Running Ocarina Of Time On The Apple Watch

March 10, 2026 by Maya Posch 4 Comments

At this point in time it can be safely stated that the question ‘Does it run Doom?’ defaults to a resounding ‘Yes’. This raises the question of what next games should be seen as some kind impressive benchmark, with [Game of Tobi] gunning heavily for Nintendo 64 titles. Most recently he ported Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time to the Apple Watch, with the port almost ready for release along with Super Mario 64 after a few more issues are fixed.

Although there are a few approaches when it comes to porting Nintendo 64 games to other systems, if the target system is effectively a small PC with all of the amenities such as rendering APIs, then using the Ship of Harkinian project as the basis is a good start. This is what [Toby] did with the Apple Watch, and after some work it runs Ocarina of Time at a solid pace, with as the main flaw being busted text rendering.

Of course, the overwhelming flaw with any small gaming system and touchscreen-only systems is that our meaty paws do not shrink that well, and using telepathy to control game systems still isn’t a feature. Thus the biggest compromise with the Apple Watch port is that you have the controls overlaid on the screen. This could probably be compensated for with a Bluetooth controller or similar, but that poses its own problems when it comes to two-handed playing.

Practical issues aside, it’s pretty amazing that just about any ‘smart’ device that we carry around with us can also be a full-featured retro gaming system, and we appreciate [Toby]’s efforts in making this a reality.

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Turning A GDB Coredump Debug Session Into A Murder Mystery

March 10, 2026 by Maya Posch 2 Comments

Debugging an application crash can oftentimes feel like you’re an intrepid detective in a grimy noir detective story, tasked with figuring out the sordid details behind an ugly crime. Slogging through scarce clues and vapid hints, you find yourself down in the dumps, contemplating the deeper meaning of life and the true nature of man, before hitting that eureka moment and cracking the case. One might say that this makes for a good game idea, and [Jonathan] would agree with that notion, thus creating the Fatal Core Dump game.

Details can be found in the (spoiler-rich) blog post on how the game was conceived and implemented. The premise of the game is that of an inexplicable airlock failure on an asteroid mining station, with you being the engineer tasked to figure out whether it was ‘just a glitch’ or that something more sinister was afoot. Although an RPG-style game was also considered, ultimately that proved to be a massive challenge with RPG Maker, resulting in this more barebones game, making it arguably more realistic.

Suffice it to say that this game is not designed to be a cheap copy of real debugging, but the real deal. You’re expected to be very comfortable with C, GDB, core dump analysis, x86_64 ASM, Linux binary runtime details and more. At the end you should be able to tell whether it was just a silly mistake made by an under-caffeinated developer years prior, or a malicious attack that exploited or introduced some weakness in the code.

If you want to have a poke at the code behind the game, perhaps to feel inspired to make your own take on this genre, you can take a look at the GitHub project.

Arduino’s New AI-Centric Board Is The VENTUNO Q

March 10, 2026 by Maya Posch 34 Comments

There have been many questions about what direction Arduino would take after being bought by Qualcomm. Now it would seem that we’re getting a clearer picture. Perhaps unsurprisingly the answer appears to be ‘AI’, with the new Arduino VENTUNO Q SBC being advertised as ‘democratizing AI’ in the Qualcomm press release, although it also references robotics.

This new board is based around the Dragonwing IQ-8275 SoC along with an STM32H5F5 MCU, making it somewhat of a beefier brother of the previously covered Arduino Uno Q, which also offers an SoC/MCU hybrid solution. On the product page we can see the overall specifications for this new board, where the release date is specified as ‘soon’.

Its IQ-8275 SoC is part of Qualcomm’s IQ8 series, with eight 2.35 GHz ARM cores and an Adreno 623 GPU, paired with 16 GB of LPDDR5. The Cortex M33-based STM32H5F5 MCU comes with its own 4 MB of Flash and 1.5 MB of RAM, all on a board that’s significantly larger than the Uno Q and isn’t crippled by a single USB-C port as SoC I/O.

Although clearly more aimed at industrial and automation applications than the solution-in-search-of-a-problem Uno Q board, it remains to be seen whether this board will catch on with Arduino fans, or whether Qualcomm’s goal is more to break into whole new markets under the Arduino brand.

Diagnosing A Mysterious Fault With A Commodore 1541 Disk Drive

March 9, 2026 by Maya Posch 2 Comments

Some PCB corrosion on the bottom of the 1541 drive. (Credit: TheRetroChannel, YouTube)

Recently [TheRetroChannel] came across an interesting failure mode on a Commodore 1541 5.25″ floppy disk drive, in the form of the activity LED blinking just once after power-up with the drive motor continuously spinning. Since the Flash Codes that Commodore implemented and bothered to document start at 2 flashes (for RAM-related Zero Page), this raised the question of what fault this drive had, and whether a single flash is some kind of undocumented error code.

A cursory check showed that the heads were okay and not shorted, ruling out a common fault with the used floppy mechanism. Cleaning up the corrosion on IC sockets and similar basic operations were performed next, without making a change, nor did removing the ICs to induce it to produce the documented error codes, but this helped narrow down the potential causes. Especially after swapping in known-good ICs failed to make a difference. One possibility was that the drive was boot looping, as the activity LED is lit up once on boot.

Some probing around with an oscilloscope between the faulty and a working drive seemed to point to a faulty RAM IC, but while probing the faulty drive suddenly initialized successfully. After some more poking around it appeared that the drive was fine after it had a chance to warm up, which just deepened the mystery.

The drive did talk to a C64 with diagnostic cartridge at this point, but would often glitch out. Ultimately it appears that a dodgy IC socket and a few bad traces were to blame for the behavior, making it an ‘obvious in hindsight’ repair. The bottom of the PCB had some clear corrosion on it, but the affected traces were apparently still hanging on for dear life with the drive still initializing once warmed up.

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Building A Class 100 Semiconductor Cleanroom Inside A Shed

March 9, 2026 by Maya Posch 16 Comments

Just your typical backyard cleanroom shed. (Credit: Dr. Semiconductor, YouTube)

Most people see that garden shed as little more than a place to store some gardening tools in, but if you’re like [Dr. Semiconductor], then what you see is a potential cleanroom for semiconductor manufacturing. As ridiculous as this may sound, the basic steps behind the different levels of cleanrooms work just as well for a multi-million dollar fab as they do for for a basic shed.

Key to everything is HEPA filtration along with positive pressure, to constantly push clean air into the cleanroom, while preventing dirty air from flowing in. The shed was also split into two sections, the first room once you enter it being the the gowning room. This is where you change into cleanroom gear before you transition into the cleanroom.

In addition to the flame-resistant drywalls, a water-based epoxy coating was applied to the insides of the cleanroom walls to make it smooth and free of debris. The HEPA filtration system constantly filters the shed’s air along with some fresh outside air, while an airconditioning unit ensures that the temperature remains constant.

The measured >0.5 µm particle contamination inside the shed turned out to be enough for a FED STD 209E equivalent of Class 100, which is ISO 5 class with a maximum of 3,520 particles/m³. For comparison, room air is ISO 9 with max 35,200,000 particles/m³. At ISO 5 it’s good enough to do some semiconductor R&D laboratory things, which is what [Dr. Semiconductor]’s channel is – shockingly – about.

Thanks to [Thayer] for the tip.

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Reverse-Engineering The Bluetooth Fichero Thermal Label Printer Protocol

March 9, 2026 by Maya Posch 19 Comments

It’s hard to deny that label printers have become more accessible than ever, but an annoying aspect of many of these cheap units is that their only user interface is a proprietary smartphone app connected via Bluetooth. The Fichero-branded label printer that [0xMH] obtained for a mere 10 Euro at a store in the Netherlands was much the same, with an associated app that doesn’t just bind it to smartphones, but also requires no fewer than 26 permissions. Obviously this required some reverse-engineering of the BLE protocol.

The fruits of this reverse-engineering effort can be found in the GitHub repository, with the most interesting part probably being that this Fichero is just one of many relabeling of generic label printers, this one being an AiYin D11, by Xiamen Printer Future Technology. This means that other iterations of this D11 will work exactly the same, as they all use the same ‘LuckPrinter’ SDK.

[0xMH] provides a Web GUI to talk with a local D11 printer, though you can also use the Python scripts, or of course implement the protocol using your favorite language and frameworks, so that you can finally control a cheap label printer from a PC or even BLE-equipped MCU like the software gods intended.

Thanks to [T-ice] for the tip.

How Usable Is Windows 98 In 2026?

March 8, 2026 by Maya Posch 49 Comments

With the RAM and storage crisis hitting personal computing very hard – along with new software increasingly suffering the effects of metastasizing ‘AI’ – more people than ever are pining for the ‘good old days’. For example, using that early 2000s desktop PC with Windows 98 SE might now seem to be a viable alternative in 2026, because it couldn’t possibly make things worse. Or could it? As a reality check, [SteelsOfLiquid] over on YouTube gave this setup a whirl.

The computer of choice is a very common Dell Dimension 2100, featuring a zippy 1.1 GHz Intel Celeron, 256 MB of DDR1, and a spacious 38 GB HDD. Graphics are provided by the iGPU in the Intel i810 chipset, all in a compact, 6.9 kg light package. As an early Windows XP PC, this gives Windows 98 SE probably a pretty solid shot at keeping up with the times. At least the early 2000s, natch.

Of course, there is a lot of period-correct software you can install, such as Adobe Photoshop 5, MS Office 97 (featuring everyone’s beloved Clippy), but a lot of modern software also runs, with the Retro Systems Revival blog documenting many that still run on Win98SE in some manner, including Audacity 2.0. This makes it totally suitable for basic productivity things.

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