2026 Retrocomputing Challenge: I Would Do Anything For Serial Data

October 24, 2026 by Bryan Cockfield 1 Comment

These days we take high-speed networking for granted, but it can be difficult to get vintage computers talking to modern machines. To help solve this problem [jaime] came up with Meatloaf which can provide files to a Commodore regardless of their location or medium of storage.

Meatloaf is an ESP32 device at its core, which plugs in to any of several Commodore computers through their IEC serial port. Many similar systems exist to bridge the gap between the modern world and the now-retro one, but this one connects to a dedicated service which points towards files no matter where they’re stored. There is some local storage, but it can also retrieve files from any active URL, and Meatloaf retrieves the files and then sends them to the Commodore over that serial link.

Part of what makes this unique is that the user doesn’t need to configure Meatloaf in any particular way, everything is done from the Commodore as long as the URL is known to the user. The system can even parse nested files like archive file types and send them along to the computer just like it would if they were on a period-correct floppy drive. There’s a GitHub project page as well for anyone looking to get into the weeds of this serial data interface.

That Weird 7-Pin S-Video Port On Old Laptops

October 24, 2026 by Maya Posch 7 Comments

Even though laptops from around the early 2000s came with just about every conceivable port on them, they still would often feature a somewhat unusual combined video output port. While at its core this was just a 4-pin analog S-video output, the three additional pins on the mini-DIN connector provided some more features. Of course, as [VWestlife] found out during his archaeological research, not every manufacturer used the same pinout here.

The naming for this specific port differs, with the name ‘S-video+’ appearing regularly, yet many descriptions glossing over the additional pins and only mentioning that it can be used with a 4-pin S-video connector. As it turns out, most manufacturers used roughly the same pinout, matching the shown Dell one. This adds composite output, along with two S/PDIF digital audio pins that could be routed out with an adapter into their full-sized ports.

Of course, the Apple PowerBook G4 had to be that exception again, with it omitting the audio pins and putting the composite signal on pin 5. This left the last two pins completely unused, but serving to completely confuse anyone who thought that they could get more out of the port with an adapter for those uncouth PC systems.

As to the remark at the end about how the transition to ‘just USB ports’ has made everything better, we’d challenge the average person to look at a random USB-C port and tell based on its appearance which standards it actually supports.

Continue reading “That Weird 7-Pin S-Video Port On Old Laptops” →

Making For Others

October 24, 2026 by Elliot Williams No comments

One of the nicest things about the Hackaday community, and the open-source hardware community at large, is the incredible generosity of one hacker to another. But it’s not purely altruism – it’s also just a great feeling to be able to share your work with other folks who understand what it represents and how to use it.

I’m looking at my workbench right now. Because I’ve been testing out the Supercon badge prototype, there is a small pile of SAOs to the right. SAOs are the perfect size for giving out to fellow hackers, because they can be small, inexpensive, and yet still embody a ton of your creativity. [Tom]’s marvelous Ode to the SAO, even opens with this as one of the main benefits, alongside teaching you “full-stack” PCB production at small scale; they are cheap enough that you can give them away. Of course, you end up getting as many or more than you give, so it’s not just the pure joy of giving at work in the SAO scene.

On my left, I have a couple dev boards made by fellow hackers. One is a clone of the Raspberry Pi Pico that’s made by the high-school students of Hack Club, and the other is [CNLohr]’s ch32v003fun board and esp32s2-funprog programmer. I needed to test out a quick microcontroller application, and having a few dev boards on hand is always useful. Because I know the people who made these boards, I tend to reach for these over their commercial alternatives. Romantic? Maybe. But they were given to me by friends.

And of course the badge prototype is sitting in the middle of all this, and that’s how I really know about the joy of giving away your designs to fellow hackers. We at Hackaday are in the incredibly fortunate position of being able to dream up a new and fun badge every year, and give it out to hundreds of fellow hackers. Heck, this year, we’re making 1,000. I say “fortunate” because we don’t have to pay for them ourselves, but rather our Supercon sponsors help pick up the bill, and that means we can make stuff that’s far cooler than our budgets would otherwise allow.

So to everyone in the SAO scene, may you give away your designs to people who really appreciate them. For the folks who have built tools for other hackers to use, you should know that the recipients probably reach for your boards over their bland commercial alternatives. And for all of you coming to Supercon in two weeks, we hope you dig the badge. It has maybe become a bit of a cliché these days, but you should know that it’s made with love.

Watch VCF Southwest In Retrotastic SGI-Edited Footage

October 24, 2026 by Tyler August 1 Comment

There’s just something about backing way, way off the cutting edge to rediscover the simpler joys of yesteryear. We’ve got a contest about to wrap up along those lines, and there are festivals celebrating all things retro in the world of computers and electronics the world over. Vintage Computer Festival (VCF) Southwest happened back in the summer, but [Wave Design] just posted a gloriously retro retrospective, complete with the full 1990s video-editing workflow, completed on an SGI O2.

The footage was recorded on a 1990s vintage DV camera, and read using a somewhat-newer Sony tapedeck that we sadly have to admit also counts as retro in these late days. That gets piped into a vintage SGI O2 workstation that would have had us drooling back in the day, whose only concession to modernity is the inclusion of an NVMe SSD through a collection of adapters we can only call a hack. This may be burying the lede deep, but it turns out there is now an NVMe driver for IRIX 6.5. Using a modern SSD saves [Wave] from dealing with the literal stack of external drives video editing called for back in the day, so we can’t hardly blame him.

After the hardware walk-through, [Wave]’s video gets into the software, which is surprisingly modern. The footage he creates is decidedly not. It looks exactly like it was broadcast in 1996, perhaps following an episode of ReBoot — which conveniently enough, also used SGI workstations in its production, though with a decidedly rarer type of digital video tape.

Continue reading “Watch VCF Southwest In Retrotastic SGI-Edited Footage” →

A Walkie Talkie Interface For Claude

October 24, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 8 Comments

[Bookmari] had a problem — working as a delivery driver, they wanted to work on various projects with Claude Code while out and about. Unfortunately, it simply wasn’t practical to write prompts and read answers on the job. Thus, they whipped up Walkie Claudie, so they could use their voice instead.

The concept is simple enough, it’s an interface that lets you talk to Claude using speech recognition, and lets Claude talk back to you with a text-to-speech engine. It runs on a smartphone, with a direct network connection to the PC running Claude, though you can use a VPN if you’re distantly located. [Bookmari] has a push-to-talk setup so that pushing a button on their Bluetooth earbuds lets them talk directly to Claude. There’s also a special mode to keep the channel active during long pauses if you need a while to collect thoughts and vocalize them. Just for fun, the interface is styled like an old-school walkie LCD, and there’s fun little details like synthesized squelch and channel-switch noises and so on.

If you’re looking for a way to stay hooked up to your AI assistant at all times, this could prove useful to you. Alternatively, consider if maybe it’s worth taking a break sometimes, or check out other Claude Code projects we’ve seen of late.

Continue reading “A Walkie Talkie Interface For Claude” →

Using An Unmodded GBA As A Music Synth

October 23, 2026 by Bryan Cockfield No comments

The style and sound of older video games is unique enough that they’re still copied in relatively modern games like Undertale, Celeste, or Shovel Knight. There’s also a vibrant chiptune community making music on the older hardware directly. Often this involves hardware modding or otherwise finding chips from older gaming systems to replicate that unique retro gaming sound authentically. But disassembling older systems is not always necessary. Take a look at this Game Boy Advance synthesizer which uses the GBA hardware with no modifications at all.

The key to making this work is the GBA’s multiboot feature, which allowed these systems to send executable code over a link cable to other consoles which didn’t have cartridges. This meant that friends could play multiplayer games without each one needing their own cartridge, but it also means that nowadays people can send their own custom software directly to the console’s RAM without much extra effort. To run the synthesizer software, the GBA is connected to a computer, the software is started, and then when the GBA is powered on the snythesizer is automatically loaded into its RAM. The audio output is played over the headphone jack, and various controls are available on the computer and on the console.

In the video linked below, [Andy] is using the GBA with some other musical hardware and the sounds he’s getting from the unmodified console are impressive. It could certainly be a go-to for anyone interested in getting started in this style of music or who doesn’t want to do something like take apart an original Sega Genesis for the audio circuitry.

Continue reading “Using An Unmodded GBA As A Music Synth” →

RepRapMicron Uses Fibre Optics To Print Tiny Benchy In Resin

October 23, 2026 by Maya Posch 6 Comments

The 0.5 mm Benchy made with the MicroRepRap UV head.

The RepRapMicron (also µRepRap) is pretty much the microscopic take on what RepRap did for more macroscale manufacturing, with the most recent innovation being a UV print head, called the PIKA UV Head. What this does is use off-the-shelf optical fiber and UV LED modules to create 3D structures in-situ in a UV resin, allowing for pretty small structures to be printed, down to a resolution of about 9 µm.

More photos of prints can be found on the blog page with links to YouTube videos. It’s naturally somewhat tricky to get clean photographs of a 3D print that’s small enough to lose forever if you so much as sneeze or breathe too loudly.

For the UV head assembly a single mode fiber optical cable was used in the form of a regular patch cord that got trimmed a bit with a hacksaw. This was used in combination with a “3W” UV LED module, which may or may not be its true rating, but it was definitely able to cure the SLA resin. The used resin was regular eSun Standard Resin.

Afterwards you have to do the typical SLA post-processing, including cleaning off of liquid resin – both the part and fiber – and curing the part. So far results are pretty decent, with overhangs still being a weak spot that will be addressed in future revisions.