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 6 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 50 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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PC Floppy Copy Protection: Vault Corporation Prolok

October 11, 2024 by Jenny List 6 Comments

In the 2020s we’re used to software being readily accessible, and often free, whether as-in-beer or as-in-speech. This situation is a surprisingly new one, and in an earlier era of consumer software it was most often an expensive purchase. An anti-piracy industry sprang up as manufacturers tried to protect their products, and it’s one of those companies that [GloriousCow] examines in detail, following their trajectory from an initial success through to an ignominious failure driven by an anti-piracy tech too extreme even for the software industry.

Vault Corporation made a splash in the marketplace with Prolok, a copy protection system for floppies that worked by creating a physically damaged area of the disc which wouldn’t be present on a regular floppy. The write-up goes into detail about the workings of the system, including how to circumvent a Prolok protected title if you find one. This last procedure resulted in a lawsuit between Prolok and Quaid Software, one of the developers of circumvention tools, which established the right of Americans to make backup copies of their owned software.

The downfall of Vault Corporation came with their disastrously misjudged Prolok Plus product, which promised to implant a worm on the hard disks of pirates and delete all their files in an act of punishment. Sensing the huge reputational damage of being tied to such a product the customers stayed away, and the company drifted into obscurity.

For those interested further in the world of copy protection from this era, we’ve previously covered the similar deep dives that [GloriousCow] has done on Softguard’s Superlok as well as the Interlock system from Electronic Arts.

C64 Gets A Graphics Upgrade Courtesy Of Your Favorite Piano Manufacturer

October 11, 2024 by Lewin Day 39 Comments

The Commodore 64 was quite a machine in its time, though a modern assessment would say that it’s severely lacking in the graphical department. [Vossi] has whipped up a bit of an upgrade for the C64 and C128, in the form of a graphics expansion card running Yamaha hardware.

As you might expect, the expansion is designed to fit neatly into a C64 cartridge slot. The card runs the Yamaha V9958—the video display processor known for its appearance in the MSX2+ computers. In this case, it’s paired with a healthy 128 kB of video RAM so it can really do its thing. The V9958 has an analog RGB output that can be set for PAL or NTSC operation, and can perform at resolutions up to 512×212 or even 512×424 interlaced. Naturally, it needs to be hooked directly up to a compatible screen, like a 1084, or one with SCART input. [Vossi] took the time to create some demos of the chip’s capabilities, drawing various graphics in a way that the C64 couldn’t readily achieve on its own.

It’s a build that almost feels like its from an alternate universe, where Yamaha decided to whip up a third-party graphics upgrade for the C64. That didn’t happen, but stranger team ups have occurred over the years.

[Thanks to Stephen Walters for the tip!]

Meet The Optical Data Format You’ve Never Heard Of Before

October 10, 2024 by Lewin Day 80 Comments

You consider yourself a power user. You’ve got lots of files, and damn it, you like to keep them backed up. Around a decade ago, you gave up on burning optical discs, and switched to storing your files on portable hard drives. One local, one off-site, and a cloud backup just to be sure. You’re diligent for a home gamer, and that gets you done.

The above paragraph could describe any number of Hackaday readers, but what of bigger operations? Universities, businesses, and research institutions all have data budgets far in excess of what the individual could even imagine. What might shock you is that some of them are relying on optical media—just not the kind you’ve ever heard of before. Enter Sony’s Optical Disc Archive.

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The Punched Card Detective

October 9, 2024 by Al Williams 31 Comments

[John Graham-Cumming] might not be the first person to thumb through an old book and find an IBM punched card inside. But he might be the first to actually track down the origin of the cards. Admittedly, there were clues. The book was a Portuguese book about computers from the 1970s. The cards also had a custom logo on them that belonged to a computer school at the time.

A Hackaday card, thanks to the online card punch

It is hard to remember, but there was a time when cards reigned supreme. Sometimes called Hollerith cards after Herman Hollerith, who introduced the cards to data processing, these cards used square holes to encode information. Reading a card is simple. There are 80 columns on a classic card. If a column has a single punch over a number, then that’s what that column represents. So if you had a card with a punch over the “1” followed by a punched out “5” in the next column and a “0” in the column after that, you were looking at 150. No punches, of course, was a space.

So, how did you get characters? The two blank regions above the numbers are the X and Y zones (or, sometimes, the 11 and 12 zones). The “0” row was also sometimes used as a zone punch. To interpret a column, you needed to know if you expected numbers or letters. An 11-punch with a digit indicated a negative number if you were expecting a number. But it could also mean a particular letter of the alphabet combined with one or more punches in the same column.

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