Can An 8-Bit Light Gun Work On A Modern TV?

October 17, 2023 by 55 Comments

It’s an accepted part of retro gaming lore, that 8-bit consoles perform best when used with an original CRT TV. One of the reason for this is usually cited as being because the frame buffer and scaler circuit necessary for driving an LCD panel induces a delay not present on the original, and in particular this makes playing games which relied on a light gun impossible to play. It’s a subject [Nicole Branagan] takes a look at, and asks whether there are any ways to use a classic light gun with a modern TV.

Along the way we’re treated to an in-depth look at the tech behind light gun games, how the gun contained a photodiode which on the NES was triggered by the brief showing of a frame with a white square where the target would sit, and on the Sega consoles by a white screen with an on-board timer counting the screen position at which the gun was aimed.

The conclusion is that the delay means you won’t be playing Duck Hunt or Hogan’s Alley on your 4K TV, but interestingly, all is not lost. There are modified versions of the games that take account of the delay, or an interesting lightgun emulator using a WiiMote. We’d be happy at playing either way, just as long as we can take pot-shots at the annoying Duck Hunt dog.

Light gun image: Evan-Amos, Public domain.

The Pros And Cons Of Hydrofoils

October 17, 2023 by 25 Comments

Hydrofoils have fascinated naval architects and marine designers for years. Fitted with underwater wings, these designs traverse the waters at great speed with a minimum of drag. As with many innovative technologies, though, the use of hydrofoils is riddled with challenges that often offset the vast benefits they offer.

While hydrofoils promise a better marine transportation experience, their adoption hasn’t been smooth sailing. In this article, we’ll dive deep into the potential and pitfalls of hydrofoil designs, and look at the unique niches this technology serves today.

Continue reading “The Pros And Cons Of Hydrofoils” →

A Look At A 1960s Tube-Based Magnavox Concert Grand Console Stereo

October 16, 2023 by 31 Comments

Back in presumably the early 1960s, [David]’s grandfather bought a console stereo featuring a record player, AM/FM radio and a rather astounding stereo speaker system that would be more than enough to cover a small concert hall. Having inherited this piece of auditory art after his grandfather’s passing, [David] has given the console stereo a prominent place in his living room, which is where we start the tour in a new video on the [Usagi Electric] YouTube channel.

Plentiful I/O on this 1960s vintage piece of Magnavox audio equipment.

Being a 1950s-vintage design that got produced into the 1960s in a variety of models, the Magnavox Concert Grand is an all-tube affair, with the only presence of semiconductors being the three transistors found in the ‘Phantom’ remote control. [David] unfortunately does not posses this remote control, although the receiver module is present in the unit. It appears to be similar to the 1960 1ST800F in possession by [electra225] over at the Classic HiFi Care forum, which can provide 50 Watt per channel, yet as noted in the forum post, the 44 tubes alone draw about 250 Watt, with [electra225] recording 377 Watt total with everything cranked up. Clearly a high power bill was a price one had to pay for having high-end audio back in that era.

After [David] takes his unit apart – made very easy due to the modular construction – he goes through the basic circuitry of the power supply, the amplifiers and even has a peek at the circuitry of the remote control which appears to use basic frequency modulation to transfer the intended action to the receiver. All of this is made quite easy as full schematics are available for the entire system, as was standard back in those days. Interesting is also the I/O module, which features an MPX section, for demodulating stereo FM which wasn’t standardized yet at the time. Finally, tape drive connectors are available, which would have been likely a reel-to-reel unit for maximum HiFi enjoyment.

With the only broken thing in [David]’s unit being the snapped wire on the tuner of the radio module (ironically caused by the disassembly), all that was changed before reassembly was a good clean, after which the console stereo was put back and tested. Reflecting an era when HiFi equipment was supposed to blend in with other furniture, it will likely continue to do service for [David] as the world’s fanciest TV soundbar for the foreseeable future.

Continue reading “A Look At A 1960s Tube-Based Magnavox Concert Grand Console Stereo” →

Satellite Hunting Hack Chat

October 16, 2023 by 3 Comments

Rescheduled — note new date!

Join us on Wednesday, October 18 at noon Pacific for the Satellite Hunting Hack Chat with Scott Tilley!

From the very first beeps of Sputnik, space has primarily been the domain of nations. It makes sense — for the most part, it takes the resources of a nation to get anything of appreciable size up out of the gravity well we all live in, but more importantly, space is the highest of high ground, and the high ground has always been a place of advantage to occupy. And so a lot of the hardware we’ve sent upstairs in the last 70 years has been in the national interest of this or that country.

join-hack-chatA lot of these satellites are — or were, at least — top secret stuff, with classified payloads, poorly characterized orbits, and unknown communications protocols. This can make tracking them from the ground a challenge, but one that’s worth undertaking. Scott Tilley has been hunting for satellites for years, writing about his exploits on the Riddles in the Sky blog and sometimes being featured on Hackaday. After recently putting his skills to work listening in on a solar observation satellite as its orbit takes it close to Earth again, we asked him to stop by the Hack Chat to share what he’s learned about hunting for satellites, both long-lost and intentionally hidden. Join us as we take a virtual trip into orbit to find out just what’s going on up there.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, October 18 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a handy time zone converter.

Why The RP1 Is The Most Important Product Raspberry Pi Have Ever Made

October 16, 2023 by 92 Comments

We’ve had about a week to digest the pending arrival of the Raspberry Pi 5, and it’s safe to say that the new board from Cambridge has produced quite some excitement with its enhanced specifications and a few new capabilities not seen in its predecessors. When it goes on general sale we expect that it will power a slew of impressive projects in these pages, and we look forward with keen anticipation to its companion Compute Module 5, and we sincerely hope eventually a Raspberry Pi 500 all-in-one. It’s the latest in a line of incrementally-upgraded single board computers from the company, but we think it conceals something of much greater importance than the improvements that marked previous generations. Where do we think the secret sauce lies in the Pi 5? In the RP1 all-in-one PCIe peripheral chip of course, the chip which provides most of the interfacing on the new board. Continue reading “Why The RP1 Is The Most Important Product Raspberry Pi Have Ever Made” →

[Ken] Looks At The 386

October 16, 2023 by 27 Comments

The 80386 was — arguably — Intel’s first modern CPU. The 8086 was commercially successful, but the paged memory model was stifling. The 80286 also had a protected mode, which differed from the 386’s. [Ken Shirriff] takes the 386 apart for us in a recent blog post.

The 286’s protected mode was less successful than the 386 because of several key limitations as it was a 16-bit processor with a 24-bit address bus. It still required segment changes to access larger amounts of memory, and it had no good way to call back into real mode for compatibility reasons. The 386 fixed all that. You could adopt a segment strategy if you wanted to. But you could also load the segment registers once to point to a 4 GB linear address space and then essentially forget them. You also had a virtual 86 mode that could simulate real mode with some work.

The CPU used a 1-micron process, compared to the 1.5-micron process used earlier. The chip had 285,000 transistors (although the 80386SL had many more). That was ten times the number of devices on the 8086. The cheaper 386SX did use the 1.5 micron process for a while, but with a 16-bit external bus, this was feasible. While 285,000 sounds like a lot, a Core i9 has around 4.2 billion transistors. Times have changed.

A smaller design also allowed chips like the 386SL for laptops. The CPU took up only about a fourth of the die. The rest held bus controllers and cache interfaces to cut costs on laptops. That’s why it had so many more transistors.

[Ken] does his usual in-depth analysis of both the die and the history behind this historic device. We spent a lot of time writing protected mode 386 code, and it was nice to see the details of a very old friend. These days, you can get a pretty capable CPU system on a solderless breadboard, but designing a working 386 system took a few extra parts. The 80286 was a stepping stone between the 8086 and 80386, but even it had some secrets to give up.

Re-imagining The Water Supply

October 15, 2023 by 48 Comments

Getting freshwater supplied across cities and towns in a reliable and safe way is no simple task. Not only is a natural freshwater reservoir or other supply needed, but making sure the water is safe to drink and then shipping it out over a dense network of pumps and pipes can cost a surprising amount of time and money. It also hinges on a reliable power grid, which is something Texas resident [Suburban Biology] doesn’t have. But since fresh water literally falls out of the sky for free, he decided to take this matter into his own hands.

The main strategy with a system like this is to keep the rainwater as clean as possible before storage so that expensive treatment systems are less necessary. That means no asphalt shingles, a way to divert the first bit of rain that washes dust and other contaminants off the roof away, and a safe tank. This install uses a 30,000 gallon tank placed above ground for storage, but that’s not the only thing that goes into a big rainwater catchment system like this. A system of PVC pipes are needed both for sending rainwater from the roofs of the buildings into the tank and for pumping it into the home for use. With all of that in place it’s both a hedge against climate change, unstable electric grids, and even separates the user from the local aquifer which may or may not have its own major issues depending on where you live.

While Texas legally protects the rights of citizens to collect and store rainwater, the same isn’t true for all areas. For example, Colorado only just passed a law allowing the collection and storage of a meager 110 gallons of rainwater and forbade it entirely beforehand. There are some other considerations for a project like this too, largely that above-ground systems generally won’t work in cold climates. On the other hand, large systems like these are really only needed where rainfall is infrequent; in more tropical areas like south Florida a much smaller storage system can be used

Continue reading “Re-imagining The Water Supply” →