Retrocomputing

1573 Articles

Windows 3.1 On A Modern AM5-Based PC Is Surprisingly Usable

April 2, 2026 by 21 Comments

Although Windows 95 stole the show, Windows 3.0 was arguably the first version of Windows that more or less nailed the basic Windows UI concept, with the major 3.1 update being quite recognizable to a modern-day audience. Even better is that you can still install Win3.1 on a modern x86-compatible PC and get some massive improvements along the way, as [Omores] demonstrates in a recent video.

The only real gotcha here is that the AMD AM5 system with Asus Prime X670-P mainboard is one of those boards whose UEFI BIOS still has the ‘classic BIOS’ Compatibility Support Module (CSM) option. With that enabled, Win 3.1 installs without further fuss via a USB floppy drive from a stack of ‘backup’ floppies that someone made in the early 90s. [Omores] also tried it with CSMWrap, but with this USB to PS/2 emulation didn’t work.

Windows 3.1 supports ‘enhanced mode’ by default, which adds virtual memory and multi-tasking if you have an 80386 CPU or better. To fix crashing on boot and having to use ‘standard mode’ instead, the ahcifix.386 fix for the responsible SATA issue by [PluMGMK] should help, or a separate SATA expansion card.

For the video driver the vbesvga.drv by [PluMGMK] was used, to support all VESA BIOS Extensions modes. This driver has improved massively since we last covered it and works great with an RTX 5060 Ti GPU. There’s now even DCI support to enable direct GPU VRAM access for e.g. video playback, with audio also working great with only a few driver-related gotchas.

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Sega Meganet: Online Gaming In 1990

April 2, 2026 by 20 Comments

It’s easy to think of online console gaming as an invention of the 2000s. Microsoft made waves when Xbox Live dropped in 2002, with Nintendo and Sony scrambling to catch up with their own offerings that were neither as sleek or well-integrated.

However, if you were around a decade earlier, you might have experienced online console gaming much closer to the dawn of the Internet era. As far back as 1990, you could jump online with your Sega Mega Drive. But what did an online console feel like in the dial-up era?

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OldVersion Is Back, And Better Than Ever

April 1, 2026 by 11 Comments

You know what they say — you can’t keep a good website down. OldVersion.com, the repository of outdated software that has been serving up old versions of tools you need for the last twenty-five years, is not going away as we reported last year. Not only is it sticking around, it’s gotten a retro facelift inspired by Windows 3.1 or OS/2. Mostly Windows, given the screensaver, but we’ll let you find that for yourself.

We’re thrilled to see that OldVersion has gotten the support they need to keep going after running into financial troubles. According to founder Alex Levine, some of that support came as a result of the Hackaday article reporting on the then-upcoming closure, so kudos to you guys for stepping up.

While we absolutely love the retro redesign of the new website, that’s one thing notably lacking — an obvious donation button. Well, that and old-school HTTP support so you can get on with your retromachines, but that, at least, is in the works according to the site roadmap. It’s a little weird that in this year of the common era 2026 you have to do extra work to give up on HTTPS functionality, but it is the way it is.

In the meantime, the site is fully usable as long as you have HTTPS capability, or go through a proxy. Perhaps you could use this ESP8266 code to get started making one, if you don’t want to embarrass your old computer by using something more powerful than it as a pass-through.

Speaking of proxies, if old versions of software aren’t enough for you, how about an old version of the internet? We heard you like old versions, so you can visit an old version of OldVersion!

Note that if you’re reading this after 01/04/2026, the look-and-feel of OldVersion.com may not match what’s depicted here.

The ikea desk, with the spectrometer on the far left.

PDP-11 Lives In Literal Computer Desk Once More

March 30, 2026 by 5 Comments

When you think of iconic parings, your brain probably goes more to “cookies and milk” than “DEC and Ikea” but after watching [Dave]’s latest on Usagi Electric where he puts a PDP-11 into an Ikea desk, you may rethink that.

The PDP-11 is vintage hardware that actually lived inside of a different desk, once upon a time, serving as the control unit for an FTIR spectrometer. While the lab equipment has thankfully survived the decades, the desk did not and when [Dave] got the unit it was as a pile of parts. He revived it, of course– it’s kind of what he does– but it didn’t get a new desk for years, until his latest shop re-organization.

The one concession to modernity– and missing parts– is using switching power supplies rather than the bulky linear PSU that would have originally powered the unit. It’s a good thing, too, or we have trouble picturing how everything would fit! This particular PDP-11 comes with the high performance vector processing unit in order to crunch those spectrographs, and apparently those chips idle at about 60C, so the desk-case got some decent-sized 120V fans to keep everything cool and running for years to come.

This isn’t the most aesthetic or fanciest case-mod we’ve seen, mostly being made of surplus plywood and scrap metal fittings, but it certainly gets the job done. Given that the PDP-11 has been crammed into every form-factor known to man, from a system-on-a-chip (before anybody really talked about SOCs) to desktop workstations, and of course the hulking cabinets with their iconic blinkenlights-– it’s hard to say that this installation isn’t reasonably authentic, even if it isn’t the original desk.

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Recreating One Of The First Hackintoshes

March 30, 2026 by 22 Comments

Apple’s Intel era was a boon for many, especially for software developers who were able to bring their software to the platform much more easily than in the PowerPC era. Macs at the time were even able to run Windows fairly easily, which was unheard of. A niche benefit to few was that it made it much easier to build Hackintosh-style computers, which were built from hardware not explicitly sanctioned by Apple but could be tricked into running OSX nonetheless. Although the Hackintosh scene exploded during this era, it actually goes back much farther and [This Does Not Compute] has put together one of the earliest examples going all the way back to the 1980s.

The build began with a Macintosh SE which had the original motherboard swapped out for one with a CPU accelerator card installed. This left the original motherboard free, and rather than accumulate spare parts [This Does Not Compute] decided to use it to investigate the Hackintosh scene of the late 80s. There were a few publications put out at the time that documented how to get this done, so following those as guides he got to work. The only original Apple part needed for this era was a motherboard, which at the time could be found used for a bargain price. The rest of the parts could be made from PC components, which can also be found for lower prices than most Mac hardware. The cases at the time would be literally hacked together as well, but in the end a working Mac would come out of the process at a very reasonable cost.

[This Does Not Compute]’s case isn’t scrounged from 80s parts bins, though. He’s using a special beige filament to print a case with the appropriate color aesthetic for a computer of this era. There are also some modern parts that make this style computer a little easier to use in today’s world like a card that lets the Mac output a VGA signal, an SD card reader, and a much less clunky power supply than the original would have had. He’s using an original floppy disk drive though, so not everything needs to be modernized. But, with these classic Macintosh computers, modernization can go to whatever extreme suits your needs.

Thanks to [Stephen] for the tip!

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Writing An Open-World Engine For The Nintendo 64

March 29, 2026 by 7 Comments

Anyone who has ever played Nintendo 64 games is probably familiar with the ways that large worlds in these games got split up, with many loading zones. Another noticeable aspect is that of the limited drawing distance, which is why even a large open area such as in Ocarina of Time‘s Hyrule Field has many features that limit how far you can actually see, such as hills and a big farming homestead in the center. Yet as [James Lambert] demonstrates in a recent video, it’s actually possible to create an open world on the N64, including large drawing distances.

As explained in the video, the drawing distance is something that the developer controls, and thus may want to restrict to hit certain performance goals. In effect he developer sets where the far clipping plane is set, beyond which items are no longer rendered. Of course, there are issues with just ramping up the distance to the far clipping plane, as the N64 only has a 15-bit Z-buffer, after which you get ‘Z fighting’, where render order becomes an issue as it’s no longer clear what is in front of what.

One fix is to push the near clipping plane further away from the player, but this comes with its own share of issues. Ergo [James] fixed it by doing two render passes: first all the far-away objects with Z-buffer disabled, and then all the nearby objects. These far-away objects can be rendered back-to-front with low level-of-detail (LoD), so this is relatively fast and also saves a lot of RAM, as the N64 is scraping by in this department at the best of times.

In the video the full details of this rendering approach, as well as a new fog rendering method, are explained, with the code and such available on GitHub for those who wish to tinker with it themselves. [James] and friends intend to develop a full game using this engine as well, so that’s definitely something to look forward to.

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Play A .WAV Instead Of Typing Line After Line Into Vintage Microcomputer

March 28, 2026 by 27 Comments

[Casey Bralla] got his hands on a Rockwell AIM 65 microcomputer, a fantastic example of vintage computing from the late 70s. It sports a full QWERTY keyboard, and a twenty character wide display complemented by a small thermal printer. The keyboard is remarkably comfortable, but doing software development on a one-line, twenty-character display is just not anyone’s idea of a good time. [Casey] made his own tools to let him write programs on his main PC, and transfer them easily to the AIM 65 instead.

A one-line, twenty-character wide display was a fantastic feature, but certainly lacking for development work.

Moving data wasn’t as straightforward in 1978 as it is today. While the Rockwell AIM 65 is a great machine, it has no disk drive and no filesystem. Programs can be written in assembler or BASIC (which had ROM support) but getting them into running memory where they could execute is not as simple as it is on modern machines. One can type a program in by hand, but no one wants to do that twice.

Fortunately the AIM 65 had a tape interface (two, actually) and could read and store data in an audio-encoded format. Rather than typing a program by hand, one could play an audio tape instead.

This is the angle [Casey]’s tools take, in the form of two Python programs: one for encoding into audio, and one for decoding. He can write a program on his main desktop, and encode it into a .wav file. To load the program, he sets up the AIM 65 then hits play on that same .wav file, sending the audio to the AIM 65 and essentially automating the process of typing it in. We’ve seen people emulate vintage tape drive hardware, but the approach of simply encoding text to and from .wav files is much more fitting in this case.

The audio encoding format Rockwell used for the AIM is very well-documented but no tools existed that [Casey] could find, so he made his own with the help of Anthropic’s Claude AI. The results were great, as Claude was able to read the documentation and, with [Casey]’s direction, generate working encoding and decoding tools that implemented the spec perfectly. It went so swimmingly he even went on to also make a two-pass assembler and source code formatter for the AIM, as well. With them, development is far friendlier.

Watch a demonstration in the video [Casey] made (embedded under the page break) that shows the encoded data being transferred at a screaming 300 baud, before being run on the AIM 65.

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