Hackaday Retro Roundup: Ultraportables edition

front

A few months ago, we rolled out an updated Hackaday, a badly needed new layout replacing the HTML and CSS that had remained unchanged since 2004. Of course a few people didn’t like change and complained about slow load times. We’ve experienced a slightly slower load time as well, so we’ll just wait until the year 2020 when our computers … Read the rest

Making a nostalgic Apple mouse wireless

If you’ve got an old mouse sitting around that has that perfect retro look why not start using it again? We’d bet there’s just enough room in there to turn the input device wireless.

The hack does away with everything but the case. The guts from a brand new wireless laser mouse are used as replacements. For the most … Read the rest

Adding Compact Flash to an old sequencer

[Shoji] has a beloved sequencer that went out of production ten years ago. Unfortunately the storage options are also 10 year out-of-date as SCSI is the stock option for storing his loops. Using a series of adapters he added Compact Flash storage to his Akai MPC-2000 Classic. The board has a connector for 25-pin SCSI which he wired to … Read the rest

Just the right controller for any game

[Patrice] hacked all of his classic controllers for use when playing games on an emulator. He made the base station starting with a USB gaming controller. From there he soldered wires connecting the PCB pads for all of the buttons to the pins of a d-sub connector. The same is done on the classic controller, allowing him to switch them … Read the rest

S-video from an Atari 2600

atari

[Ben Heck] posted this writeup about getting S-Video/composite out of an Atari 2600. This is actually the hack of [Longhorn Engineer], who showed it to [Ben] at a recent event. If any of you have tried to play these classics on a modern TV you may have found it to be quite difficult. If you manage to get it … Read the rest

PCjr 25 years later

pcjr

[Trixter], connoisseur of old hardware, is celebrating the 25th anniversary of the PCjr. IBM’s PCjr was killed only 18th months after being revealed and [Trixter] lays out exactly why. Overall, it was designed to be cheap to produce and sell, but many of the choices made it difficult to use. They used the CPU instead of DMA for floppy … Read the rest