2026 Retrocomputing Challenge: NEC 286 Laptop Rides Again

October 9, 2026 by Tyler August 6 Comments

The sad reality is that all consumer electronics are going to be e-waste eventually. [Cory Whitesell] was determined his old NEC ProSpeed 286 Laptop wouldn’t meet that fate until absolutely necessary, so when his attempts at repairs failed, his efforts pivoted to create a retro battlestation from the stylish old machine.

That screen looks too good to be stock, but otherwise you can’t tell from this angle.

Externally, it looks pretty well stock, and [Cory] has retained as much of the internals as possible. The original power supply remains intact, with power taken off the original HDD’s molex connector. Said power drives a Raspberry Pi, which is small enough to fit inside without any gutting. The original keyboard connects easily enough via a PS/2 to USB adapter, while the passive-matrix LCD has been replaced with a modern screen of the same dimensions. You’d have to be a pretty hard-core purist to mourn that last change.

With emulation on the Pi, he can still have the DOS experience you’d expect from this machine, but its also powerful enough to be useful in the modern day. While we place no bets on whether or not this mod will stay relevant for another 38 years, a more powerful single-board computer or slightly-squished cell phone can be placed in the drive bay instead once the Pi’s ARM processor inevitably starts to look as anemic as the 286 does now.

Not everyone loves this kind of restomod, but we’ve featured more than a few and have a special category for it in our ongoing retrocomputing contest for those who will do everything to keep classics out of the e-waste bin, including remaking them.

2026 Retrocomputing Challenge: Retro Terminal Bartop Arcade Topper

October 8, 2026 by Donald Papp 9 Comments

Retrocomputing is more than just hardware. It’s also a feel, a vibe, and [valkyrie0528]’s Retro Terminal Bartop Arcade Topper has it in spades.

The same unit, in bartop arcade machine mode.

Here’s how it happened. The gorgeous device you see in the image above in fact started out as a bartop arcade cabinet build. The front section — with arcade buttons and joystick — is a removable panel. While building it, the panel was uninstalled and [valkyrie0528] placed a keyboard in the empty recess to do some configuration. Sitting at the machine like that felt like being right back in the 80s, perched at an 8-bit home computer. Cue a visit from the Good Ideas Fairy.

Now, in addition to being an arcade cabinet, one can swap the arcade controls panel for a one that has a keyboard (clicky and mechanical, of course), touchpad, and small USB breakout. The result looks amazing either way. As an arcade machine it’s beautiful, and in retro terminal mode it’s simply gorgeous.

The icing on the cake is [valkyrie0528]’s use of cool-retro-term as the terminal emulator, and there’s even a widescreen wallpaper accompanying it that puts an image of two 5.25″ floppy drives to the side. If you like that idea, you can download the wallpaper file from the project page for your own use.

A widescreen wallpaper with two 5.25″ floppy drives is the perfect complement to a retro terminal emulator.

There’s still time to enter our 2026 Retrocomputing Challenge, so if you find yourself inspired and want to show off your own take of things, there’s no time to lose!

Streaming Games Means The Nintendo DSi Will Never Be Obsolete

October 7, 2026 by Tyler August 8 Comments

There comes a point where you have to acknowledge that your beloved console is out of date and– barring the odd homebrew title– won’t be playing new games ever again. You’d think that Nintendo’s 2008 DSi handheld would be in this category, but [gavff64] has a workaround. What if the odd homebrew title streamed games over the network?

At its core the RNDS-Stream is just decoding an MJPEG stream from a server on a Linux PC, giving you the content of an X11 or xWayland window with relatively low latency at around 15-20FPS. So while you won’t be entering any e-sports tournaments, you can enjoy more relaxed, casual games like Counterstrike. Well, at least there’s no audio streaming yet, so you won’t have to hear the other team’s trash talk. That ought to make it more relaxed.

Sound may come; the project is very much a work in progress, and also a showcase of RubyNDS, [gavff64]’s Ruby-based homebrew framework for the DSi. Why Ruby? Why the DSi? For no other reason than [gavff64] likes both of those things.You can observe it in action after 4:48 in the video embedded below– just be warned, it’s editing is tuned to a TikTok-using audience and won’t be to everyone’s taste. Don’t let videography get in the way, though, because the hack is the thing and it’s up on GitHub for all and sundry under an MIT license.

The DSi is no stranger to hackers, having gotten its first flash cart the year of its release. In spite of that, we’ve seen surprisingly little homebrew for the dual-screen device, this augmented reality app being an exception.

Continue reading “Streaming Games Means The Nintendo DSi Will Never Be Obsolete” →

Handheld Atari 2600 Packs A CRT

October 7, 2026 by Jenny List 33 Comments

We covered [Nick Bild]’s mini Atari console using original devices not so long ago, and today he’s back with the same console wrapped up with a CRT as a handheld. It would have cost a fortune in D cells to own back in the day, but we know we’d have lusted after one of these in 1979.

He’s called it the µTari Go, pronounced “Microtari”, and it’s a 3D printed affair with the buttons roughly where you’d expect them if you’re used to the Game Boy, and a cartridge socket at the top above the screen.The PCB is the circuit of the original packed into a smaller space, so his claim of using original hardware is valid. The CRT is one of those Sony flattened modules that can still be found in the usual online bazaars, and it packs a small speaker. He’s not been foolhardy enough to equip it with those D cells, so the power is an external 12 V jack.

You can’t not like this project, especially after seeing it in action in the video below. Unlike in the ’70s a USB-C power pack could run this thing with reasonable playing time, so it could even be fully portable if you wanted. You can see our write-up of the board itself here.

Continue reading “Handheld Atari 2600 Packs A CRT” →

2026 Retrocomputing Challenge: Dungeons Of Daggorath, But Without Quite So Much Typing

October 7, 2026 by Donald Papp 4 Comments

People mod games all the time, but it’s not every day someone mods Dungeons of Daggorath for the TRS-80. [Nick Bild] did exactly that, adding joystick support and a couple DOOM-inspired monsters for good measure. And while he was at it, optional unlimited player health and power because why not?

A pretty good representation, in our opinion.

Dungeons of Daggorath was pretty unusual for its time. It portrayed a dungeon and its contents from a first-person perspective, and events progressed in real time.

Gameplay-wise, most commands entered by the player revolved around moving around and attacking monsters, and that was done with text commands like ATTACK RIGHT which could mercifully be shortened to A R. Still, not the most efficient control scheme.

[Nick] downloaded the original source code and made several modifications. A joystick moves the player much more efficiently, with the button acting as a shortcut to attacking with whatever is in the player’s right hand. He also replaced the spider and viper enemies with creatures inspired by DOOM‘s imp and cacodemon monsters, as well as the aforementioned optional limitless health and power.

[Nick] dubbed the modified game Dungeons of Doom and while the terms of the original don’t allow redistribution of modified code, his changes are simple enough to follow. Especially so for those from the generation that remembers typing programs in by hand from a magazine page.

The Commodore 64 Keyboard Font, For Everyone

October 7, 2026 by Jenny List 28 Comments

There are some classic fonts which appeared in one place and became almost iconic, yet never made it into the digital age. The font on the Commodore 64 keyboard for example, with its its slightly narrow letters. If you’ve been yearning to see it again then help is at hand, because [Levente Szabadkai] has traced it from photographs and made it available as a vector font in a variety of formats on GitHub.

As you might expect, it’s an uppercase font only, as the hardware never sported lower case letters. But it doesn’t stop there, because it also contains the various punctuation and other marks, all the PETSCII glyphs, and the function keys. There’s even a Commodore logo for that key down in the left hand corner, but we’re guessing you’ll have to assemble CLR HOME yourself. We can’t help noticing the cursor arrows are solid in contrast to the outlined ones on our 64 here, but we’re guessing there may be some minor differences between models.

So download the font, and make all your stuff look like a 1980s home computer keyboard. And in case you are wondering why you find so many keyboard fonts familiar, we’ve talked about the Gorton font in the past.

It’s GW-BASIC, Jim, But Not As We Know It

October 4, 2026 by Tyler August 8 Comments

Back in the old days the IBM-PC, like most of its contemporary computers, shipped with BASIC in ROM. Even after it stopped living in ROM, IBM-Compatibles shipped with GW-BASIC, and now we have a project that asks: what if they still did? Thoreau BASIC is GW-BASIC, but updated for the 21st century.

It’s meant to be code-compatible with all old GW-BASIC code — which means, yes, line numbers and GOTOs abound — but it can boot from a modern x86 PC’s UEFI or run under Windows and take full advantage of modern hardware with 64-bit memory and multithreading support. Graphics are 24-bit at any resolution your monitor can handle, and there are a number of handy built-in commands to handle file management, graphics — including sprites — mouse and keyboard input, 32-channel sound, and more. It is also not strictly an interpreted language. Programs can be compiled to run under Windows or bare-metal on UEFI x86 machines.

It’s not open source, but the project is “pay what you want” over on Itch.io, where you can also see a number of examples.

We’ve seen other attempts to revive BASIC over the years, like MoonBASIC or BASIC-256, but we have to admit it’s never going to be the dominant force it once was, regardless of how nostalgic we might get. That’s probably for the best, but it’s still nice to know you can boot to BASIC if you really, really want to. Do you think it would work with our preprocessor?