Testing Oneself For AI Slop

October 14, 2026 by Jenny List 50 Comments

The feed of a Hackaday writer brings many surprises, some rubbish, and the occasional diamond which of course we bring to you. Sometimes a page catches the eye that’s not a Hackaday piece per se, but makes for interesting reading. Today there was an example which provides a catalyst for a story if not being one itself.

It’s an AI skill intended to make a slop-writing operation look less sloppy, and since it contains a list of slop behaviours, of course it’s irresistible to turn it on yourself. To delve into the archives, if you will. So here goes, how slop-like is your scribe?

It kicks off with the old favourite, “Delve“. Oh dear, that one’s in the List Hackaday corpus quite a bit. Earliest appearance: 2016. Then landscape terms, in which it’s easy to recognise “Sphere” again. Oops. 2016 again. How about “Testament“? Well, that one’s a 2017 word. “Pivotal“? Four years of the Raspberry Pi, back in 2016. How about “Showcase“? Yup, it’s there, in 2019. Meanwhile “Foster“, goes back to 2017.

Next up are “Leverage” and “Utilise“. Safe ground here. Editors have what are referred to a “Pet Peeves”, language tics that annoy them on sight, and those two regrettable pieces of business-speak never evade this red pencil. The word you are looking for is “Use”.

The page goes on to name a load more words as tells, and we could continue to dissect them for your amusement, but we think you get the message from long-pre-LLM Hackaday. It gets more interesting when it talks about paragraph structure, and there are the things we’d recognise as tells. Staccato paragraphs, one-line stacks for impact, and repeated sentence start words. Whether AI slop is sounding like a business influencer’s Linkedin posts, or the other way round, is anybody’s guess. And yes, Hackaday does use em-dashes — get over it.

It’s amusing to poke mild fun at your past writing style, but if there’s a serious point in there it’s that spotting slop is never as easy as having a check-box list of tells when in fact you’re just looking at professional-grade command of the language. After all, given that Hackaday is in its corpus, the LLM can even make a passable effort at writing like one of us. Perhaps the key lies in that article, when the fake Hackaday piece became obvious because it lacked the inference of the real one.

Does It Run… Duke Nukem 3D?

October 13, 2026 by Jenny List 16 Comments

When id Software released DOOM back in 1993 it helped define the genre, but it was hardly the only hit first-person shooter of that decade. There was also 3D Realms’ 1996 Duke Nukem 3D, a game which added some humor to the genre. Here’s [PicoPlus-devel], with pico-duke3D. It’s Duke Nukem 3D, on an RP2350.

Before reaching the conclusion that this might be obvious and easy, the three years between the two releases saw quite significant movements in the world of gaming PCs. DOOM’s minimum spec in 1993 was a 386 and 4 MB of memory, and would have been playable on a basic VGA card in an ISA slot. By contrast three years later Duke Nukem 3D required at least a 486DX2 and 8 MB, which would inevitably have had VESA local bus or PCI graphics. It’s a Quake competitor rather than a DOOM competitor, thus the power required to run it has stepped up a notch or two.

The RP2350 then is up to the job, and runs the game on a DVI equipped Pico clone. It can be controlled via either SNES or USB controllers given the right hardware, making it the perfect one-game console. The shareware game works, as does the full version if you own a copy. Having been around in the ’90s then, we’re curious. Could it be made to run Shadow Warrior as well? You no mess with Lo Wang!

A Modern Browser For The PlayStation Portable

October 13, 2026 by Jenny List 16 Comments

The Sony PlayStation Portable, better known as the PSP, is now over two decades old. In its day it was an impressive handheld gaming machine, not least because of the inclusion of wireless networking and a web browser.

We tried the browser back then, and it’s fair to say the experience was a little underwhelming. We’re thus mightily impressed at [Steve Janovitz], who has produced Tilefinch — a modern web browser for the PSP.

Depending on the model, the PSP came with a 333 MHz MIPS32 processor, and for all but the first model, 64 MB of RAM. Powerful back in 2004,but leagues behind something that would run any modern web browser. So how’s he doing it? The answer seems to be by careful choice of software components and use of the PSP’s built-in capabilities for jobs such as video decoding. The browser engine is Lexbor for example, while JavaScript is handled by QuickJS.

We don’t have a PSP to hand so we can’t tell how it would render Hackaday or even how fast it is, but we’re suitably impressed by this project. For PSP enthusiasts it’s a game-changing browser, but for us it also points the way towards web browsing being a possibility for other platforms. As the distinction between a high-end microcontroller and a low-end SoC becomes blurred, we’re starting to see exciting new hardware emerging with devices such as Espressif’s ESP32-P4 that, on paper at least, might be capable of running this browser. Exciting times in limited hardware web browsing might be upon us.

Emulating A Floppy Drive By Emulating The Drive Itself

October 12, 2026 by Jenny List 3 Comments

The Commodore 1541 is famously the floppy drive for the Commodore 64 series of 8-bit computers, and can be found with relative ease. Not so well known is its 1551 sibling — the drive made for the Commodore 16 and Plus/4 machines.

They’re particularly rare in 2026, so [Maciej Witkowiak] has made an emulator. But it’s not just modern silicon emulating the whole thing. Instead it’s the same 6510 and ROM you might have found on the original, talking to a Pi Pico emulating the drive hardware. It’s a gloriously over the top solution to the problem of emulating a disk drive, the reason being that it started life as a daughter board plugged into an original drive mainboard.

Complementing the Pico is a CPLD for glue logic, and an OLED for selecting disk images. The Pico even generates the clock and IRQ timing for the venerable 8-bit part. The ROM is 64k in size, room enough for both the original firmware and enhanced community versions. The whole thing can be found in a GitHub repository, should you wish to have a go yourself.

Long time Hackaday readers will know [Bil Herd] as one of our contributors. If you’re interested in the back story to the series of computers that included the Commodore 16, his book makes for interesting reading.

WiFi Router Does Software-Defined Radio

October 12, 2026 by Jenny List 5 Comments

Perhaps the most famous of software-defined radios is the RTL-SDR, which is very cheap because it’s a digital TV receiver that’s been pressed into service delivering raw I and Q data streams. But the RTL-SDR is certainly not the only chipset that can do this, and today we have a new one.

The MediaTek MT7996 radio chip in the Gemtek W1700K WiFi 7 router can serve as a very competent SDR receiver, and here’s [h0m3us3r] with the code to make it stream over Ethernet to a Linux machine with a web server, through the device’s SoC.

The radio works on the 2.4, 5, and 6 GHz bands, depending upon which version of the device — and thus which radio chip — you have. These may not be entirely useful to many who use lower bands, and given that a similar hack has been found for ESP32 radios on 2.4 GHz it’s likely a demand will arise for a receive up-converter. Until then, you can look at WiFi packets in a waterfall view to your heart’s content.

Since more and more devices now incorporate a radio, we hope that more such undocumented raw streaming modes will be found, and that we’ll see some other new SDRs. Something to look forward to.

Taking A Nokia 3310 Game Jam To The N’th Degree

October 11, 2026 by Jenny List 3 Comments

Game jams are a fun competition in which the aim is to write a game under a particular theme while under a time constraint, usually a weekend. [Hoani] entered one where the aim was to write a game within the constraints of the Nokia 3310’s user interface: a 94 by 48 pixel grey LCD, a buzzer, and a keypad. His entry was Trick Shot II, a ball-bouncing game running on his game engine, which is cool enough, but making a custom PCB for a Nokia 3310 case to run it on? Next level.

Look away if you don’t like restomods, for a real Nokia 3310 is gutted to take this board. On it is a Pi Pico, the Nokia LCD, which has outlasted the original phone as a part by decades, and a Nokia keypad layout. The first prototype was not a perfect fit because it had a 1.6mm board rather than 1mm.

The engine meanwhile is written in Go, and has both graphics and sound APIs. Considering that the Pico’s power exceeds whatever CPU the phone had by many orders of magnitude, we’d imagine it has no problems with such a tiny screen.

We like the attention to detail of this project, and that such a limited interface can still deliver gaming fun. Meanwhile, if you would prefer to use a 3310 as a phone, you can charge it the 21st-century way.

Another IKEA Product Yields An LED Matrix

October 10, 2026 by Jenny List 26 Comments

The IKEA Kortlinje is a digital clock that costs around 20 dollars, featuring a hygrometer and thermometer. It’s another cheap appliance, you might think, were it not that the display is a white LED matrix. Best of all, with three VK1640 LED controllers, it has hacking potential. You’re in at the ground floor if you hack one of these, but so far we’ve seen a post from the RevSpace hackerspace in the Netherlands, and the first glimmerings of a firmware on GitHub from [VIPnytt].

We have one on the bench here, and cracking it open we find the three LED drivers, an unidentified microcontroller with a 32.768 kHz watch crystal, and a mystery chip nobody’s yet identified that may either be some kind of I2C multiplexer or have something to do with those sensors. Neither has any markings, so no help there. The hackability comes in the relative ease of desoldering the microcontroller and substituting your own. In which case with access to I2C and the LED drivers, you can make it do your bidding.

This thing is part of a rich tradition of hacking IKEA products. Perhaps one of our favorites is the use of bowls from the Swedish furniture giant to make a telescope mount.