Meet The Raven: An Atari Clone Computer Based On The Motorola 68060

May 24, 2026 by Maya Posch 9 Comments

Some people who have a hankering to run GEM/TOS applications might just fire up an emulator, or maybe coax an old Motorola 68k-based Atari ST system back to life. Then there are people like [Anders Granlund], for whom hard mode is a way of life and making a custom mainboard around a genuine 68060 CPU and associated peripherals is a reasonable approach to pick. Thus quoth the Raven project.

The project commenced in 2024, when [Anders] started a thread on it over at the Exxos Forum which thus became pretty much the project log for the endeavor.

Both RAM and ROM ICs are on SIMM sticks, which seems like a pretty nifty idea compared to the typical socketed or soldered-in approach here, allowing for up to 48 MB of RAM and 16 MB of ROM.

On the custom ATX-compatible mainboard you get a total of 4 ISA slots, as well as everything from YM2149 audio, IDE HDD and legacy Atari peripheral support. All of which fits in a standard ATX case with an ATX power supply. If this tickles your fancy, you can find the design files for the current A1 board revision, though you will have to source your own ICs.

With all of it assembled you can run Atari’s TOS with its GEM UI, or the modern equivalent in the form of FreeMiNT.

CGA As You Have Never Seen It Before

May 17, 2026 by Jenny List 11 Comments

An old-style graphics system as found on many 8-bit computers and on early PC graphics cards drew its characters by retrieving their bitmaps from a ROM. With a little sideways thinking, [GloriousCow] has exploited this process to make a CGA card perform graphical tricks it was never designed to do.

The CGA card clocks its character ROM continuously across the whole screen, even at the edges where nothing would normally be displayed. By placing the ROM in tandem with a Raspberry Pi Pico 2 they were able to use this ROM clocking as a synchronization signal, and inject whatever pixel data they chose.

The result is a CGA card that can display 60 Hz high-res graphics in text mode, albeit with a very retro one bit color depth. It can overlay the text and the graphics too, because the ROM is still present. One fun result of this is a bouncing DVD logo screensaver, on a DOS PC.

There’s a PCB and a promise of more, meanwhile we suggest you take a look at an impossible feat using a similar technique: NES Doom.

Restoring A 3DO Blaster Card From The Early 90s

May 15, 2026 by Bryan Cockfield 12 Comments

Before the modern trifecta of video game giants came to dominate the market around two decades ago, the world was awash in video game consoles. Many of these retro platforms have largely been forgotten outside of the enthusiast communities, and an average gamer today might not have ever heard of brands like ColecoVision or TurboGrafx. Among these unusual, rare, or forgotten systems was the 3DO which wasn’t strictly a console but rather a specification that manufacturers could use to make consoles on their own. But even more unusual was that this standard could be used to build 3DO-compatible expansion cards for PCs as well.

In this video, [The Retro Collective] received one of these boards to add to their museum, but like much retro hardware of this era it wasn’t working exactly like it would have out-of-the-box. After adding it to one of their period-correct 386 machines of the time, they found that it would only work properly with weight applied at one of the corners. This led to the discovery of some disconnected pins on the PCB, and a repair of that and some other issues brought the card back to life again.

The video also discusses the platform itself and shows how it would connect to a PC from that time. The PC would have needed a Sound Blaster card, a CD ROM drive with a particular proprietary interface, and a few other hardware requirements, but with everything up and working the player would have a console that theoretically competed with the original Playstation or Nintendo 64. It also illustrates an alternative path video games might have taken where expansion cards added console compatibility to any modern PC, but unfortunately the 3DO never really caught on.

Continue reading “Restoring A 3DO Blaster Card From The Early 90s” →

Remembering The BBC Computer Literacy Project

May 9, 2026 by Jenny List 15 Comments

There comes a point in everybody’s life when things that they were a part of are presented as history, and for the 8-bit generation, that time is now. It’s interesting to see the early history of 8-bit home computers presented as history, not from a 2026 perspective but from the early 1990s. The BBC archive has recently posted a retrospective from 1992 looking at ten years of the Computer Literacy Project, a British government programme intended to equip the young people of the 1980s with the skills they would need to approach the information age. It’s a much more immediate history of something which was largely still in place at the time, making it a time capsule in which this past isn’t quite the other country we see it as today.

The Computer Literacy Project was run by the nation’s broadcaster and included a raft of TV programming about computers, as well as the commissioning of a machine specifically for the project. You know this machine as the Acorn BBC Micro, and aside from eventually providing the genesis of what would become ARM, it remains one of the most high-spec 8-bit machines in terms of built-in hardware. We hear from the luminaries of Acorn about the development of this machine, and then the film moves into some of the wider cultural effects.

If you were there, you’ll doubtless remember some of the TV programmes featured, and you might have used a BBC Micro at school. If you weren’t there, it’s an encapsulation of the promise on offer in that era, an optimism that seems sad when you reflect that educational computing descended into learning Microsoft Word during the following decade. It would be another two decades before the Raspberry Pi and BBC micro:bit picked up that fallen torch.

The Beeb, it seems, has long had an interest in home computers. Schools, too.

Continue reading “Remembering The BBC Computer Literacy Project” →

It’s An Apple Lisa, On A FPGA

May 9, 2026 by Jenny List 5 Comments

Most of us will know that Apple’s precursor to the Macintosh series of computers was a machine called the Lisa. Something of a behemoth compared to those early Macs, it had a price to match and wasn’t a commercial success. Working Lisas survive, but unlike a Mac you won’t find many at your local swapmeet. But what if you really must try this early Apple GUI? Never fear, because [AlexElectronics] is here with a much more accessible version on a FPGA.

This Lisa has a surprisingly large PCB compared to the size of the FPGA, because of the number of connectors. It takes the approach of mixing new and old in interfaces, for example as well as original Lisa keyboard and mouse support, you can also use modern USB versions. There’s also an HDMI output for a modern monitor, and an SD card. Unexpectedly alongside the FPGA there’s a 40-pin DIP, it’s a UART chip because there’s no handy pre-built one for that particular chip. We’re told it will be up on GitHub when finalized.

Keeping old computers alive, especially rare ones, is hard. We like projects like this one, and we hope to see more developments. Meanwhile you can see the machine in the video below.

Continue reading “It’s An Apple Lisa, On A FPGA” →

How Commodore Made A Sync Splitter

May 8, 2026 by Jenny List 5 Comments

Recently we featured an unusual Commodore 8-bit computer on the bench of [Tynemouth Software] — a Commodore 64 in a PET case. One of the unique parts it had was a board which took the composite output from the mainboard and split out the sync pulses for the monitor, and now they’re back to give it a full reverse engineer.

Perhaps the first surprise is why this board is necessary at all, after all one might expect an 8-bit machine to have those signals already at hand. It seems that the VIC chip inside the 64 did the combination to composite internally, so no such luck for the Commodore engineers. The board they designed then is a complete and very well-engineered sync splitter.

The technology of a video signal has its origins in the 1930s, so it’s not hard to extract both vertical and horizontal sync pulses with little more than a few passive components and a couple of transistors. The trouble with such a simple approach is that the output will work, but it will be messy and crucially, not have quite the required timing. The Commodore board uses the same approach as a simple discrete circuit of having a pair of filters with a time constant selected to catch the relevant sync, but extends it with extra logic. There are one-shots designed to provide clean pulses of exactly the right length, and gates that provide blanking to remove the chance of pulses ending up where they shouldn’t. The video path is the only part which might differ from a conventional sync splitter, because as the output from the 64 is all-digital, it takes a TTL-level through a gate rather than a more conventional analogue path.

You can see the rest of the machine in our original write-up, and we’re reminded that the boards haven’t been cleaned at their owner’s request, to preserve their patina.

Is It A Pet? No, It’s A Teacher’s Pet!

May 1, 2026 by Jenny List No comments

Here at Hackaday we cover the world of retrocomputing, which means that we see all manner of older computers in our everyday work. We might even claim that we’ve seen them all, were it not that every now and then something comes along which surprises us. [Tynemouth Software] has done just that, with an unexpected Commodore. It’s a Commodore 4064, something that was new to us, but which is best described as a Commodore 64 in a PET case. He’s bringing this one back to life.

For those with weak early-Commodore-fu, maybe it’s worth a quick recap. The PET was Commodore’s big hit from the late 1970s, and it took the form of an all-in-one machine with a CRT display built in. They packed a 6502, BASIC, blocky monochrome graphics, and unexpectedly an IEE-488, or GPIB port. Meanwhile the 64 was the company’s smash hit early 1980s home computer in a compact console design, with high-res color graphics for the time on your TV, and a synthesizer chip that’s still legendary in 2026. Combining a 64 mainboard with the super-robust PET case appears to have been part of Commodore’s business and education offerings.

This one appears to have been in the damp, because that board is definitely more than a bit grubby. After a lot of debugging its power and video circuits, including an unexpected sync splitter board to drive the non-composite monitor, he narrows down the problem to a dodgy ROM and some memory errors.

It seems there’s some question in Commodore enthusiast circles as to whether these machines were assembled from surplus PET parts, but he puts that one to bed by pointing out the custom metalwork and the few custom Commodore 64 features on the board. All in all it’s an interesting dive into an unusual 8-bit machine.

We’ve seen [Tynemouth] a few times here, perhaps most notably with their modern take on a ZX80.