This week the Hackaday Podcast is on vacation, but we’d like to wish you all happy holidays and a great 2026. Thanks for tuning in! We’ll be back next week.
This wasn’t a real show, but that doesn’t prevent you from downloading it as an MP3 anyway.
Hackaday Podcast: 2025 Holiday Placeholder Edition
This doesn’t have to do with anything, but 24 years ago, Young Me had a Commodore PC40-III (rare 286) from e-waste and noticed that his un-grounded monitor threw some nice sparks when connecting to the grounded PC and had some fun with that. Until the onboard video card (Paradise SVGA) crapped out. Young Me disassembled the thing, destroyed the socket for the PVGA chip, stole the RAMDAC (probably to fix another video card) and just replaced it with an ISA card with an identical chipset. The PVGA chip was thrown around the house and eventually landed in the junk bin, worse for wear.
Yesterday, I finally got around to trying to fix the machine (the only problem was that the picture didn’t sync horizontally). And after dremeling away some of the IC case to replace 2 missing pins, bending all the pins from the destroyed socket straight, soldering a broken off pin from the socket to the IC and replacing the RAMDAC with one that was suspiciously flying around the house, the onboard SVGA still worked exactly like it was when it broke – 24 years ago! So I traced the missing HSync to a 74LS125 and jumped it, which made the picture lock again, but too far to the left. I replaced the chip and now the onboard SVGA is fully working.
And today I had some fun with that machine on Windows, utilizing the graphics capabilities to the fullest (800×600, 16 colors). Including playing a game I wrote for fun, that was written specifically for that resolution/color depth (nothing to mention, the entire game is a stupid joke).
Even earlier, Young Me destroyed a 16 MHz 286 laptop by testing a broken keyboard and trying to get it to work.
Today I found the keyboard had its own power line fused – and the fuse was blown. Young Me thought he blew the keyboard controller. Unfortunately the laptop is even worse for wear, the LCD was completely taken apart, played with and thrown away, the case was thrown out first, and the bare circuit board shows what 25 years of floating around the house does. The power connector is missing its plastic and just consists of the metal fingers, so I’ll have to re-crimp that. Plus I don’t have any of those special late 80s Laptop Floppy Drives spare. But I do have matching hard drives to spare, as well as RAM.
Kudos to Today You!