Access The Information Superhighway With A Mac Plus

October 17, 2024 by Bryan Cockfield 5 Comments

For some time now, Apple has developed a reputation for manufacturing computers and phones that are not particularly repairable or upgradable. While this reputation is somewhat deserved, especially in recent years, it seems less true for their older machines. With the second and perhaps most influential computer, the Apple II, being so upgradable that the machine had a production run of nearly two decades. Similarly, the Macintosh Plus of 1986 was surprisingly upgradable and repairable and [Hunter] demonstrates its capabilities by bringing one onto the modern Internet, albeit with a few tricks to adapt the old hardware and software to the modern era.

The Mac Plus was salvaged from a thrift store, and the first issue to solve was that it had some rotten capacitors that had to be replaced before the computer could be reliably powered on at all. [Hunter] then got to work bringing this computer online, with the only major hardware modification being a BlueSCSI hard drive emulator which allows using an SD card instead of an original hard disk. It can also emulate an original Macintosh Ethernet card, allowing it to fairly easily get online.

The original operating system and browser don’t support modern protocols such as HTTPS or scripting languages like Javascript or CSS, so a tool called MacProxy was used to bridge this gap. It serves simplified HTML from the Internet to the Mac Plus, but [Hunter] wanted it to work even better, adding modular domain-specific handling to allow the computer to more easily access sites like Reddit, YouTube, and even Hackaday, although he does call us out a bit for not maintaining our retro page perhaps as well as it ought to be.

[Hunter] has also built an extension to use the Wayback Machine to serve websites to the Mac from a specific date in the past, which really enhances the retro feel of using a computer like this to access the Internet. Of course, if you don’t have original Macintosh hardware but still want to have the same experience of the early Internet or retro hardware this replica Mac will get you there too.

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Linus Live-Codes Music On The Commodore 64

October 16, 2024 by Elliot Williams 12 Comments

In this tremendously educational video, [Linus Åkesson] takes us through how he develops a synthesizer and a sequencer and editor for it on the Commodore 64, all in BASIC. While this sounds easy, [Linus] is doing this in hard mode: all of the audio is generated by POKE, and it gets crazier from there. If you’re one of those people out there who think that BASIC is a limited language, you need to watch this video.

[Linus] can do anything with POKE. On a simple computer like the C64, the sound chip, the screen chips, and even the interrupts that control program flow are all accessible simply by writing to the right part of memory. So the main loop here simply runs through a lot of data, POKEing it into memory and turning the sound chip on and off. There’s also a counter running inside the C64 that he uses to point into a pitch lookup table in the code.

But the inception part comes when he designs the sequencer and editor. Because C64 BASIC already has an interactive code editor, he hijacks this for his music editor. The final sequencer interface exists inside the program itself, and he writes music in the code, in real time, using things like LIST and editing. (Code is data, and data is code.) Add in a noise drum hack, and you’ve got some classic chiptuney sounds by the end.

We love [Linus]’s minimal C64 exercises, and this one gets maximal effect out of a running C64 BASIC environment. But that’s so much code in comparison to his 256-byte “A Mind is Born” demo. But to get that done, he had to use assembly.

Thanks [zogzog] for the great tip!

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The Greengate DS:3 Part 2: Putting A Retro Sampler To Use

October 14, 2024 by Adam Fabio 2 Comments

The Greengate DS:3 had been re-created in the form of the Goodgreat. Now [Bea Thurman] had to put it to use. If the Greengate DS:3 card was rare, the keyboard was nearly impossible to find. After a long search, [Bea] bought one all the way from Iceland. The card of course came courtesy of [Eric].

It was time to connect the two together. But there was a problem — a big problem. The GreenGate has a DB-25 connected via a ribbon cable to the board’s 2×10 connector. The keyboard that shipped with those cards would plug right in. Unfortunately, [Bea’s] keyboard had a DIP-40 IDC connector crimped on its ribbon cable. What’s more the connectors for the sustain and volume pedals were marked, but never drilled out. The GreenGate silk screen was still there though.

Maybe it was a prototype or some sort of modified hardware. Either way, the 40-pin DIP connector had to go if the keyboard ever were to work with the card. What followed were a few hours of careful wire tracing

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Solving A Retrocomputing Mystery With An Album Cover: Greengate DS:3

October 14, 2024 by Adam Fabio 10 Comments

[Bea Thurman] had a retro music conundrum. She loved the classic Greengate DS:3 sampler, but couldn’t buy one, and couldn’t find enough information to build her own. [Bea’s] plea for help caught the attention of [Eric Schlaepfer], aka [TubeTime]. The collaboration that followed ultimately solved a decades-old mystery.

In the 1980s, there were two types of musicians: Those who could afford a Fairlight CMI and everyone else. If you were an Apple II owner, the solution was a Greengate DS:3. The DS:3 was a music keyboard and a sampler card for the Apple II+ (or better). The plug-in card was a bit mysterious, though. The cards were not very well documented, and only a few survive today. To make matters worse, some chips had part numbers sanded off. It was a bit of a mystery until [Bea and Tubetime] got involved.

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Hacker Chris Edwards demonstrating his wireless Amiga

Retro Wi-Fi On A Dime: Amiga’s Slow Lane Connection

October 13, 2024 by Heidi Ulrich 9 Comments

In a recent video, [Chris Edwards] delves into the past, showing how he turned a Commodore Amiga 3000T into a wireless-capable machine. But forget modern Wi-Fi dongles—this hack involves an old-school D-Link DWL-G810 wireless Ethernet bridge. You can see the Amiga in action in the video below.

[Chris] has a quirky approach to retrofitting. He connects an Ethernet adapter to his Amiga, bridges it to the D-Link, and sets up an open Wi-Fi network—complete with a retro 11 Mbps speed. Then again, the old wired connection was usually 10 Mbps in the old days.

To make it work, he even revived an old Apple AirPort Extreme as a supporting router since the old bridge didn’t support modern security protocols. Ultimately, the Amiga gets online wirelessly, albeit at a leisurely pace compared to today’s standards. He later demonstrates an upgraded bridge that lets him connect to his normal network.

We’ve used these wireless bridges to put oscilloscopes and similar things on wireless, but newer equipment usually requires less work even if it doesn’t already have wireless. We’ve also seen our share of strange wireless setups like this one. If you are going to put your Amgia on old-school networking, you might as well get Java running, too.

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A VIC-20 With No VIC

October 13, 2024 by Al Williams 7 Comments

[DrMattRegan] has started a new video series to show his latest recreation of a Commodore VIC-20. The core of the machine is [Ben Eater’s] breadboard 6502 design. To make it a VIC-20, though, you need a “VIC chip” which, of course, is no longer readily available. Many people, of course, use FPGAs or other programmable logic to fake VIC chips. But [Matt] will build his with discrete TTL logic. You can see the first installment of the series below.

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Are CRT TVs Important For Retro Gaming?

October 11, 2024 by Dave Rowntree 51 Comments

We always thought the older console games looked way better back in the day on old CRTs than now on a modern digital display. [Stephen Walters] thinks so too, and goes into extensive detail in a lengthy YouTube video about the pros and cons of CRT vs digital, which was totally worth an hour of our time. But are CRTs necessary for retro gaming?

The story starts with [Stephen] trying to score a decent CRT from the usual avenue and failing to find anything worth looking at. The first taste of a CRT display came for free. Left looking lonely at the roadside, [Stephen] spotted it whilst driving home. This was a tiny 13″ Sanyo DS13320, which, when tested, looked disappointing, with a blurry image and missing edges. Later, they acquired a few more displays: a Pansonic PV-C2060, an Emerson EWF2004A and a splendid-looking Sony KV24FS120. Some were inadequate in various ways, lacking stereo sound and component input options.

A poor analog cable coupled with rendering inaccuracy gives a nice filtering effect

A large video section discusses the reasons for the early TV standards. US displays (and many others using NTSC) were designed for 525 scan lines, of which 480 were generally visible. These displays were interlaced, drawing alternating fields of odd and even line numbers, and early TV programs and NTSC DVDs were formatted in this fashion. Early gaming consoles such as the NES and SNES, however, were intended for 240p (‘p’ for progressive) content, which means they do not interlace and send out a blank line every other scan line. [Stephen] goes into extensive detail about how 240p content was never intended to be viewed on a modern, sharp display but was intended to be filtered by the analogue nature of the CRT, or at least its less-than-ideal connectivity. Specific titles even used dithering to create the illusion of smooth gradients, which honestly look terrible on a pixel-sharp digital display. We know the differences in signal bandwidth and distortion of the various analog connection standards affect the visuals. Though RGB and component video may be the top two standards for quality, games were likely intended to be viewed via the cheaper and more common composite cable route.

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