Pitting A Modern Chess Engine On A Pentium PC Against 1996’s Deep Blue

November 5, 2026 by No comments

Although premature optimization can be a really bad thing, late optimization is sometimes unavoidable because we simply didn’t have know about certain algorithms yet to massively improve the solving of a problem. When the 1990s was all about beating chess grandmasters at their game, IBM went so far as to build a the Deep Blue custom super computer for it. This is what [Nicholas Carlini] managed to effectively beat using a version of the Stockfish chess engine running on an era-appropriate Pentium PC.

A common way to measure one’s skill in chess involves the Elo rating system, named after chess master and physics professor [Arpad Elo]. As a relative system, it can be used to compare different players including chess engines against each other, with IBM’s Deep Blue scoring 2700, with the modern-day Stockfish engine hitting around 3700. This makes Stockfish statistically much more likely to win against a human chess grandmaster than Deep Blue, but also raises the question of how much of this advantage is due to Stockfish running on a much faster system.

To investigate the impact here, [Nicholas] used a Pentium Pro 200 MHz system with 64 MB of RAM (Fast Page or EDO SIMMs), which would have been a rather nice system for about 1995. Two chess engines were ported to this platform, being Crafty and Stockfish. Next both engines were tweaked with the help of an LLM coding bot to see what difference various compilation flags and algorithms would make.

Based on the results it would seem that the answer is ‘yes’: this 200 MHz Pentium Pro could have likely beaten even a chess grandmaster like [Kasparov] and Deep Blue in at least a few games, though without going back in time by about thirty years we’ll never know for certain.

Header: Wilfredor, CC0

I Think We Should See Other SBCs

November 5, 2026 by 11 Comments

Are you currently designing a project for a common single-board computer (SBC), and do you expect other people to build your project, too? We routinely feature projects that do exactly this. Well, turns out SBC availability is a problem now – and I’d like to teach you how to pick SBC alternatives, mostly to the Raspberry Pi boards.

We had SBC shortages before, but 2026 has beat them all, and it doesn’t look like it’ll stop within even a few months. RAM prices have incinerated the supply side of single-board computer availability, and I suspect that consumer SBC use in Russian drones had a noticeable impact, too.

Less-utilized SBCs always brought their own advantages to the table. If you didn’t like that the Pi Zero came with only 512MB of RAM, you could always buy an Orange Pi or a Radxa board with 2GB or 4GB for a meager increase in price. Now, there’s even more of a motivation to explore what’s on offer!

This year, SBC prices and availability have both jumped up tremendously, and even the Zero 2W stocks have evaporated. Me, I had to make a few of my projects way more flexible way quicker. Now, I have some experience to share!

Finding Your New SBC Friends

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Finger Joint Cutter Uses A Jigsaw Blade, But Not As We Know It

November 5, 2026 by 4 Comments

Around these parts, finger joints (or box joints) are usually the product of laser cutting. [bluesyann] shows us a method of using a stationary jigsaw, a custom blade, and 3D-printed jig to create a DIY box joint cutter whose results look impressive. What’s appealing is not just the end result, but the fact that the whole system is made from little more than an inexpensive tool, scrap wood, and common hardware.

A DIY wide blade cuts each notch in a single go.

In [bluesyann]’s system, the jigsaw is fixed in place to make a stationary cutter. The saw itself is nothing special; it’s the wide blade that makes the difference. It cuts a notch in a single go, and it’s made by epoxying together multiple blades to make a single extra-wide one. Jigsaw blades are not expensive, and they’re easy to snap into pieces. By using a total of three blades (snapping two of them into pieces) one can create the wide version shown here.

With a stationary jigsaw sporting an extra-wide blade that cuts the same notch every time, all that remains is a way to get the spacing right. The solution there is a 3D-printed jig that each freshly-cut notch fits onto as the next one is cut.

There are a few other details, but those are the important bits. One does have to do a bit of trial and error to get things dialed in, but once they are, it’s off to the races.

If one prefers a less hands-on method of cutting box joints, check out this robotic table saw which automates the process.

Porting A “Crappy” Flash Game To The IBM 5150 And Beyond

November 5, 2026 by 3 Comments

Flash is obsolete and the IBM 5150 is obsolete. Therefore, by the transitive property of algebra, you should be able to run flash games on IBM’s original PC, right? Okay, obviously not — there’s obsolete, and then there’s obsolete — but that didn’t stop [TheRasteri] from trying to bring his favorite scatological humor game to glorious CGA in a slightly not-safe-for-work video.

CGA is really not meant to display the fine details of a 2000s flash game, but [TheRasteri] has some experience with the Amstrad CPC and its demoscene, where they’ve learned to hack the heck out of the same MC6845 CRT controller chip that lives on a CGA card. With a few lines of carefully-crafted assembler, he’s able to swap character height on the fly to create the equivalent of a 160 x 86 pixel window in CGA text mode. That’s probably the most impressive part of this build, but the adventure of vintage-DOS C development on display here is worth watching. He’s using Open Watcom V2 and coding the entire thing as a huge state machine, and tests it on a wide range of DOS machines to catch all the bugs.

While Adobe Flash once enabled a golden age of browser games, we could be on the verge of another thanks to WebAssembly. If you want to hear about programming in C on DOS, we’ve seen a good case made for it.

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PiPedal Grants Guitar Effects, Amp Emulation, And More

November 4, 2026 by 3 Comments

Back in the day, if one wanted a particular guitar effect one would purchase an effects pedal or “stomp box”, and even a modest collection of them could be an eye-watering investment. A guitar amp chosen for a specific sound could be another huge purchase (and who stops at one?) But if you’ve got a Raspberry Pi kicking around and a bit of free time, PiPedal provides configurable effects, guitar amp emulation, and more.

The audio engine runs on a Raspberry Pi, with configuration and control accessed by mobile device or web browser.

Things have come a long way in terms of audio processing, and PiPedal is no straightforward application of simple digital filters. We indirectly learned about it from a fellow who used it to experiment with a range of equipment he could in no reality actually afford. He shared his experience in a blog post that left him thinking he might as well sell all his pedals and build the stomp box of his dreams around PiPedal.

PiPedal’s impressive audio engine runs on a Raspberry Pi (or comparable single-board Linux computer) with control and configuration accessed from a mobile device or web browser. It’s expressly designed to seamlessly work whether one is at home, on stage, or in a studio.

The GitHub repository has code and documentation, so check it out. And if you use it as the basis of a project of your own, don’t keep it to yourself! Drop us a note on the tips line because we absolutely want to know all about it.

The First Business Computer Hits 75!

November 4, 2026 by 1 Comment

Many of us will have followed the early history of electronic computing, from the urgent necessities of war, to universities, and then on into the wider world. Most of the firsts in that field are now well known, but there’s one that’s a little obscure. LEO was a commercial development of Cambridge University’s EDSAC that was produced at the behest of J. Lyons and Comapny, one of the UK’s largest mid-20th-century food producers. As such it was the first purpose-built electronic business computer, and since its 75th anniversary is upon us, the Centre for Computing History is holding an event to mark the occasion.

There’s a whole cultural essay to be written about the role of Lyons in twentieth-century Britain, but for Hackaday purposes it should suffice to say that there was little in the way of food production that they didn’t touch. The shops were full of Lyons cakes, biscuits, and tea, and a feature of many towns would have been a Lyons Tea Shop, a budget restaurant. The logistics of such a complex business made a computer of great interest to the company, and after some of its executives learned about ENIAC on a trip to the USA they sought out a machine closer to home. They found the EDSAC, a research computer, and commercialised it as Lyons Electronic Office, or LEO. This spawned a series of machines that lasted into the 1970s, the last one being used by the British Post Office.

It might be difficult to find a LEO in a museum today, but in the National Museum of COmputing at Bletchley you can find the next best thing in their recreation of EDSAC. It’s a decade since we visited, perhaps it’s time for a return.

Header image: Spudgun67, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Beautiful Laser Harp Hides Some Neat Tricks

November 4, 2026 by No comments

Laser harps aren’t quite a right of passage, in that not everyone builds them, but it’s likely everyone at least contemplates building one at one time or another. We’re lucky that [Derrick] a.k.a. [DJ Baja Blast] didn’t stop at contemplating, and even luckier that he put together a full write-up for his tricked out laser harp — because this is a fascinating build, with features we’ve never seen in one place before.

First of all, the harp! Lasers, photodiodes, done, right? Not here! [DJ Baja Blast] kept it analog with photoresistors so that he could measure the rise and fall of the voltage as the laser light is occluded by the player’s hands — thus you can moderate the volume via faster, louder and quieter, slower plucks. More unique is the inclusion of an accelerometer. What can you do with an accelerometer in a harp? Well, here it’s being used as a tilt sensor, with the tilt acting as a control to ‘bend’ the note as it sounds, tuning it flat or sharp or altering it any other way you choose to define in software. There’s also an ultrasonic distance sensor so you can do the same thing — or any other thing, there’s no shortage of effects to chose from — theremin-style, and an encoder wheel sits on the side, so that’s five extra inputs beyond selecting a note by blocking a laser diode. Unless you count the optional looper pedal input, or the aux in.

It probably has a teensy learning curve, but looks like a baja blast to play.

All these inputs are driving a Teensy 4.1 microcontroller, which has the grunt for just about any synthesis or sampling, though right now [DJ Baja Blast] is sticking with the Karplus-Strong string synthesis algorithm. The Teensy can drive an onboard speaker but also offers MIDI out. Eventually he does intend to add more. Last but not least, we cannot forget that he’s plumbed this instrument to hook to a fog machine. Which makes for a visually engaging performance, and probably helps a lot when you’re learning where the laser ‘strings’ are.

The whole thing is handsomely put together with cherry and walnut. Does it sound as good as it looks? Listen to it in action in the demo video below, and judge for yourself! If you want to build your own you can grab the files on GitHub.

This is hardly the first laser harp we’ve seen, or even the first to use a Teensy, but it’s certainly got the most options to spice up a performance. It’s got to be a baja blast to play.

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