Retrocomputing

1586 Articles

Modern Mice On Old Computers

July 14, 2020 by 23 Comments

Getting retro hardware up and running again is sometimes a feat, and the amount of effort needed tends to go up exponentially with increased hardware age. Getting an IDE hard drive running again is one thing, but things like peripherals on truly “retro” computers like Commodores and Amigas is another beast altogether if you even have a 30-year-old mouse still lying around. That’s why adapters like Project mouSTer are here to help you connect modern USB hardware to truly ancient computers.

This piece of equipment was built for the Atari ST (hence the name), a 8-bit  computer from the mid-80s. It mates a DB9 plug with USB via a small microcontroller which does the translating. The firmware can be flashed over the USB connection so there’s planned support for other machines of this vintage. The chip supports all the features the original mouse did, too, including PS4 pad support and support for joysticks, and comes in an impressively tiny package once assembled which blends in seamlessly.

The project is a great step to getting retro computers working again, even if you can’t find exact OEM replacements anymore. That’s a common problem, and we’ve seen this solved in other ways for other old Ataris. It’s not uncommon to put modern power supplies in retro computers, either, as long as they power up and work after everything’s wired together.

Changing System Architectures And The Complexities Of Apple’s Butterfly Approach To ISAs

July 13, 2020 by 64 Comments

Apple computers will be moving away from Intel chips to its own ARM-based design. An interesting thing about Apple as a company is that it has never felt the need to tie itself to a particular system architecture or ISA. Whereas a company like Microsoft mostly tied its fortunes to Intel’s x86 architecture, and IBM, Sun, HP and other giants preferred vertical integration, Apple is currently moving towards its fifth system architecture for its computers since the company was formed.

What makes this latest change possibly unique, however, is that instead of Apple relying on an external supplier for CPUs and peripheral ICs, they are now targeting a vertical integration approach. Although the ARM ISA is licensed to Apple by Arm Holdings, the ‘Apple Silicon’ design that is used in Apple’s ARM processors is their own, produced by Apple’s own engineers and produced by foundries at the behest of Apple.

In this article I would like to take a look back at Apple’s architectural decisions over the decades and how they made Apple’s move towards vertical integration practically a certainty.

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(Re)Making A ColecoVision

July 12, 2020 by 13 Comments

[Leaded Solder] found some ColecoVision game cartridges at a flea market, and like most of us would, thought, “I’ll build a ColecoVision console from scratch to play them!” Well, maybe most of us would think of that, but not actually do it. He did and you can read about the results in great detail since he wrote up two posts, one covering the design and one covering the construction.

The ColecoVision was a game console that famously could be expanded into a nice — for its day — personal computer. It even had a daisy wheel printer in that configuration. However, in either configuration, the game console was the brains of the operation. According to [Leaded Solder] the price of a unit in working order is high even though over 2 million were made because of several design problems that make them less likely to survive the decades. Rather than repair and modify an original unit, it was cheaper and much more educational to build new.

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A ZX80 With A Proper Case

July 11, 2020 by 14 Comments

A popular project among Hackaday readers is to recreate a piece of home computing or gaming hardware from the past, and in that endeavour we’ve seen some truly amazing projects. Usually they take the form of bare PCBs or custom cases that look nothing like the original, but not [Cees Meijer]’s Sinclair ZX80 clone. It sports a 3D printed replica of the original computer’s vacuum-formed case, which from a distance you could be mistake for the real thing.

Internally it’s not a ZX80 at all, but a Raspberry Pi Zero running an emulator. But  with a case like this one that’s not the point. It doesn’t have the full-length PCB of the original but a modern ZX80 membrane keyboard, and the Pi appears to be hiding somewhere in the “hump” used by the Astec UHF modulator on the original. There is more information in a blog post, and the model can be downloaded via Thingiverse. Handily, the files also include the original CAD file from RS DesignSpark, should you wish to modify it to your own tastes. If somebody could mate it with Tynemouth Software’s ZX80 kit then our cup would run over.

Of course, this isn’t the only retrocomputer for which a replacement case can be found.

The Latest Linux – On A Floppy In A 486!

July 8, 2020 by 97 Comments

If you have ever studied the early history  of the GNU/Linux operating system in its many forms, you’ll have read that [Linus Torvalds] developed his first kernel for his Intel 386-based computer. Though the 386 architecture is now ancient, the current Linux kernel can still be compiled for it and many distributions still maintain an i386 branch to provide broad compatibility for later machines able to run i386 code. But what if you were to take a current Linux kernel and stick it on a floppy in a machine from the early 1990s, with meagre RAM? [Fozztex] did just that, with not a 386 but a 486, sporting what would have been an impressive for the time 36MB of RAM. You can watch it in action in the video below the break.

A recent Linux kernel is rarely if ever compiled for something as small as a floppy disk, so getting one to boot from such ancient media appeared to be a challenge. It was possible though with the tinyconfig make option, and after finding a small enough root filesystem courtesy of Aboriginal Linux, a bootable floppy was created. It’s not entirely useful and its sole purpose was to see whether Linux could see a large hard drive on the 486, but it’s still a version 5.6 Linux kernel booting from floppy on an ancient computer. Never complain that your Raspberry Pi Zero is slow again, we’ve come a long way!

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Gaming In Different Languages

July 7, 2020 by 2 Comments

One of the perks of using older hardware is its comparative simplicity and extensive documentation. After years or decades of users programming on a platform, the amount of knowledge available for it can become extensive. This is certainly the case with the 6502 microprocessor, used in old Apple computers and some video game systems from the ’80s. The extensive amount of resources available make it a prime candidate in exploring various programming languages, and their advantages and disadvantage.

This project looks into those differences using a robot game, which has been programmed four different ways in three languages. [Joey] created the game in Python first and then began to port it to the 65C02, a CMOS variant of the 6502. The first iteration is its assembly language, and then a second iteration with optimized assembly code. From there, he ports it to C and then finally to Forth. Each version of the game is available to play in a browser using an emulator to run the 6502 hardware.

Since the games run in the browser, other tools are available to examine the way the game runs in each language. Registers can be viewed in real time, as well as the values stored in the memory. It’s an interesting look at an old piece of hardware and of its inner workings. For an even deeper dive into the 6502, it’s possible to build a working computer on breadboards using one.

Commodore SX-64 Keyboard Upgraded From Trash To Treasure

June 30, 2020 by 6 Comments

Released in 1984, the Commodore SX-64 Executive Computer was one of the first portable luggable color computers. It cost twice as much as a Commodore 64, had a tiny 5″ diagonal screen, and couldn’t actually support both 5¼” drives as advertised. On the upside, people say it had a slightly better keyboard than its classic cousin.

[Drygol] agreed to restore the keyboard from a friend’s Commodore SX-64 sight-unseen, and boy was this thing in bad shape. Most people would probably consider the condition a shame and write it off as a lost cause, since two of the corners were missing most of their plastic. But [Drygol] isn’t most people. [Drygol] had mad restoration skills to begin with, and this project honed them to a razor’s edge.

Plenty of the other vintage computer restorations [Drygol] has done required plastic welding, which uses heat or a lot of friction to smooth over cracks. Some of those have not stood the test of time, so he’s now in the habit of stabilizing cracks with brass mesh before filling them with fiberglass putty.

The best part is how [Drygol] managed to rebuild the corners using the same methods, soldering the brass mesh at the 90° joins, and reinforcing them with thick copper wire before beginning the painstaking putty/sand/putty process. The use of blank copper clad boards as straight edges and thickness gauges is genius.

There’s a whole lot to learn here, and the adventure beings with something that probably keeps a lot of people from trying stuff like this in the first place: how do you safely remove the badges?

You’re right, plastic welding is awesome. There even used to be a toy plastic welder. But there’s no need to troll the electronic auction bay to give it a try — just use a cheap soldering iron.