Author: Bryan Cockfield

1751 Articles

Graphing Calculator Gets USB-C Upgrade

January 7, 2026 by 17 Comments

Unlike Texas Instruments, whose graphing calculators have famously not made technological improvements in decades despite keeping the same price tag, HP has made a few more modern graphing calculators in the last few years. One of which is the HP Prime which boasts hardware from the mid-2010s including an ARM processor, a color screen, and rechargeable lithium battery. But despite this updated hardware it’s still using micro-USB for data and charging. [David] wanted to fix that by giving this calculator a USB-C port.

The first steps were disassembling the calculator case and removing the micro-USB port. The PCB is glued to the LCD screen which isn’t ideal, but he was able to work on it with everything attached. The parts are small enough to need a microscope, and with a hot air station he was quickly able to remove the USB port. His replacements from a generic online retailer were able to be soldered without much effort, but there was one major complication. The new USB-C ports didn’t account for the “On The Go” mode supported by micro-USB and were shorting a pin to ground which put the calculator into “host” mode instead of acting as a device. But using the microscope and cutting a trace on the PCB disabled this mode permanently and got the calculator working properly.

As far as modernizing calculators go, it seems like the HP Prime checks a lot of boxes, with the major downside that the LCD screen and more powerful processor means that the battery needs to be charged more often than the old TI calculators. Rather than carry a dongle around everywhere, [David] found this to be a much more efficient change to his trusty HP. If you’re still stuck using TI calculators, though, there are a few ways to modernize those as well like this build which adds a lithium battery or this one which ports a few Game Boy games to the platform.

Super Mario 64, Now With Microtransactions

January 6, 2026 by 13 Comments

Besides being a fun way to pass time, video gaming is a surprisingly affordable hobby per unit time. A console or budget PC might only cost a few hundred dollars, and modern games like Hollowknight: Silksong can provide 40-60 hours of experience for only around $20 USD. This value proposition wasn’t really there in the 80s, where arcade cabinets like Gauntlet might have cost an inflation-adjusted $8 per hour in quarters. This paradigm shift is great for gamers, but hasn’t been great for arcade owners. [PrintAndPanic] wanted to bring some of that old coin munching vibe into console gaming, and so added a credit system to Super Mario 64.

The project is a fork of a decompilation of Super Mario 64, which converts the original machine code into a human-friendly format so bugs can be fixed and other modern features added. With the code available, essentially anyone can add features into the game that weren’t there already. In this case, [PrintAndPanic] is using a Raspberry Pi connected to a coin slot, so when coins are put into the game like an old arcade machine, the Raspberry Pi can tell the modified version of Super Mario 64 to add credits. These credits allow the player to run and jump, and when the credits run out Mario becomes extremely limited and barely able to outrun even the slowest Bombombs and Goombas.

With some debugging out of the way and the custom game working, [PrintAndPanic] built a custom enclosure for the game and the coin slot to turn it into a more self-contained arcade-style machine. The modified code for this project is available on the project’s GitHub page for those who want to play a tedious version of a favorite video game that costs more money than it should.

There are plenty of other modifications for this classic as well, most of which involve improving the game instead of adding a modern microtransaction-based system.

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Bicycle Tows 15,000 Pounds

January 4, 2026 by 13 Comments

An old joke in physics is that of the “spherical cow”, poking fun at some of the assumptions physicists make when tackling a new problem. Making the problem simple like this can help make its fundamentals easier to understand, but when applying these assumptions to real-world problems these assumptions are quickly challenged. Which is what happened when [Seth] from Berm Peak attempted to tow a huge trailer with a bicycle — while in theory the bike just needs a big enough gear ratio he quickly found other problems with this setup that had to be solved.

[Seth] decided on a tandem bike for this build. Not only does the second rider add power, but the longer wheelbase makes it less likely that the tongue weight of the trailer will lift the front wheel off the ground. It was modified with a Class 3 trailer hitch, as well as a battery to activate the electric trailer brakes in case of an emergency. But after hooking the trailer up the first time the problems started cropping up. At such a high gear ratio the bike is very slow and hard to keep on a straight line. Some large, custom training wheels were added between the riders to keep it stable, but even then the huge weight still caused problems with the chain and even damaged the bike’s freehub at one point.

Eventually, though, [Berm Peak] was able to flat tow a Ford F-150 Lightning pulling a trailer a few yards up a hill, at least demonstrating this proof of concept. It might be the absolute most a bicycle can tow without help from an electric motor, although real-world applications for something like this are likely a bit limited. He’s been doing some other bicycle-based projects with more utility lately, including a few where he brings abandoned rental e-bikes back to life by removing proprietary components.

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FPGA Dev Kit Unofficially Brings MSX Standard Back

January 3, 2026 by 15 Comments

In the 1980s there were an incredible number of personal computers of all shapes, sizes, and operating system types, and there was very little interoperability. Unlike today’s Windows-Mac duopoly, this era was much more of a free-for-all but that didn’t mean companies like Microsoft weren’t trying to clean up all of this mess. In 1983 they introduced the MSX standard for computers, hoping to coalesce users around a single design. Eventually it became very successful in Japan and saw some use in a few other places but is now relegated to the dustbin of history, but a new FPGA kit unofficially supports this standard.

The kit is called the OneChip Book and, unlike most FPGA kits, includes essentially everything needed to get it up and running including screen, keyboard, and I/O all in a pre-built laptop case. At its core it’s just that: and FPGA kit. But its original intent was to recreate this old 80s computer standard with modern hardware. The only problem is they never asked for permission, and their plans were quickly quashed. The development kit is still available, though, and [electricadventures] goes through the steps to get this computer set up to emulate this unofficially-supported retro spec. He’s also able to get original MSX cartridges running on it when everything is said and done.

Although MSX is relatively unknown in North America and Western Europe, it remains a fairly popular platform for retro computing enthusiasts in much of the rest of the world. We’ve seen a few similar projects related to this computer standard like this MSX-inspired cyberdeck design, but also others that bring new hardware to this old platform.

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Zork Running On 4-Bit Intel Computer

January 3, 2026 by 7 Comments

Before DOOM would run on any computing system ever produced, and indeed before it even ran on its first computer, the game that would run on any computer of the pre-DOOM era was Zork. This was a text-based adventure game first published in the late 70s that could run on a number of platforms thanks to a virtual machine that interpreted the game code. This let the programmers write a new VM for each platform rather than porting the game every time. [smbakeryt] wanted to see how far he could push this design and got the classic game running on one of the oldest computers ever produced.

The computer in question is the ubiquitous Intel 4004 processor, the first commercially available general-purpose microprocessor produced. This was a four-bit machine and predates the release of Zork by about eight years. As discussed earlier, though, the only thing needed to get Zork to run on any machine is the Z-machine for that platform, so [smbakeryt] got to work. He’s working on a Heathkit H9 terminal, and the main limitation here is the amount of RAM needed to run the game. He was able to extended the address bus to increase the available memory in hardware, but getting the Z-machine running in software took some effort as well. There’s a number of layers of software abstraction here that’s a bit surprising for 70s-era computing but which make it an extremely interesting challenge and project.

As far as [smbakeryt]’s goal of finding the “least amount of computer” that would play Zork, we’d have a hard time thinking of anything predating the 4004 that would have any reasonable user experience, but we’d always encourage others to challenge this thought and [smbakeryt]’s milestone. Similarly, DOOM has a history of running on machines far below the original recommended minimum system requirements, and one of our favorites was getting it to run on the NES.

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A Steam Machine Clone For An Indeterminate But Possibly Low Cost

January 2, 2026 by 29 Comments

For various reasons, crypto mining has fallen to the wayside in recent years. Partially because it was never useful other than as a speculative investment and partially because other speculative investments have been more popular lately, there are all kinds of old mining hardware available at bargain prices. One of those is the Asrock AMD BC250, which is essentially a cut down Playstation 5 but which has almost everything built into it that a gaming PC would need to run Steam, and [ETA PRIME] shows us how to get this system set up.

The first steps are to provide the computer with power, an SSD, and a fan for cooling. It’s meant to be in a server rack so this part at least is pretty straightforward. After getting it powered up there are a few changes to make in the BIOS, mostly related to memory management. [ETA PRIME] is uzing Bazzite as an operating system which helps to get games up and running easily. It plays modern games and even AAA titles at respectable resolutions and framerates almost out-of-the-box, which perhaps shouldn’t be surprising since this APU has a six-core Zen 2 processor with a fairly powerful RDNA2 graphics card, all on one board.

It’s worth noting that this build is a few weeks old now, and the video has gotten popular enough that the BC250 cards that [ETA PRIME] was able to find for $100 are reported to be much more expensive now. Still, though, even at double or triple the price this might still be an attractive price point for a self-contained, fun, small computer that lets you game relatively easily and resembles the Steam Machine in concept. There are plenty of other builds based on old mining hardware as well, so don’t limit yourself to this one popular piece of hardware. This old mining rig, for example, made an excellent media server.

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Low-Cost, Portable Streaming Server

January 2, 2026 by 12 Comments

Thanks to the Raspberry Pi, we have easy access to extremely inexpensive machines running Linux that have all kinds of GPIO as well as various networking protocols. And as the platform has improved over the years, we’ve seen more demanding applications on them as well as applications that use an incredibly small amount of power. This project combines all of these improvements and implements a media streaming server on a Raspberry Pi that uses a tiny amount of energy, something that wouldn’t have been possible on the first generations of Pi.

Part of the reason this server uses such low power, coming in just around two watts, is that it’s based on the Pi Zero 2W. It’s running a piece of software called Mini-Pi Media Server which turns the Pi into a DLNA server capable of streaming media over the network, in this case WiFi. Samba is used to share files and Cockpit is onboard for easy web administration. In testing, the server was capable of streaming video to four different wireless devices simultaneously, all while plugged in to a small USB power supply.

For anyone who wants to try this out, the files for it as well as instructions are also available on a GitHub page. We could think of a number of ways that this would be useful over a more traditional streaming setup, specifically in situations where power demand must remain low such as on a long car trip or while off grid. We also don’t imagine the Pi will be doing much transcoding or streaming of 4K videos with its power and processing limitations, but it would be unreasonable to expect it to do so. For that you’d need something more powerful.

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