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C64 on desk with NFC TeensyROM and game token

TeensyROM NFC Game Loading On The C64

May 23, 2025 by 6 Comments

When retro computing nostalgia meets modern wireless wizardry, you get a near-magical tap-to-load experience. It’ll turn your Commodore 64 into a console-like system, complete with physical game cards. Inspired by TapTo for MiSTer, this latest hack brings NFC magic to real hardware using the TeensyROM. It’s been out there for a while, but it might not have caught your attention as of yet. Developed by [Sensorium] and showcased by YouTuber [StatMat], this project is a tactile, techie love letter to the past.

At the heart of it is the TeensyROM cartridge, which – thanks to some clever firmware modding – now supports reading NFC tags. These are writable NTag215 cards storing the path to game files on the Teensy’s SD card. Tap a tag to the NFC reader, and the TeensyROM boots your game. No need to fumble with LOAD “*”,8,1. That’s not only cool, it’s convenient – especially for retro demo setups.

What truly sets this apart is the reintroduction of physical tokens. Each game lives on its own custom-designed card, styled after PC Engine HuCards or printed with holographic vinyl. It’s a tangible, collectible gimmick that echoes the golden days of floppies and cartridges – but with 2020s tech underneath. Watch it here.

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Simulating Cable TV

May 11, 2025 by 16 Comments

[Wrongdog Recons] suffers from a severe case of nostalgia. His earlier project simulated broadcast TV, and he was a little surprised at how popular the project was on GitHub. As people requested features, he realized that he could create a simulated cable box and emulate a 1990s-era cable TV system. Of course, you also needed a physical box, which turned into another project. You can see more about the project in the video below.

Inside is, unsurprisingly, a Raspberry Pi. Then you have to pretend to be a cable TV scheduler and organize your different video files for channels. You can interleave commercials and station breaks.

One addition was a scheduler so you could set up things like football games only play during football season. You can also control timing so you don’t get beer commercials during Saturday morning cartoons.

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Edison Phonograph Plays The Cylinders

May 8, 2025 by 9 Comments

You might be old enough to remember record platters, but you probably aren’t old enough to remember when records were cylinders. The Edison Blue Amberol records came out in 1912 and were far superior to the earlier wax cylinders. If you had one today, how could you play it? Easy. Just build [Palingenesis’] record player. You can even hear it do its thing in the video below.

The cylinders are made of plaster with a celluloid wrapper tinted with the namesake blue color. They were more durable than the old wax records and could hold well over four minutes of sound.

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Onkyo Receiver Saved With An ESP32

April 24, 2025 by 23 Comments

[Bill Dudley] had a problem. He had an Onkyo AV receiver that did a great job… until it didn’t. A DSP inside failed. When that happened, the main microprocessor running the show decided it wouldn’t play ball without the DSP operational. [Bill] knew the bulk of the audio hardware was still good, it was just the brains that were faulty. Thus started a 4-month operation to resurrect the Onkyo receiver with new intelligence instead.

[Bill’s] concept was simple. Yank the dead DSP, and the useless microprocessor as well. In their place, an ESP32 would be tasked with running things. [Bill] no longer cared if the receiver had DSP abilities or even the ability to pass video—he just wanted to use it as the quality audio receiver that it was.

His project report steps through all the hard work he went through to get things operational again. He had to teach the ESP32 to talk to the front panel display, the keys, and the radio tuner. More challenging was the core audio processor—the obscure Renaisys R2A15218FP. However, by persevering, [Bill] was able to get everything up and running, and even added some new functionality—including Internet radio and Bluetooth streaming.

It’s a heck of a build, and [Bill] ended up with an even more functional audio receiver at the end of it all. Bravo, we say. We love to see older audio gear brought back to life, particularly in creative ways. Meanwhile, if you’ve found your own way to save a piece of vintage audio hardware, don’t hesitate to let us know!

Everyone’s Talking GPMI, Should You?

April 10, 2025 by 74 Comments

The tech press has been full of announcements over the last day or two regarding GPMI. It’s a new standard with the backing of a range of Chinese hardware companies, for a high-speed digital video interface to rival HDMI. The Chinese semiconductor company HiSilicon have a whitepaper on the subject (Chinese language, Google Translate link), promising a tremendously higher data rate than HDMI, power delivery well exceeding that of USB-C, and interestingly, bi-directional data transfer. Is HDMI dead? Probably not, but the next few years will bring us some interesting hardware as they respond to this upstart.

Reading through pages of marketing from all over the web on this topic, it appears to be an early part of the push for 8k video content. There’s a small part of us that wonders just how far we can push display resolution beyond that of our eyes without it becoming just a marketing gimmick, but it is true to say that there is demand for higher-bandwidth interfaces. Reports mention two plug styles: a GPMI-specific one and a USB-C one. We expect the latter to naturally dominate. In terms of adoption, though, and whether users might find themselves left behind with the wrong interface, we would expect that far from needing to buy new equipment, we’ll find that support comes gradually with fallback to existing standards such as DisplayPort over USB-C, such that we hardly notice the transition.

Nearly a decade ago we marked the passing of VGA. We don’t expect to be doing the same for HDMI any time soon in the light of GPMI.

Designing A Tone Control Properly

April 8, 2025 by 12 Comments

Many years ago, audio equipment came with a tone control, a simple RC filter that would cut or boost the bass to taste. As time passed, this was split into two controls for bass and treble, and then finally into three for bass, mid, and treble. When audiophile fashion shifted towards graphic equalisers, these tone controls were rebranded as “3-band graphic equalisers”, a misleading term if ever we heard one. [Gabriel Dantas] designed one of these circuits, and unlike the simple passive networks found on cheap music centres of old, he’s doing a proper job with active filters.

The write-up is worth a read even if you are not in the market for a fancy tone control, for the basic primer it gives on designing an audio filter. The design contains, as you might expect, a low-pass, a bandpass, and a high-pass filter. These are built around TL072 FET-input op-amps, and an LM386 output stage is added to drive headphones.

The final project is built on a home-made PCB, complete with mains power supply. Audiophiles might demand more exotic parts, but we’re guessing that even with these proletarian components it will still sound pretty good. Probably better than the headphone amplifier featured in a recent project from a Hackaday writer, at least. There’s a build video, below the break.

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Newspaper clipping with words 'speaking personally' and a photo

A Fast Rewind To The Era Of Tapesponding

March 12, 2025 by 5 Comments

Imagine a time before Discord servers and cheap long-distance calls. Back in the 1950s, a curious and crafty group of enthusiasts invented their own global social network: on reels of magnetic tape. They called it tapesponding (short for tape corresponding), and it was a booming hobby for thousands of radio hams, tinkerers, and audio geeks. Here’s the original video on this analog marvel.

These folks weren’t just swapping mixtapes. They crafted personal audio letters, beamed across the globe on 3-inch reels. DIY clubs emerged everywhere: World Tape Pals (Texas-based, naturally) clocked 5,000 members from “every Free Nation” – which frames it in a world in terms of East vs. West. Some groups even pooled funds to buy shared tape decks in poorer regions – pure hacker spirit. The tech behind it: Speeds of 3¾ IPS, half-track mono, round-robin reels, and rigorous trust networks to avoid ghosters. Honestly, it makes IRC net ops look soft. Tapesponding wasn’t just for chatty types. It fostered deep friendships, even marriages. It was social engineering before that term was coined. The video is below the break.

What are your thoughts on this nostalgic way of long-distance communication? The warm whirring of a spinning tape reel? The waiting time before your echo is returned? Or are have you skipped all the analog mechanics and shouted out into the LoRaWAN void long ago?

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