A Modern Web Browser For Classic Mac OS

May 29, 2026 by Jenny List 7 Comments

When using older computers there comes a point at which modern software drops support, as for example is happening with builds for Windows XP. Every now and then though, along comes something that bucks the trend. Enter [mplsllc] with Macsurf, a port of the Netsurf browser for classic MacOS 9 on PowerPC. Bring your nineties beige box back online!

The first generation of PowerPC Macs occupy an odd position, being faster and more capable than their predecessors while not sharing the ability to run MacOS X like their G3 descendants. Macsurf has the promise of bringing them into the 2020s, but if you’re expecting the equivalent of Google Chrome you might be disappointed.

Netsurf is a browser that started life on RiscOS, the original ARM OS from the Acorn Archimedes. It’s lightweight and portable, it’s an active project, it has a good rendering engine that does up to date HTML and CSS, it offers native TLS, and it has JavaScript built in. It’s ideal for a 1990s PowerPC, but with the caveat that sites expecting the very latest browsers might struggle. Sadly we don’t have a ’90s Mac to hand so we can’t try this port, but we’re used to it on other lower-power machines so we thing it’ll be a great asset to the platform.

We last looked at Netsurf when we had a look at RiscOS, if you are interested.

When Is An Apple Laptop Not A Macbook? When It’s An Apple II

May 29, 2026 by Tyler August 23 Comments

Do you remember, some years ago, when that brand-new 8086-based laptop hit the shelves? Great for PC lovers, but not so fun for those on the fruitier side of the street. Well, the same Chinese firm that brought us the Book8086 are back, this time with an ‘Apple’ Laptop that is decidedly not a MacBook– the Book II is a dual-processor Apple II clone in a laptop form factor.

… but just look at all those DIPs on the inside. Authentically retro!

Dual processor? On an Apple II? It wasn’t that uncommon, back in the day — that’s what the Z80 softcard was, after all: a second processor that let you run CP/M and associated business applications, and this one has it built-in. It also has the 80-column video card, a second floppy controller, a printer interface, and a 16 kB ROM card for languages. That leaves two of the Apple’s expansion slots available, one of which is broken out externally on the back of the laptop, along with the printer and floppy ports.

Useful? Probably no more so than the NEC V20-based PC version. Still, those did find buyers and we have no doubt that this new laptop will, too. Especially since with the right expansion card, you might get this machine running DOS as well. Of course if you don’t feel like shelling out the quid or running an emulator, you can always roll your own Apple II on an FPGA.

Thanks to [Stephen Walters] for the tip! We usually steer clear of product announcements like this, but [Stephen] figured we’d be interested in this one since we covered the then-new retro PC versions way back in 2023.

An Atic Atac Minimap For The ZX Spectrum

May 28, 2026 by Jenny List 2 Comments

The use of modern microcontrollers as add-on peripherals for 1980s home computers has delivered significant benefits and capabilities unimaginable in the days when those machines were new. A great example come from [Happy Little Diodes], who’s using a Pi Pico based peripheral for a Sinclair ZX Spectrum to provide something that looks far more modern, a hardware minimap for the iconic Spectrum game, Atic Atac.

The ZX expansion port provides all the bus signals from the Z80 microprocessor, and the peripheral uses a latch to capture Spectrum memory writes. Because the game’s operation is well known it can easily watch out for updates to the in-memory variable that contains the game room ID. It’s then a case of drawing the map with the player centered on the room the are in, for a much more 21st century game interface component.

Having been around when both the ZX and this game were new, we like this add-on, a lot. We can imagine it could relatively easily support other games, too.

Haven’t got a Spectrum? Never fear, you can make yourself one!

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Virtual Museum Hosts Every OS You Haven’t Heard Of

May 28, 2026 by Tyler August 11 Comments

OK, every operating system is a bit of a stretch — Windows Vista notably didn’t make the cut — but [Andrew]’s Virtual OS museum has a good claim to being the most comprehensive archive of operating systems yet assembled.

[Andrew] has a blog post describing the project, as well as a YouTube video that we’ve embedded below. But the real fun is in the downloading and spinning up one of 570+ operating systems for more than 250 platforms on pre-configured virtual machines that have been packaged up for us.

This isn’t just the usual retrocomputer nostalgia-fest of Macintosh System and DOSBox. There’s everything from IBM Big Iron and VAXen to Texas Instrument graphing calculators emulated in the museum, with software to run on them, too. If you’ve ever wondered what you could do with the Manchester Baby, well, all known software for that machine is included with its ‘operating system’.

Admission is free, but like any good museum you’ll be waiting in line a while to get in, so expect the full 128 GB download to take some time. If you’re into computer history, though, it’s going to very much be worth the wait. If you try it and like it, you could help others by seeding the torrent.

The actual museum launches in a VM as a modern Linux system — perhaps that can be considered an exhibit itself — with a launcher to select any of the other system/OS combos, including various other, older Linuxes hosted on their own VMs. There are more to come, too, as [Andrew] continues the long debugging process of making sure everything works as expected.

Purists may decry this virtual emulation as not being quite the real thing, which is true. But while MiSTer supports a lot of cores via FPGA, you probably won’t find everything here on that platform. We have, however, seen an FPGA recreation of the Manchester Baby. More than once, even.

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Three Arduinos Team Up To Make 80s-Style Computer

May 27, 2026 by Bryan Cockfield 28 Comments

Back in the 80s, buying a home computer could easily mean an inflation-adjusted cost of thousands of dollars (or your equivalent currency unit of choice), and all for an 8-bit machine that might not have a hard drive and almost certainly didn’t connect to a network. Here in the future it’s easy to get spoiled by all the computing power and inexpensive devices practically falling into our laps, but using some modern low-cost microcontrollers can connect us to our early computing roots like [Joe]’s latest Arduino-based computer.

Taking design an engineering cues from computers like the Timex Sinclair 1000, Commodore PET, and TRS-80 MC-10, this computer uses a trio of Arduinos to accomplish what the best computer manufacturers once did with tons of integrated circuits. An Arduino Due handles all of the processing and traditional computing tasks, including a somewhat customized BASIC implementation, while an Uno performs audio processing duties. Taking care of the video processing is the much more capable Arduino Mega, outputting 40×25 monochrome NTSC composite video at 8×8 character resolution. There’s even WiFi courtesy of an ESP32 — certainly an upgrade compared to the source material.

After booting it up, the user gets a Commodore-like experience that replicates the 80s computing era quite well, and is even built inside its own keyboard case just like that era of computers usually were. [Joe] plans to release all three firmware images and the Python script used to get files onto the faux-retro machine, so keep an eye out for that.

In the event that you used rubles instead of dollars to pay for your expensive 8-bit machines back in the 80s, this computer might be more up your alley instead.

Tiny C64 PSU Rejects Tradition, Embraces USB

May 26, 2026 by Tyler August 36 Comments

The Commodore 64 has, by modern standards, the interesting power requirement of needing both 5 VDC and 9 VAC. Traditionally, one would use an iron-core transformer to step-down the wall current — be it 220 V or 115 V, 50 Hz or 60 Hz — to produce the low-voltage AC.

That’s how Commodore did it, and that’s how most of the aftermarket replacements do it, too. That iron-core transformer is bulky, though, and [Side Projects Lab] decided that in this day and age of switching supplies and USB-PD he could surely do better. Which he did, with the diminutive PD-64.

As you can see, it just covers the power port of the C64, and not much else. Partly that small size comes from offloading some of the hard work onto a USB-PD wall wart. The PD-64 requests 12 VDC, which it then steps down to 5 VDC with the usual buck converter, and inverts to 9 VAC in a circuit that is the most interesting part of the project.

There are various ways one could do this, after all, and we’re sure some of you will have different ideas than [Side Projects Lab], but his method seems sound. In order to provide galvanic isolation between the two outputs, the 12 VDC line is first chopped into a 500 kHz signal, and run through a tiny 5:6 ferrite transformer. That output gets rectified to 13.6 VDC, a voltage that is used to run a class-D audio amplifier to produce the 9 V peak-to-peak, zero-DC-offset signal the C64 needs.

[Side Projects Lab] has released both FreeCAD files for the case and STLs as BY-CC-ND 4.0, and a circuit diagram is available for the electrical side. If you don’t want to design your own PCB, [sideprojectslab] will be selling finished versions.

If you’re interested in further dragging your C64 into the modern era, check out the HDMI output that [Side Projects Lab] hacked together for the iconic computer last year.

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Peek Into IBM’s System/360 With Vintage Training Film

May 25, 2026 by Donald Papp 9 Comments

Computing goes hand-in-hand with how to structure and access data, and this internal training film from IBM regarding file organization and data processing with System/360 is from a time when such decisions were crucial to system architecture.

Some trends never change, like storage costs over time.

The presenter talks about the transition from magnetic tape-based storage (in which data is stored and must be read sequentially) to DASD (direct access storage devices) which have more in common with modern mass storage media. The ability to access and process data at will instead of sequentially represented a tremendous opportunity to change how organizations handled data. System/360 redefined mainframe computing, introducing not just the concept of compatibility and interoperability of programs and data between systems, but also popularized the 8-bit byte.

It’s not a particularly long presentation and it doesn’t go into deep technical detail — it was primarily aimed at sales people — but it does offer an interesting peek into a time period in computing history that most of us have little or no direct experience with. Nevertheless some things never change, like a trend of plummeting storage prices (listed as cost per million characters) over time.

Check it out in the video embedded below, and if you’d like to know more about IBM’s System/360 we have you covered.

Thanks [Stephen Walters] for the tip.

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