 5 chime to a B&O 3 chime whistle by matching the measurements in the handy-dandy spreadsheet [TrainArtisan] provided.

One excellent tip he gives in the video is to grease all the mating surfaces of the whistles with petroleum jelly, but it’s worth watching the whole thing on YouTube for both full build and tuning instructions, and to learn more than you ever thought you needed to know about whistles. He gets right into the physics of sound waves to explain exactly the limitations of trying to replicate the sound of brass steam whistles with plastic and compressed air. If you just want to hear a bunch of train whistles to see how well it works, jump to the ten minute mark. The disappointing part comes later, where he explains the airflow requirements: if you don’t have a compressor with a big tank, you can’t expect more than one short toot at a time.

Interestingly enough it looks like most of the whistles we’ve written about are locomotive-adjacent, including [AeroKoi]’s earlier work, and a true cast-brass replica for the purists. 

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CHIP 8: The Pong Game’s Afoot!

November 11, 2026 by 8 Comments

Writing a computer game has always been hard. It is only the nature of the difficulty that changes. A modern game is as much about graphics, sound, and storytelling as it is about programming. But in the early days of computers, writing a game was a challenge because of limited graphics, slow CPUs, and tiny memory capacity. If you wanted to write a game for an early microcomputer, you generally wrote it in assembly language. BASIC was available on many machines, but it was usually too slow for anything requiring fast animation. Assembly language was fast, but it was also difficult to write, debug, and port to another machine.

RCA — in particular [Joseph Weisbecker], the architect of the 1802 — introduced the COSMAC VIP into the primordial 1977 home video game market. In addition to using ready-made games, the idea was that you could create your own. But writing games in 1802 assembly language would be beyond most of RCA’s customers. [Weisbecker] devised CHIP-8, a tiny virtual machine. It wasn’t quite a programming language. Instead, it was a simple instruction set implemented by an interpreter running on a real computer. You wrote programs for the imaginary CHIP-8 processor, and the interpreter made them run on the actual hardware. CHIP-8 is perfect for the kind of games you’d see in those days and still has a following among those who love retro games. Continue reading “CHIP 8: The Pong Game’s Afoot!” →

The Drawer Every Standing Desk Needs

November 11, 2026 by 10 Comments

Adjustable standing desks have had some ergonomic and health benefits for many people who would otherwise be sitting down all day, but those benefits come at a cost of a bit of usability. They can be more expensive, they make cable management and lighting a bit more difficult, and of course they take up more space than a normal desk. Related to that, they may have limited or no drawer space. [Super Valid Designs] decided to tackle all of these problems, while at the same time addressing the larger problem of a very disorganized workspace.

The idea seems simple on its face. The desk surface would be removed from the legs and a full-sized drawer built that matches the footprint of the desk and attaches to the same points, then the surface can be put back on top of that. But this is where feature creep started to set in, although in this case it was all a net positive for the build. [Super Valid Designs] wanted a front for the drawer but, since this is where his keyboard and mouse would go, wanted it to automatically move aside so it’s not in the way. He built a clever mechanism that pivots the front down when the drawer slides out. Not only that, but the drawer locks into place when it’s halfway out in “keyboard mode” and by lifting the front and pulling the drawer further out he can access a deeper storage space further to the back of the drawer.

Although adding these features in took him longer than he originally thought, the new desk is much more usable than the old while helping him eliminate some of the clutter around his workspace. Like any prototype, though, there were a few issues such as cable management (which is a problem with most standing desks) and the fact that he forgot that some of his peripherals were attached to the desk with clamps, which can’t be used with the drawer cabinet in the way. Overall though it’s a major improvement which we think could only be further improved by making it not just a standing desk, but a walking desk.

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EV Batteries Are Proving Hardier Than Expected

November 11, 2026 by 61 Comments

Batteries have a habit of quietly getting worse. Anyone who has nursed an old smartphone through its final years knows the routine—it leaves the house at 100% and is begging for a charger by lunchtime. It’s no surprise, then, that one of the most common worries about electric cars is what happens to the pack after a few years and a lot of kilometres. Nobody wants to buy a used EV only to discover it can barely make it across town. Fears around battery degradation and high replacement costs were the catch cry of many EV doomers over the years.

The good news is that we now have a pretty big pile of data on the question. Austrian battery diagnostics company Aviloo has crunched the results of more than 500,000 tests on used EVs  covering 20 popular models from the likes of Tesla, Volkswagen, Hyundai and Nissan. The data thus far tells us that EV batteries are holding up far better than the naysayers would have you believe.

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Why Engineers Are Forced To Create Junk Designs

November 11, 2026 by 74 Comments

It’s become a bit of a platitude to state that products were manufactured better in ‘the olden days’, but as [The Meandrous Engineer] covers in a recent video essay, the truth is a lot more greyscale and nuanced than something so trite.

The very short version is that it is the dominant culture of a nation in which products are manufactured that determines how many shortcuts and potential product life-shortening decisions are made. This same culture works its way down into company culture, including the engagement of the so-called C-suite with the engineers and folk who keep the now mostly automated manufacturing lines running, as well as vice-versa.

Old-school die-cast models and incandescent light bulbs saw their own series of manufacturing shortcuts, including a pre-World War 2 scandal about the artificial limiting of the lifespan of lightbulbs so that customers would buy more of them. This foreshadows what happened as soon as plastics and computer-aided design and manufacturing came on the scene.

Post-WW2, people like W. Edwards Deming were welcome guests in Japan and other rebuilding nations, introducing the Lean method of manufacturing which was at the time not deemed desirable in a post-war USA. For Japan, South Korea and other nations in the region this meant a boom in manufacturing, with a quality level that would ultimately trounce that of their Western equivalents.

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