Graphics Upgrade For Nintendo Entertainment System

June 22, 2026 by Bryan Cockfield 24 Comments

Modern video game consoles rarely have expansion ports, but in the 80s and 90s it was practically guaranteed. With the speed that hardware was advancing it made sense to build in some way to upgrade a system’s capabilities throughout its lifespan. But while this gave us things like the Sega CD and N64 Expansion Pak, many ports ultimately went unused. Given this recent project from [decrazyo], one wonders if unused port on the bottom of the Nintendo Entertainment System could have been used to expand its graphical capabilities.

The basis of this upgrade is the fact that the Picture Processing Unit (PPU) on the NES has four pins that are grounded. These four pins tell the NES to display the background color if the pixel is transparent. Since they’re normally grounded, this means the NES can only display a limited background image, but there’s no reason these pins must be grounded. By using a second PPU configured to output graphics information and wiring it to these four pins on the first PPU, the NES can be given all kinds of new abilities, such as adding parallax effects to backgrounds, rendering more sprites, and showing more colors in the backgrounds.

Of course, the hardware requirements for this will require a donor NES to get the second PPU as well as the necessary memory chip for it, and we don’t recommend tearing apart perfectly good retro consoles for experimentation if it can be avoided. Presumably, you could use this open-source NES hardware alternative instead. But for those with the parts and the gumption, creating a demo or adding graphics features to homebrew games using this second graphics chip is within reach.

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MSYS2 And The No-Fuss Way To Get More GNU Into Your Windows

June 22, 2026 by Maya Posch 32 Comments

As great and streamlined as the Windows desktop experience is, one area where it’s at best disappointing and at worst rage-inducing is when it comes to its command line interface (CLI) offerings. In Windows 9x/ME this could be excused by the fact that it was essentially just a dressed-up MS-DOS CLI experience, but on Windows NT-based OSes no such excuse exists.

Yet even after Microsoft finally acknowledged the shortcomings of the cmd.exe shell by 2006, they then proceeded to go their own way with PowerShell, industry standards be damned. Especially for those of us who have no beef with the UNIX/BSD/Linux CLI experience and the joys of shell scripting, this insistence was disappointing. Simultaneously, everyone from OS X/MacOS to Haiku were happily offering a familiar CLI environment alongside POSIX compatibility.

Although Windows NT OSes were POSIX compliant, they never offered a suitable shell along with it, nor any of the other things you’d expect in a modern-day BSD, Haiku or Linux CLI environment. In a recent article by my esteemed colleague Al Williams, these sore points were somewhat addressed as far as basic CLI tools go, but the issue goes obviously much deeper than just the basic userland tools. Which is where MSYS2 comes into the picture.

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SDS-Remote Brings Power-User Features To Siglent Scope

June 22, 2026 by Matt Varian 3 Comments

Many oscilloscopes have provisions to be connected to a computer and used remotely, but most of those interfaces are fairly rudimentary. To address this, [Winfried] has developed the SDS-Remote, a remote interface for the Siglent SDS 1000X-E series oscilloscopes.

The 1000X-E series oscilloscopes have both USB and network interfaces, and the SDS-Remote can use either (though the USB interface is still somewhat experimental). SDS-Remote allows for remote controlling the oscilloscope, capturing waveforms super handy as it lets you export a CSV file of the waveforms for further analysis. You can also capture screenshots of the scope through the web interface, making it much easier to compare waveforms as you’re working on a project. The built-in data logging lets you run long experiments and save out their results. The macro recorder lets you automate complex tests using SCPI commands and brings basic scripting to the interface without needing to run separate code. There’s also a mechanism to integrate an AI LLM to help translate common language into the correct scope configuration.

Thanks [Winfried] for sharing this awesome web interface for the oscilloscope no doubt it’ll be a welcome upgrade for those already remote controlling their Siglent scope. Head over to his GitHub page and check it out for yourself! Have you written any improved user interfaces for your equipment? Be sure to let us know what you’ve done so we can share with others who may find use in an interface that offers more than came with the product.

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Bortle-1 Skies in the heart of darkest Texas.

“Telescope Rancher” Is The Coolest Job You Didn’t Know Existed

June 22, 2026 by Tyler August 36 Comments

McCulloch County, Texas, is smack dab in the middle of a very large state. We wouldn’t exactly call it the middle of nowhere, but given there’s so little light pollution it scores a 1 on the Bortle Scale, it’s not exactly the Big Apple, either. [Bray Falls] lives there, and has a job description we have become immediately jealous of: [Bray] is a telescope rancher.

Like the song goes, the stars really are big and bright at night deep in the heart of Texas. Not only is his ranch free of the light pollution that plagues more urban locations, central Texas is pretty dry, with only a few days of rain in any given month. That’s not great for agriculture, but it’s great for astronomy since it means the skies are most often cloud-free. Combine that with access to high-speed internet, and you have the makings of a telescope ranch.

Telescopes being let out of the barns for the night.
Image: Starfront Observatory

It’s brilliant in its simplicity: along with his own ‘scopes, [Bray]’s Starscope Observatory hosts hundreds of other people’s CCD equipped goto telescopes, all set up to be remote controlled over the information superhighway. On clear nights– which again, is most of them–the roofs roll off the telescope barns and observations can begin. Pad rental comes with tech support, too, so you don’t have to fly out to heart of darkest Texas if your mount gets jammed or you lose signal for any reason. That said, you should be sure to read the fine print before signing up, because said tech support probably doesn’t apply if you 3D printed your own ‘scope, or built your own mount.

That said, having gone to the effort of doing all that, would you really send your baby away to a farm upstate? Best reserve that for the old Celestron collecting dust in the corner. If you think we should be leaving these observations to the pros, be aware [Bray] has apparently discovered a very oddly-placed supernova remnant, 40 degrees off the galactic plane in Virgo. So this isn’t just a rewarding hobby; it’s still science, too.

Won’t Somebody Please Think Of Banning The British Children!

June 21, 2026 by Jenny List 107 Comments

The British government is in a headlong rush to ban under-16s from social media, and restrict the access of under-18s. And in typical form, the EFF is here with a warning about the dangers and futility of such legislation.

A satirical mock-up of what UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer's driving licence might look like, courtesy of https://use-their-id.com/ — Kids aren’t stupid. They’ll use a fake ID like this one from the satirical https://use-their-id.com/ . Or they’ll become VPN experts.

The proposed new law will involve an age restriction policed through online ID verification, something which will not be limited to the young, as every British adult will also have to show ID to access large parts of the Internet.

There is little in the way of information about how this unprecedented invasion of privacy will be implemented, however we expect that it will be left to the lax security measures of a range of lowest-bidder third party identity verification services. The resulting database will become a very rich target indeed.

The EFF pull no punches in warning of the harms these measures will bring upon those it seeks to protect. Far from “Giving under-16s their childhood back” as it is being promoted, they warn that it will deprive them of access to community, friends, and distant family, as well as educational content that could be vital for them.

If it works at all. Certainly he more technically minded youth will put their efforts into the world of computer networking. A VPN ban is reportedly in the works, so a whole generation of future software developers and IT specialists will get their start running software to get round this on their Raspberry Pi.

We’ve reported on the EFF’s concerns over UK ID laws before.

Header image: Diliff, CC BY-SA 2.5.

An AI-generated diagram of the coffee-making process is shown. A filter holds a basket of coffee grounds, which are contained in a paper filter. An ultrasonic transducer vibrates the basket.

Brewing Espresso With Ultrasonic Assistance

June 21, 2026 by Aaron Beckendorf 43 Comments

There are as almost as many kinds of coffee as there are of coffee drinkers, with each method for preparing the beverage appealing to a different kind of palate: moka pots, filter coffee, pour-over coffee, French presses, cold brews, espresso, and more produce their own unique flavours by extracting different compounds from the grounds to different degrees. Now, a new method has joined the throng: ultrasonic-assisted extraction, which can produce even an espresso at room temperature.

Espresso is normally made by forcing hot water through tightly-packed, finely-ground coffee beans, quickly producing a concentrated extraction. Its one of the hardest kinds of coffee to consistently make well, since the outcome is influenced by everything from grind size and packing density to temperature, pressure, and more. Ultrasonic agitation helps here by creating cavitation bubbles, which form shock waves as they collapse, breaking open the bean structure and producing small, strong jets of water. The experimental apparatus was built into a modified espresso machine. An ultrasonic transducer delivers vibrations to the basket containing the room-temperature slurry of coffee grounds for two or three minutes.

To quantify the results, the researchers analysed total dissolved solids, extraction yield, pH, colour, volatile components, and caffeine and chlorogenic acid contents. By varying ultrasonic power and grind size, the extraction yield and dissolved solids could be adjusted to closely match traditional espresso or cold-brew coffee. The other metrics had no significant differences, and a survey of 100 coffee drinkers found no preference between this and traditional espresso. When the drinkers tried the cold-brew coffees, they preferred the version made with ultrasonic assistance. The experiment succeeded in its goal of reducing energy consumption: the ultrasonic-assisted coffee took about a quarter as much energy to make.

If you still prefer a more traditional approach, we’ve covered some beautiful espresso machines before, including one made out of motorcycle engine parts.

Hackaday Links: June 21, 2026

June 21, 2026 by Tom Nardi 5 Comments

Today marks the summer solstice, the longest day of the year and the start of astronomical summer in the Northern Hemisphere. This doesn’t really have much to do with hacking hardware or building gadgets other than the fact that from this point on you’ll have progressively less daylight hours to do it in each day. Of course, if you do your best work in the middle of the night this won’t impact things much.

If you’re as likely to find a controller in your hand as a soldering iron in the evenings, you might be interested in a recent filing against Sony. Lawyers representing a group of four gamers allege that the entertainment giant is violating a California law that says digital storefronts need to make it clear that buyers don’t technically own the games in question but are merely licensing them — a license which, as we’ve seen in the past, can be revoked or modified at any time with no restitution made to the purchaser.

Now while we agree conceptually that selling gamers a license rather than an actual copy of the game is clearly a one-sided deal, we’re still not sure this case has a lot of merit. As far as we can tell, Sony does make it clear in the fine print that you’re not really going to own anything once they take your money. Or, at the very least, they make it equally as clear as any other company that’s selling digital downloads these days. Should the court actually find that said fine print is a little too fine, it could conceivably have ramifications throughout the entertainment industry. This is certainly a case to keep an eye on.

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