Author: Tyler August

559 Articles

Rebuilding An Obsolete IC To Save A Betacam SP Tapedeck

July 30, 2026 by 8 Comments

Betacam is not the Betamax you may have had at home– it was a professional format that lived on into the 21st century, in the “SP” form. In many places, it would have been the last tape format in use. So it is perhaps understandable that [ldursw] decided to recreate an obsolete and unobtainable IC to save a Sony broadcast-grade editing Video Tape Recorder (VTR). Still mad, perhaps, but in a way we very much appreciate.

The Sony BVW-75 VTR had an odd flaw where the output lacked colour, unless paused with dynamic tracking off. Then colour would appear, but only in odd stripes. Clearly the chroma circuit was at fault. Some sluthing found that a sync separator IC– that separates the sync pulses that keep everything moving together, if the name didn’t give it away– wasn’t behaving correctly. More sluthing found that the chip in question was no longer available. Luckily, the concept of a sync separator hasn’t quite given up the ghost, and another part was available. It just didn’t fit, used a different voltage, and had an inverted output. No biggie! [ldursw] added a voltage regulator, an inverter, and a video amplifier chip, then after breadboard testing put them on a PCB with pins that match the original IC’s form-factor, making it a plug-in replacement.

That’s a GitHub link at the start of this article, by the way, so he’s open sourced the solution for anyone who needs a Toshiba TA7357P video sync separator. We don’t know who else needs this, but we’re willing to bet that whoever does, really needs it. On behalf of whoever that might be, we offer sincere thanks to [ldursw] for the hack, and for submitting it to our tips line.

This reminds us a little bit of a tape deck repair we featured previously, reviving another Sony format– D-1 tapes–to archive old media.

The newly surgerized internals

Pizza Eye Surgery Saves Hemispherical Projector

July 30, 2026 by 15 Comments

If you ever make it to DNA Pizza in San Francisco, you may feel as though you’re being watched. The Eye of the Pizza is Upon You. Or, it was, until the out-of-production and now very expensive spherical projector gave up the ghost during a power outage. It’s back, though! Thanks to proprietor [Jamie Zawinski] and some cheap, absolutely-not-supposed-to-be-in-there replacement parts.

The saga started long ago, back in 2017, when [Jamie] got ahold of a Gekkin WorldEye hemispherical projector. It looks like those were meant for the educational market, to show planets and the like, but [Jamie] instead put a big eye on it, thanks in part to work by [PaintYourDragon]. It looked great, as you can see from the demo video embedded below. There it sat, staring down patrons for nine long years, until the power company did what is known in the business as “an oopsie” and turned the WorldEye into an expensive paperweight.

Not to be deterred, [Jamie] got the cheapest projector he could find and an equally-bargain-bin fisheye lens originally meant for macro photography, and mashed them into the Gekkin case without a care for such fripperies as focal length. A little surgery later, and as [Jamie] puts it, “The Eye of Pizza is, Once Again, Upon You”. In spite of the projector being 16:9, thus not quite projecting across the whole surface of the dome and the image fuzzing a touch at the edges, the result works far better than it should for the amount of engineering that went into it. [Jamie] expects further improvements can come from tweaking the image on the software side, but it looks like the current iteration is good enough for pizza parlor decor.

We’ve featured another of [Jamie]’s hacks before, when he built a Linux payphone. Weirdly enough, this isn’t the first time the WorldEye has received a projector transplant around here.

Continue reading “Pizza Eye Surgery Saves Hemispherical Projector” →

Sail Virtually Aboard The “Itanic” With IA-64 Emulator

July 20, 2026 by 16 Comments

Intel’s Itanium architecture was an interesting experiment, but it has gone down in history as one of the chip giant’s bigger flops, so much so that it earned the name “Itanic” in the tech press. This is perhaps unfair, considering it did limp on until a quiet EOL in 2020. We didn’t know anyone missed it, but perhaps it was more the technical challenge than nostalgia for obsolete server hardware that led [Yufeng Gao] and [gdwnldsKSC] to spin up an instruction-set translator for the late, lamented, IA-64 architecture.

Note that it’s very much in alpha, version 0.1, so don’t expect all the things. Neither HP-UX and OpenVMS will boot, which is a pity since Itanium’s great success was arguably winning those OSes and thereby killing the bespoke architectures HP and DEC had at the time. Gentoo can get to a shell, as long as you use Kernel 6.6 or older, and Windows Server 2003 and XP-64 both apparently boot.

It’s not incredibly performant, with 486-level speeds when running on Ryzen 5000 series hardware, but then, it is a 64-bit hardware being emulated here, and pretty weird hardware at that. Itanium’s Very Long Word Instruction architecture was notoriously hard to program well. Specifically, it was hard to compile optimized programs for, so we expect optimizing an emulator is going to be similarly difficult. That’s why this is so impressive, even at this early stage.

The late, unlamented Itanium is probably one of the few systems not in the Virtual OS Museum, but perhaps eventually this project will change that.

via Raymii.org

Old SSDs Find New Life As Game Cartridges

July 20, 2026 by 24 Comments

Game companies might not like physical media much anymore, but gamers sure do. There’s nothing like pawing over your collection to find what to play, and inserting a cartridge with a satisfying click before sitting down to an old-school game like — wait, Cyberpunk 2077? Yeah, that wasn’t released on cartridge, but that didn’t stop [LewdMeat]. The cartridges are 3D printed and contain old 2.5″ SSDs picked up for cheap in bulk.

This larger base seems ideal for building into a PC console, but either would work.

Inside the base unit is a simple USB3-SATA adapter that hooks to [LewdMeat]’s gaming PC. There are two versions of the base: a simple vertical unit, and a horizontal one with some springs to give a satisfying grip. On each disk is a launch script that is vetted by a program on the PC that auto-launches only the cartridges you’ve told it to trust, which is a level of security we can appreciate.

We don’t know how much life is left in these cheap drives, but they should last a while if the only write is the odd save file. Hopefully [LewdMeat] is cycling through his games fairly often, as SSDs are only non-volatile storage if your time horizon is short enough.

Thanks to [iliis] for the tip! Remember, if you use our tips line to share what you find, you’re not doomscrolling, you’re doing a public service.

Could Reticulum Power A Post-Internet Network?

July 20, 2026 by 36 Comments

These days, it is easy to think you always have access to the Internet. But some wonder if — in spite of its ARPANET, nuclear-war-planning heritage — you can actually count on it to be there when things go pear-shaped. [The Tech Prepper], as you might imagine, is quite concerned with that last question, and is flogging Reticulum over high-frequency radio as a post-internet network in a video embedded below.

Reticulum is a cryptographic network stack, fully decentralized and amazing from a cyberpunk/hacker/survivalist perspective. Unfortunately for [The Tech Prepper], until the you-know-what hits the ventilation unit and the FCC and its counterparts in other countries are too busy to be concerned with such trifles, encrypted signals are banned on ham radio bands just about everywhere. That’s why his demo is using a dummy load on the Mercury HF modem instead of an antenna: the feds don’t care if the signal doesn’t leave the building. The video shows how to replicate the setup using his EmComm Tools suite on Ubuntu.

Perhaps more interesting is his vision of a Post-Internet network, be it in a disaster scenario, as he envisions, or simply because we get sick of what the internet has become. The idea of easily hooking an open-source radio modem to a PC running modem73, open-source SDR software, has a certain appeal. Reticulum isn’t your only option there: modem73 will let you run a BBS in the clear — that is, unencrypted and legal to transmit — and let’s face it, wasn’t life online more fun in BBS days?

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen the Reticulum network stack, but last time it was operating at considerably shorter ranges over LoRA. 

Continue reading “Could Reticulum Power A Post-Internet Network?” →

Recycling Laptops And IMacs Makes PC Building Fun And Affordable Again

July 19, 2026 by 55 Comments

Building a PC used to be a fun adventure — what’s the latest, what’s the greatest, what can I afford? Well, that last question seems to have taken over and sucked all the fun out for a lot of people. [Matt] from [DIY Perks] on YouTube has hit upon a solution that’s brought back the fun, at least for him: recycling! The video is embedded below, and he runs a forum whose thread has more details.

Long story short, though, he’s flagging recycled laptop components as both good value for money and a fun rabbit hole to go down researching parts. The best part, of course, is that you can get a mobo with 32GB of RAM soldered on, and embedded RTX graphics, and a decent processor for about what you’d pay for that RAM on sticks these days. The big hack is getting the dang thing started: he needed to make a single-pin ribbon cable after identifying which pin on the keyboard membrane hit the power button. If you can score a laptop that does not power on from the keyboard, you’ll have an easier time in that regard.

Continue reading “Recycling Laptops And IMacs Makes PC Building Fun And Affordable Again” →

QT6 Brings BASIC To The Web Browser, Or Your Computer

July 19, 2026 by 13 Comments

In the old days, you either swore by BASIC or you swore at it — but just about everybody got their start on the educational language. Nowadays, the kids are learning Python, but there’s a case to be made for BASIC — either for education, or just for nostalgic fun. BASIC-256 fills that niche, and now that it’s being ported to the oh-so-portable QT6 by [UglyMike], there’s even a webAssembly version that will let you run BASIC in your browser.

This version of BASIC is based on KidBASIC, which was aimed at the educational market. It’s got some handy-dandy graphics routines, 64-bit variables, and other quality-of-life features you can find in the docs. The new port is multi-platform, though the MacOS version has only been compiled for Apple Silicon — less of an issue than it used to be — and the web version naturally can’t get access to hardware for, e.g., serial ports, so it is somewhat more limited than a full install. There’s a second ARM build for Raspberry Pi along with the ubiquitous x86, but the project is open source, so if you really want to run this on an UltraSPARC system, you are welcome to compile it there. That said, this is a beta version, and the dev is actively looking for problems — so give it a go and let them know.

This isn’t the only open source BASIC out there — even Microsoft released their source code, at least for the 6502.

Thanks to [UglyMike] for the tip!