The Y2K Bug In BSD 2.11 That Survived 2000

June 15, 2026 by Maya Posch 17 Comments

A year before the arrival of the brand-new 21st century, the Year 2000 Bug was predicted to grind modern society to a halt and ensure that at the dawn of the year 2001, there’d be nothing left but the smoldering wreck of once great societies. Thanks to the concerted efforts of countless engineers, software developers, and many others, we were left with mostly just silly glitches, with one of these surviving bugs apparently just discovered, as [Van Heusden] reported on an NTPd bug in BSD 2.11.

To be fair, it is a pretty obscure one, as the demonstration involves BSD 2.11 on a PDP-11/70 from 1975, so it’s probably not something that still sees much use outside retrocomputing enthusiast circles. In the blog post, the demonstration involves connecting a specific adapter by Traconex, capable of receiving WWV/WWVH time signals, and setting it up for use by the NTPd prior to running the ntpd -a any -d -d -d -d command.

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GentleOS, A Simple OS For Your Old PC

June 13, 2026 by Jenny List 28 Comments

Every month or so we bring you a Jenny’s Daily Drivers article, in which we share with you an esoteric OS and try to use it for the everyday work of a Hackaday scribe. As part of that ongoing effort, the world of esoteric operating systems is always on the radar, even though many of them are unlikely to fulfill the Daily Driver requirement.

Even so, sometimes we see an OS that we like, and so it is with [Luke8086]’s GentleOS. It’s an operating system — or to be pedantic — a kernel shell into which applications are compiled, for older 16 and 32-bit x86 computers with a very low hardware requirement. It brings a simplicity to older PCs that we like.

Downloading the tiny image and booting it in a virtual machine, it’s almost ridiculously quick to boot on a 2020s computing behemoth with gigabytes of RAM and multiple 64-bit cores. It has a basic but nice and clean GUI, and a selection of basic applications and games. You won’t be using this for productivity work, but that’s hardly the point. It’s particularly pleasing to look at the code and find something simple enough to understand, too.

We like it, if you have an older PC it might be worth spinning this one up for a bit of fun.

Deeply Optimized MSX Emulation On ESP32-S3 With VGA Output

June 12, 2026 by Maya Posch 9 Comments

ESP32-S3 board with VGA and audio output during development. (Credit: Ivan Svarkovsky)

The ESP32-S3 is by many metrics quite the powerful little computer, which has led to it being used even for things like emulating retro consoles and similar. Here [Ivan Svarkovsky]’s S3-MSX-PC project pushes the envelope by taking the multi-system Retro-Go project’s MSX component and optimizing it for the ESP32-S3’s Xtensa Lx7 CPU cores.

The project involves an ESP32-S3 as the core, requiring at least 8 MB of PSRAM (N16R8 configuration) to match the tested configuration. Any software is loaded into PSRAM before it’s executed, with the MSX1, MSX2 and MSX2+ supported.

For audio you have to wire up your own PDM filters to connect to the two GPIO pins that are used for audio output, while VGA output is handled by a basic 2-bit R-2R RGB222 DAC. For input devices you can use any USB keyboard, while software is added via the web interface or directly onto an SD card.

The Technical Deep Dive section goes into more detail as to what exactly got changed – with the blessing of the fMSX author – in the original fMSX core, such as targeting the Lx7 core’s cache dimensions and optimizing hot paths to avoid bottlenecks. Memory accesses were aligned for Xtensa and moving certain data from Flash to RAM was another change, along with the prevention of pipeline flushing due to certain branching decisions.

Considering that MSX specifications are based on a Z80 core, it’s not so crazy that one of these ESP32-S3 MCUs can effectively emulate them. The Retro-Go project itself claims to cover a whole swath of Nintendo and Sega consoles, as well as others, making it almost too easy to do some retrogaming without even having to drag out a Raspberry Pi SBC or so.

It's rare to see an A1200 case fuller than this.

Amiga 1232 Storm CD Packs Every Upgrade Into One Wedge

June 11, 2026 by Tyler August 23 Comments

You know what they used to say– once you go Commodore, you’ll never leave by any door. Well, they might not have said that, but given the prevalence of projects still using Commodore-branded systems decades after the company’s demise, perhaps someone should have. A case in point is [Jit06] with this writeup on his Ultimate Amiga 1200 — or “Amiga 1232 Storm CD”– which crams just about every upgrade you might think of into the 1990s wedge computer.

Of course it has the PiStorm 32, with a CM4 providing supercomputer performance, at least by A1200 standards. That’s rather old hat, though, and it’s everything else crammed into the old Commodore that takes the score. For one thing, there’s a slot-loading, slim-form DVD drive from an old laptop that’s been incorporated so smoothly it almost looks factory. Ditto for the compact flash card slot, which is also on the IDE bus. The two share a custom IDE cable– yes, kids, we did used to roll our on 44-pin cables back in the day, but you’d better believe no one did it unless they really had to. With the space constraints inside the A1200 case, [Jit06] falls into that category.

The optical and CF cards trigger the drive LED on the Amiga case by default, but [Jit] wanted to see access on the PiStorm’s SD card as well, so he wired a couple of red LEDs to the default lightguide to get a colour-contrasting flash. That SD card is also broken out with an extender for easy access without opening the case– and once again, it looks almost as good as stock. So does the modded-on VGA port, which is stealing space that once belonged to the Amiga’s RF modulator and fed by a ScanPlus AGA board.

The only thing that really stands out as modded is the volume knob on the floppy-drive side of the case; that controls a mixer that sits between the CD audio and Paula, the Amiga’s custom sound chip. This lets him use the A1200 as a CD-32 system, and is very handy to have as CD-32 games used CD audio tracks that apparently were not well mixed with the digital audio in the games.

With all the cutting and soldering, this is not a reversible mod, something people are becoming much more concerned with as these machines slowly increase in rarity. Still, as a quality-of-life improvement, this sort of upgrade might be worth it if can keep the old A1200 relevant for another three decades. For anyone else who never got over the Amiga bug, he’s also published a linux-native SD-card creator called emu68 bootstrap on github to help with making images for the PiStorm.

Thanks to [Jit] for the tip! With the easy OS-swapping he’s enabled with the SD-breakout, there’s no reason not to try the rediscovered Amiga Unix. If you want the same without cutting into a vintage case, the PiStorm can be a sidecar.

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Repairing A Pair Of Voodoo 2 GPUs For Some SLI Action

June 11, 2026 by Maya Posch 12 Comments

Well there's your problem. (Credit: Bits und Bolts, YouTube) — Well there’s your problem. (Credit: Bits und Bolts, YouTube)

Recently [Bits und Bolts] stumbled over a pair of Dragon 3000 branded 3dfx Voodoo 2 cards in his unfixed cards pile, and decided that the best course of action was to not only fix them, but also run them in SLI for some sweet Unreal Tournament action. Naturally, these cards being in the broken cards pile meant that he first had to figure out why they were broken and fix all issues.

The advantage of having two identical Voodoo 2 cards is of course that any missing components, like some resistors on one card, could be referenced on the other card. Beyond that it was mostly a matter of reflowing clearly corroded pins on the ICs and replacing damaged resistors and resistor arrays before the first tests could be run.

Using the mojo utility it was easy enough to spot that there were still some lingering issues, with clear issues visible in 3D games as well. These were tracked down to a dodgy pin on one of the texture mapping units (TMUs) that needed some more reflowing, and a very sneaky resistor array that was cracked but not obviously so until prodded with a multimeter.

With both cards now making happy noises when individually tested, it was time to go full SLI, fire up the Pentium 2 system and enjoy the glory of 24 MB of VRAM at high resolutions in Unreal Tournament. Considering that the bloke who had sent in these cards had found them while cleaning up a shed, it’s quite amazing how little rework was needed to once again party like it’s 1999.

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Powering Up A Pluggable Module From The 1948 IBM 604 Electronic Calculator

June 8, 2026 by Maya Posch 4 Comments

In that awkward transition phase between electromechanical accounting systems used in the 1940s and the introduction of fully digital computers we find systems such as the IBM 604 Electronic Calculator, advertised for accounting, calculating and engineering tasks. While not capable of complex instructions, loops and other advanced features, it did use an interesting modular architecture with easily swappable modules containing a vacuum tube and associated components. Recently [Ken Shirriff] took a poke at one of these and even powered it up.

This kind of pluggable system would become a staple of computer systems, as they enabled the use of modules or cards with specific functions that could be swapped and combined at will to increase system flexibility, lower costs and make repairs a snap. For the IBM 604 a total of about 1250 vacuum tubes were used, apparently all of which were found on these pluggable modules.

The module that [Ken] got his hands on has a thyratron tube, which is effectively a high current switch and rectifier. In the short demonstration video you can see it being used to switch a lamp on and off, with further details explained in the article.

Despite being rather limited in its functionality and limited by the punch card input and output speed, the IBM 604 was still a smashing commercial success with over 5600 units produced. A transistorized prototype version with 2200 transistors and 95% less power usage was created in 1954 that formed the basis for the IBM 608, the world’s first commercial all-transistorized calculator.

The 608 didn’t last too long, however, as at that point the breakneck pace of semiconductor technology meant that any newly released product was already obsolete by the time it hit the market. Despite this, fundamentals like pluggable modules would keep showing up over and over, ranging from the 1950s Bendix G-15 to even modern day systems, including PCs with pluggable RAM and expansion cards as well as mainframes where hot swapping of even entire CPU modules is just another feature.

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A New Life For A Rare Console

June 7, 2026 by Jenny List 6 Comments

One of the delights of our tips line is that from time to time it brings us retrocomputing hardware that, despite years of reporting, we were not aware existed. [Hitmanmcc] has just such a machine, an NEC PC Engine LT. It’s a PC engine in a laptop form factor, and like many of this super-rare console, it has succumbed to capacitor failure. We’re treated to the process of bringing it back to life.

Replacing capacitors was only part of the story for this repair, as the electrolyte had caused damage elsewhere on the board. In particular there is a small transformer that forms part of an inverter to generate an LCD bias voltage, and this had been destroyed. Fortunately the art of switching power conversion has advanced in the decades since the console was produced, and a small module was procured to do the same job.

The result of all this surgery is another rare console rescued from e-waste, and an opportunity for the rest of us to take a look too. The PC engine is a relative rarity here, but we’ve had a few hacks over the years. This converter for its American cousin is one.