Retrocomputing

1717 Articles

Yesterday Has Never Looked This Good: Feast Your Eyes On The 2026 Retrocomputing Challenge Winners!

November 4, 2026 by 4 Comments

If there’s one category among those we see here at Hackaday that has something for everyone, it’s retrocomputing. Spanning everything from relay-based machines that fill a wall through to modern machines with a retro twist, there must be few of us who haven’t seen such a project as been impressed. Our most recent contest challenged you to come out with your best retrocomputing projects, and we’re extremely pleased to say that you didn’t disappoint us. Here are the results, both the outright winners, and the honourable mentions.

First up, our top three. For these, we are happy to award the prize of a  $150 DigiKey gift certificate. Continue reading “Yesterday Has Never Looked This Good: Feast Your Eyes On The 2026 Retrocomputing Challenge Winners!” →

FloppoScope Is A Disk Image Analyzer

November 1, 2026 by 17 Comments

If you’re a big retro tech fan, you might still have a floppy drive on hand, or even some sort of high-end disk imaging solution. If you’re a little less committed, you may still have plenty of disk images on your hard drive for various reasons. Either way, you might find [0ldStaph]’s latest project to be useful for examining any disk images you have on hand.

FloppoScope is a browser-based tool for analyzing floppy disk images. Despite being browser-based, everything runs locally, so you’re not actually risking any sensitive data by using the tool—though we can’t imagine you’ve got too much Top Secret intel stored as floppy disk images, anyway.

The tool will draw you a nicely color-coded map of the disk layout and shows all the pertinent data for the filesystem of the image. It will even let you preview common file types if you need. The tool can also convert images between various formats, and spit out reports on things like bad sectors or corrupted files that have been detected. FloppoScope can handle everything from PC and Apple format disks, to Amiga, Atari DOS, and BBC Micro stuff. Oddities like various Sharp MZ machines and the NeXTSTEP format are included too. It works with both image and flux files, as well, so whichever way you captured your disks, it should work here.

We’ve looked at the importance of imaging remaining floppy disks quite recently. If you’ve got unpreserved disks sitting in your bedroom, shed, or study, consider getting on that as a matter of priority at this point!

Huge PalmOS Development Archive Goes Online, Thanks To Personal Backups

October 31, 2026 by 27 Comments

Palm OS, an operating system for a range mobile devices that predated mobile phones, is largely forgotten today. Or at least, that’s what [Aaron Ardiri] thought.

That all changed when he was contacted by a developer about some Palm OS software he had written decades ago. He soon realized there was a whole community of enthusiasts enthusiastically exploring a platform he had assumed was a forgotten layer in the strata of early mobile computing history.

This led [Aaron] to dust off and publish his substantial personal archive of development tools, source code, documentation, and more all related to his years of working with Palm OS in the early days of mobile computing.

When it comes to the importance of preserving computing history, we can’t put it better than [Aaron] himself so we’ll just quote him here:

Preservation is not simply about keeping old files. Source code, tools and documentation provide a record of how engineers solved problems under the constraints of their time. They also preserve knowledge that is easily lost when companies disappear and platforms are discontinued.

In many ways, Palm OS devices like the PalmPilot have very little in common with modern mobile computing platforms. They had to do more with less, and development reflected that. If you’re curious what these devices were like, here’s a great tour that includes a browser-based emulator.

A 1982 Modem For $100

October 30, 2026 by 20 Comments

[Dave Farquhar] takes a walk down memory lane about the Commodore 1600 VICModem, perhaps the first phone modem to sell for less than $100. Commodore, of course, was famous for making cheaper computers like the VIC20, the Commodore 64, and lower-cost peripherals like disk drives. But how did they hit the $100 price point with the modem when competing 300 baud modems sold for at least twice that, and a 1200 baud unit would set you back at least $600?

First, Commodore didn’t handle the design themselves. Instead, they outsourced to Anchor Automation, a well-known modem manufacturer. It used a Motorola MC14412 modem on a chip, along with six other chips. The chip could, in theory, do 600 baud, but the modem was rated for 300. But it did make some interesting design choices.

Continue reading “A 1982 Modem For $100” →

2026 Retrocomputing Challenge: Custom RISC-V Processor For Retro System

October 28, 2026 by 4 Comments

Although once little more than an academic endeavor, the RISC-V architecture is slowly supplanting applications that would have normally gone to ARM. Even a few microcontrollers have chips running this open-source instruction set now, and we expect it to grow in the future since it doesn’t require the licensing of an ARM or x86 chip. [M_Jagadeesh97] is getting ahead of the curve with this retro gaming system built on a custom-designed RISC-V system.

Most of us, presumably including [M_Jagadeesh97], don’t have access to chip fabrication tools, but what we can get is any of various FPGAs. This RISC-V CPU is built on a Terasic DE0-Nano board with 32 MB of RAM available to it, and boots to a launcher with 32 games available. There are a few limitations with this low-power system which was largely solved by limiting the display to 64×32, which lets it maintain the same aspect ratio as the original DOOM as well as the same aspect ratio for many of the older games, while still maintaining 45 FPS.

The project writeup goes deep into the design of a system like this, from the bare metal, the CPU design, the timing of the video signals, and how to implement a Wolfenstein-like raycaster. After adding a small display it looks to be fairly portable as well and is an excellent demonstration of how powerful inexpensive boards like this  FPGA can be with the proper amount of effort.

2026 Hackaday Retrocomputing Contest

Emulate The 486 In Your Browser

October 28, 2026 by 22 Comments

You might fondly remember the days of the Intel 486, but you probably don’t have one on your desk anymore. If you’d like to emulate that classic hardware, you can now do it in your browser, thanks to [Jan de Jager].

What [Jan] has built is a 100% browser-based emulator for an Intel 80486DX2-66 PC. Obviously, it’s not just a CPU that’s being emulated here—[Jan] has gone so far as to throw in the motherboard and ISA/VLB adapter card emulation necessary to make this a real and functioning computer that runs inside a solitary browser tab.

It’s all written in ES6 JavaScript. It will happily run SeaBIOS, VGA BIOS, FreeDOS 1.3, and a whole bunch of classic games, like Wolfenstein 3D, Duke Nukem, and DOOM. There’s even a control panel where you can configure the PC how you like, from storage to expansion cards and all the rest.

Once upon a time an emulator was an application you had to download and run, hoping all the while that your new machine had enough grunt to emulate the classic hardware of your desires. These days, we have endless piles of CPU cycles to throw at everything and you can do it all within a browser. Or even on a tiny microcontroller, if you feel like it!

How A Single University Project Started Everything

October 27, 2026 by 24 Comments

If we care to cast an eye over the history of ubiquitous personal computing as we know it today, we might immediately point at the original IBM PC. After all, for most of us our machines share backward compatibility in some form through multiple generations back to that original box from 1981.

But if we look at the things we use today and take for granted, from laser printers to graphics cards to the routers which power most of the Internet, they’re not from IBM at all. At the recent Vintage Computing Festival Berlin, [Michael Engel] delivered a talk naming a surprising progenitor for much of that technology, none other than Sun Microsystems.

It all starts with [Andy Bechtolsheim], famously Sun’s co-founder, when at the end of the 1970s he was a postgraduate at Stanford University. Working on the Stanford University Network — SUN — project he designed a computer to be used as a workstation on the network. The processor of choice then was Motorola’s 68000, but it lacked the MMU that would be required to run UNIX. His design had an MMU implemented externally to the 68000, with a bank of SRAM serving as the page table. This design would form the CPU board of the first Sun workstation.

The story might end there, were it not that many other companies had the same requirement, and Sun could supply them a CPU board. Silicon Graphics, the distant ancestral progenitor of your GPU, was one of them, so the first SGI workstation also had the same CPU as the first Sun. It appeared in the early Imagen laser printers too, as well as commercial AppleTalk to Ethernet bridges. Perhaps the biggest surprise is that because the original Stanford board had also been used as a router, the software for that became part of Cisco’s first product.

The video is below the break, and it’s a fascinating watch.

Continue reading “How A Single University Project Started Everything” →