Inside Raiders Of The Lost Ark (Atari Style)

February 13, 2026 by Al Williams 2 Comments

It’s a bit ironic that an Atari 2600 game based on Raiders of the Lost Ark — a movie about archaeology — is now the subject of its own archaeological expedition as [Dennis Debro] and [Halkun] spent time reverse-engineering the game. Luckily, they shared their findings, so you can enjoy it the same way you can visit a king’s tomb without having to discover it and dig for it. If you don’t remember the game, you might enjoy the demo from [Speedy Walkthroughs] in the video below.

If you are only used to modern software, you might think this is little more than someone dumping the program code and commenting it. However, on these old, limited systems, you have to really understand the actual architecture because there are so many things you have to manage that are specific to the hardware.

For example, the game has two 4K ROM banks that use a strange switching mechanism. The entire game is built around the NTSC television signal. Everything is oriented toward generating the 60 Hz frame rate. Game logic runs during the vertical blanking and over-scan sections to prevent strange visible artifacts due to software running.

This is a fascinating look inside game coding as it existed around 1982. Of course, you can also run everything using emulation. Usually, our reverse engineering is more hardware-related. But we do love these old games, too.

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PROFS: The Office Suite Of The 1980s

February 11, 2026 by Al Williams 12 Comments

Today, we take office software suites for granted. But in the 1970s, you were lucky to have a typewriter and access to a photocopier. But in the early 1980s, IBM rolled out PROFS — the Professional Office System — to try to revolutionize the office. It was an offshoot of an earlier internal system. The system would hardly qualify as an office suite today, but for the time it was very advanced.

The key component was an editor you could use to input notes and e-mail messages. PROFS also kept your calendar and could provide databases like phonebooks. There were several key features of PROFS that would make it hard to recognize as productivity software today. For one thing, IBM terminals were screen-oriented. The central computer would load a form into your terminal, which you could fill out. Then you’d press send to transmit it back to the mainframe. That makes text editing, for example, a very different proposition since you work on a screen of data at any one time. In addition, while you could coordinate calendars and send e-mail, you could only do that with certain people.

In general, PROFS connected everyone using your mainframe or, perhaps, a group of mainframes. In some cases, there might be gateways to other systems, but it wasn’t universal. However, it did have most of the major functions you’d expect from an e-mail system that was text-only, as you can see in the screenshot from a 1986 manual. PF keys, by the way, are what we would now call function keys.

The calendar was good, too. You could grant different users different access to your calendar. It was possible to just let people see when you were busy or mark events as confidential or personal.

You could actually operate PROFS using a command-line interface, and the PF keys were simply shorthand. That was a good thing, too. If you wanted to erase a file named Hackaday, for example, you had to type: ERASE Hackaday AUT$PROF.

Styles

PROFS messages were short and were essentially ephemeral chat messages. Of course, because of the block-mode terminals, you could only get messages after you sent something to the mainframe, or you were idle in a menu. A note was different. Notes were what we could call e-mail. They went into your inbox, and you could file them in “logs”, which were similar to folders.

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IBM Made A Sound Card? Who Knew!

February 9, 2026 by Jenny List 17 Comments

Even in a field you think you know intimately, the Internet still has the power to surprise. Sound cards of the 1990s might not be everyone’s specialist subject, but since the CD-ROM business provided formative employment where this is being written, it’s safe to say that a lot of tech from that era is familiar. It’s a surprise then when along comes [DOS Storm] with a new one. The IBM Mwave was the computer giant’s offering back in the days when they were still pushing forward in the PC space, and sadly for them it turned out to be a commercial disaster.

The king of the sound cards in the ’90s was the SoundBlaster 16, which other manufacturers cloned directly. Not IBM of course, who brought their own Mwave DSP chip to the card, using it as both the sound card and the engine behind an on-board dial-up modem. This appears to have been its undoing, because aside from its notoriously flaky drivers, using both sound and modem at the same time just wasn’t a pleasant experience. To compound the problem, Big Blue resorted to trying to bury the problem with NDAs rather than releasing better drivers, so unsurprisingly it faded from view. Perhaps the reason it was unfamiliar here had something to do with it not being sold in Europe, but given that the chipset found its way into ’90s ThinkPads, we’d have expected to have seen something of it.

In the video below the break he introduces the card, and with quite some trouble gets it working. There are several demos of period games which sound a little scratchy, but we can’t judge from this whether they’d have sounded better on the Creative card. If you’d like to immerse yourself in the folly of ’90s multimedia, have a little bit of Hackaday scribe reminiscing.

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A VIC-20 Emulator In Your Browser

February 3, 2026 by Lewin Day 11 Comments

The Commodore VIC-20 was a solid microcomputer that paved the way for the legendary Commodore 64 to come. If you’re a fan of the machine and want to revisit its glory days, you could hunt one down on an auction site and hope that it’s in working order. Or you could just emulate the VIC-20 in your browser thanks to the work of [Lance Ewing].

The project is called JVic—because it’s a VIC-20 emulator written in Java. It’s primarily intended for playing old VIC-20 games, and is designed with mobile devices front of mind—so it works well on a phone screen. You can enjoy the built-in library of games, or you can even direct JVic to boot up a ROM from a ZIP file hosted on a given URL or attached to a forum post. You can also install it on your own device rather than running it online, if so desired. [Lance] provides a range of setup options for running it locally or putting it on your own web server if that’s how you like to do things. Files are on Github for those eager to dive in.

We get lots of VIC-20 hacks around these parts. Even if it’s not the most popular machine that Commodore ever built, it’s certainly up there in the rankings. If you want to learn Forth, or even build a VIC-20 from scratch, we’ve explored that before. If you’ve got your own retrocomputer hacks kicking around, don’t hesitate to let us know!

[Thanks to Stephen Walters for the tip!]

Lazarustorm Lets A PiStorm Live Outside Your Old Amiga

January 29, 2026 by Tyler August 7 Comments

The PiStorm is nothing new; if you’re familiar with the retrocomputer scene, you’ve probably heard of it. By replacing the 68k processor in an old Amiga (or some models of Atari) the PiStorm accelerator gives a multiple order of magnitude speedup. It’s even a reversable mod, plugging in where the original CPU was. What’s not to love? Well, some people would simply prefer to keep their original CPUs in place. [TME Retro] has a video highlighting the solution for those people: the Lazarustorm by [arananet].

It makes perfect sense to us– back in the day, you could plug a whole x86 PC-compatible ‘sidecar’ into your Amiga, so why not a PiStorm? The whole bus is right there for the taking.The Lazarusstorm, as a project, is bog simple compared to the PiStorm itself. A PCB and the connectors to get it plugged into the expansion port on the Amiga side, and the connectors to plug the PiStorm into it on the other. A couple of jumpers and a few passives, and that’s it. [TME Retro] also took the time to come up with a case for it, which sits on felt feet to relieve stress on the PCBs. It’s a nice bit of CAD, but we rather wish he’d done it in beige.

As for the upgraded Amiga, it runs just as fast as it would had the 68k been replaced with a Pi3 and PiStorm internally, which is to say it’s practically a supercomputer by 1980s standards. You get the SD card to serve as a hard drive and can even access the internet via modern WiFi, something Commodore engineers likely never expected an A500 to do. Of course, just connecting to the network is only half the battle when getting these retro machines online. When these accelerators were new, the 68k emulation ran on top of Linux, but now that the EMU68k project has it bare metal and even faster.

This isn’t the first Raspberry-flavoured slice of Amiga sidecar we’ve featured: here’s one running Spotify. If you haven’t got an Amiga, there’s a PiStorm for the FPGA-based MiniMig, too. Continue reading “Lazarustorm Lets A PiStorm Live Outside Your Old Amiga” →

Computer History Museum Opens Virtually

January 28, 2026 by Al Williams 13 Comments

If your travels take you near Mountain View, California, you can have the pleasure of visiting the Computer History Museum. You can see everything from a PDP-1 to an Altair 8800 to a modern PC there. If you aren’t travelling, the museum has launched a digital portal that expands your ability to enjoy its collection remotely.

CEO Marc Etkind said, “OpenCHM is designed to inspire discovery, spark curiosity, and make the stories of the digital age more accessible to everyone, everywhere. We’re unlocking the collection for new audiences to explore.”

The portal features advanced search tools along with browsable curated collections and stories. There’s also an album feature so you can create and share your own custom collections. If you are a developer, the portal also allows access via an API.

As an example, we checked out the vintage marketing collection. Inside were a 1955 brochure for a Bendix computer you could lease for under $1,000 a month, and a 1969 brochure for the high-performance Hitachi HITEC 10. It had 4K words of 16-bit memory and a clock just a bit more than 700 kHz, among others.

If you are on the other side of the Atlantic, you might want to check out a very large museum there. There’s also a fine museum in the UK.

The History Of Tandem Computers

January 26, 2026 by Al Williams 10 Comments

If you are interested in historical big computers, you probably think of IBM, with maybe a little thought of Sperry Rand or, if you go smaller, HP, DEC, and companies like Data General. But you may not have heard of Tandem Computers unless you have dealt with systems where downtime was unacceptable. Printing bills or payroll checks can afford some downtime while you reboot or replace a bad board. But if your computer services ATM machines, cash registers, or a factory, that’s another type of operation altogether. That was where Tandem computers made their mark, and [Asianometry] recounts their history in a recent video that you can watch below.

When IBM was king, your best bet for having a computer running nonstop was to have more than one computer. But that’s pricey. Computers might have some redundancy, but it is difficult to avoid single points of failure. For example, if you have two computers with a single network connection and a single disk drive. Then failures in the network connection or the disk drive will take the system down.

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