Bernoulli Disk Goes “Wii!” When Plugged Into WiiU

June 20, 2026 by Tyler August 10 Comments

The Bernoulli disk was a wild piece of 1980s hardware. Take a big floppy. Spin the platter at 1500 RPM just a micron or so from a read head. The airflow around that rapidly-spinning disk actually stabilizes the disk that close to the read-head via the Bernoulli effect, hence the name. Once upon a time, everybody wanted a Bernoulli Box to put under their Macintosh 512, but [Will It Work?] wanted to see how well these old drives held up to the 21st century by using it to load games onto a WiiU.

It’s not as crazy at is it seems. The WiiU is happy to read and write anything that looks like a USB mass storage device. The Bernoulli Box is of course pre-USB — even the later model 5 1/4″ drive [Will] is using from 1987. That means it uses SCSI, the USB of the 1980s. He’s got a 90 MB disk, though Iomega did make disks of higher capacity in that format, all the way up to 230 MB. Yes, the same Iomega of Zip-drive fame and infamy. But don’t worry, the peculiar pneumatic nature of the Bernoulli disks makes them immune to the click of death.

You might think it’s going to take a great deal of hacking and homebrew to get the WiiU talking to a SCSI drive from the 80s, but as we said in the introduction, Nintendo made this thing respect USB conventions, so all that’s needed is an SCSI-to-USB cable. Well, plus a passive SCSI 1 to SCSI 2 adapter to get the USB adapter to fit.

It doesn’t seem like the drive slows down the WiiU nearly as much as we’d expect, but then it’s not a console known for fast load times. The other surprising detail is how much space the WiiU’s formatting sucked up, knocking the 90 MB disk down to only 68 MB. Combine that with the WiiU’s firmware wanting to pad space for save files, and not much fits. Thus we don’t expect this odd tower of power to take off like the original did. Still, if you had one of these back in the day, it might be a nice nostalgia hit to hear the drive whirring away.

If you think a disk drive is something Nintendo would never imagine for their consoles, think again! The Japanese version of the NES had the Famicom Disk System, which turns out to be essential if you want to run UNIX on it.

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Making Old Computers Count To A Million

June 19, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 10 Comments

How fast can you count to a million? It would probably take you a while. A computer could certainly do it faster. Indeed, the The National Museum of Computing figured it could actually prove to be a simple but useful benchmark for comparing computers over many eras and architectures. Thus was born the Million Measure.

The intention was to develop a benchmark that could run on just about anything considered a “computer.” As explained in a recent talk, the Million Measure can be run quite simply on anything from an ancient World War II computer like Colossus, to a modern Raspberry Pi. There are no complicated algorithms that need optimization, nor architecture-specific code required to do the job. The museum also found it to be a useful way to figure out which computers in their collection were actually working at any given time. Early computers from the mid-20th century reported benchmark times in minutes, while a 1995 BeBox is the fastest machine tested so far at 0.004 seconds.

It’s not a particularly useful measure for modern machines, which are so fast as to make the test difficult to parse in an intuitive way. But if you’re working with today’s hardware, there are other techniques you can use. Video after the break.

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Epson HX-20 Gets A Drive Upgrade

June 19, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 11 Comments

The Epson HX-20 is sometimes referred to as an early laptop computer. It’s a little odd in its form factor, and in its storage, relying on a microcassette drive to store data. It can be problematic to keep these tapes and drives going after so many decades, so [Andrew Menadue] has been tinkering with a more modern solution.

The replacement drive uses a Raspberry Pi Pico to emulate the original tape drive. The Pico uses a microSD card to store data instead of the magnetic media of old. The device has a small screen for showing status information and four buttons for navigation, allowing the faux drive to be controlled as to what “tape” it’s pretending to be. It’s also possible to use the device to emulate ROM cartridges that could be used with the HX-20 in place of its original tape deck storage solution.

We’ve seen some other old hardware get similar drive upgrades before, too. No surprise, because mechanical drives and media simply don’t last forever. Sometimes you need to build a replacement that’s viable today. Video after the break.

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A promo image that might have been a little much even in 1999.

Commodore Unveils Linux Powered Flip Phone

June 18, 2026 by Tyler August 75 Comments

Whatever happens with the new incarnation of the Commodore corporation, we’ll always remember the old one fondly. Well, we’ll remember certain of its products fondly, at any rate, if not the corporate leadership that drove them under. About that, perhaps the less said the better. That’s why we’re looking at the revived Commodore’s latest offering with equal parts interest and trepidation — is there really a market for a Linux-based, Commodore branded flip phone in 2026 and beyond?

The official reveal trailer, which you can watch below, can only be described as weaponized nostalgia for the late 90s, which tracks because the revived C-64 is more-or-less the same thing for the 8-bit era. That said, between replaceable batteries, actually having a decent camera — a 48MP Sony module — quality Cirrus Logic DAC for audio, and running the Linux-based, Android-app-compatible Sailfish OS, the “Callback 8020” ticks all the boxes. Except for price, that is. Many will find the $499 USD launch price a little tough to swallow in this economy, so we hope they aren’t betting the farm on this one being a mass hit.

Still, compared to other premium “digital minimalist” products like the LightPhone III, the price looks reasonable — and with web browsing and social media explicitly excluded from the app store, this phone is firmly in that category. At least this one comes with some sweet Commodore branded headphones, which double as an FM antenna just like they did on your Nokia back when.

While it doesn’t come with DOOM from the factory, it does come with Snake and a selection of emulated C64 games . Ringtones are SID samples, but of course there’s no actual SID chip in the phone, any more than there’s a 6502. That said, if someone builds a phone around a 6502, please let us know.

No, it’s not a new Amiga, as so many of us were hoping for, but by putting quality modern components into the flip phone form-factor, at least they’re trying to innovate (or perhaps retrovate) and we have to respect that. Only time will tell if the market does.

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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 29 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.