Reverse-engineering The 1998 Ultima Online Demo Server

May 8, 2026 by Maya Posch 1 Comment

In any MMORPG, the average user will generally only encounter the client side of the system. This makes building a compatible open source version of the proprietary server into a bit of a chore. Of course, sometimes you get a bit of a break, such as with the – still active – MMORPG Ultima Online, when the disc for the 1998 The Second Age expansion contained a stand-alone demo. This also meant a (stripped-down) server which has been gratefully reverse-engineered by the community, with [draxinar] now claiming to have made the most complete server based on this demo server.

To make things extra challenging, the originally written in C++ server binary was reverse-engineered into C99 code, meaning that the use of classes and associated vtables had to be left intact, just without the critter comforts provided by C++.

The total process took about a decade with occasional progress, with the current server binary being mostly identical to a 1998-era Ultima Online server. Some features that were stubbed out or disabled in the demo server had to be re-enabled or reimplemented, including the user account system.

Features that were left out of the final release like the ecology system were also enabled in so far as they were implemented. Although there is probably still a lot more work to be done on the code, [draxinar] reckons that this is a good point for the community to get involved to do some testing and provide feedback. There are also some missing server-related resource files that may still be saved somewhere.

Thanks to [adistuder] for the tip.

A 1947 Radio Gets A Face Lift

May 6, 2026 by Al Williams 4 Comments

We’ve all done it. We spy an old radio at a garage sale or resale shop. We know someone should bring it back to life, but it looks like a project, so we pass it by. Not [Ken] from [Ken’s Shop]. He found an Arvin 664A AM radio from 1947 in what appears to be a home-built cabinet and decided to bring it back to life.

From what we could find, the original case was a white plastic, not the wood box it is in today. So the first challenge was simply getting inside to see what was going on. Continue reading “A 1947 Radio Gets A Face Lift” →

Rescuing The Data On A 1960s LGP-21 Computer’s Disk Memory

April 25, 2026 by Maya Posch 36 Comments

One of the nice things about magnetic storage is that as long as the magnetic layer remains intact, the data it contains should stay readable pretty much indefinitely. That raises the prospect of recovering data from really old computer systems featuring magnetic memory, such as the 63-year old LGP-21 that [David Lovett] of Usagi Electric is currently restoring. Its magnetic memory disk is nothing amazing by modern standards, but after initial testing it seems to spin up and read data just fine, raising the question of what was left on the drive when it was last used, meaning what was in memory at the time.

The read/write head side of the LGP-21's magnetic memory. (Credit: Usagi Electric, YouTube) — The read/write head side of the LGP-21’s magnetic memory. (Credit: Usagi Electric, YouTube)

Non-invasive data recovery here involves writing a program that will simply read the entire disk from beginning to end. Tracks 0 and 1 were found to be unreadable due to some kind of hardware issue, but track 2 could be backed up by looking at the output on the CRT, thus providing a track to use. Fascinatingly the LGP-21’s memory disks uses interleaved tracks to reduce the number of read/write heads as part of the overall cost-saving measures relative to the more expensive LGP-30. As you might expect, this slows down memory access a lot over its big brother.

Before any recovery attempt could begin, the Flexowriter typewriter that forms the user interface to the computer had to be given some serious maintenance, along with a few other components like a switch and the paper tape reader. This restored the ability to even properly enter data and receive output instructions.

The subsequent effort to recover the stored data involved a bootstrap program that got loaded into memory, after which the remainder of the program was loaded from paper tape. Following this everything worked swimmingly, though with the caveat that with not even a floppy drive to use, the raw hexadecimal data was hammered out on paper with the Flexowriter over the course of 1.5 hours.

This data will now be scanned in and OCR-ed into something that can hopefully be easily analyzed. Hopefully we’ll know before long what this system was last used for.

Continue reading “Rescuing The Data On A 1960s LGP-21 Computer’s Disk Memory” →

Hackaday Links: April 19, 2026

April 19, 2026 by Tom Nardi 5 Comments

We’ll start things off this week with a story that’s developing more than 25 billion kilometers from Earth — on Friday, NASA announced that the command had been sent to shut down Voyager 1’s Low-energy Charged Particles (LECP) instrument. As the power produced by the spacecraft’s aging radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) continues to dwindle, engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory have been systematically turning off various systems to extend the mission for as long as possible. It’s believed that deactivating LECP should buy them another year, during which engineers hope to implement a more ambitious power-saving routine. If this sounds a bit familiar, you’re probably thinking of Voyager 2. The plug was pulled on its LECP instrument back in March of 2025.

The JPL engineers hope that their new plan may allow them to reactivate previously disabled systems on the twin space probes, but even if everything goes according to plan, there’s no fighting the inevitable. At some point, there simply won’t be enough juice in the RTGs to keep the lights on. Although it’s going to be a sad day when we have to bring you that news, surviving a half-century in space is one hell of a run.

Speaking of ending a run, just a week after Amazon announced that pre-2012 Kindles would no longer be supported, the company is letting users know that the Kindle software for PCs will be discontinued in June. In its current form, at least. As Good e-Reader reports, Amazon is developing a new client for users who want to access the Kindle ecosystem from their computers, but it will only run on Windows 11. Since older software could be used to strip DRM from purchased ebooks, it seems likely this is another attempt to lock the platform down.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: April 19, 2026” →

What Can You Run On A 1960s Univac? Anything You’re Willing To Wait For!

April 18, 2026 by Tyler August 14 Comments

There are two UNIVAC 1219B computers that have survived since the 1960s and one of them is even operational. [Nathan Farlow] wanted to run a Minecraft server on it, so he did. After a lot of work, of course, which is described in a detailed blog post, and, a YouTube video by [TheScienceElf] we’ve embedded below.

The UNIVAC is a seriously weird architecture by modern standards: it’s got eighteen-bit words — yeah, not even a power of two — and one’s compliment arithmatic with a weird signed zero thing going on. There’s one 36-bit and one 18-bit register, and only 40,960 words of memory. Eighteen-bit words. Yeah, it was the 1960s and they were making it up as they went along.

[Nathan] wasn’t, entirely, as this weird system is both well-documented and already had an emulator — in BASIC, of all things. [TheScienceElf] used the docs and the existing emulator to recreate his own in Rust so he could test their somewhat crazy plan without wasting cycles on real hardware. The plan? Well, there are really only two options if you want to build modern software for a niche architecture: one is to add niche support to something like GCC, and the other is to write a RISC V emulator and compile to that. We’ve seen that second one before, and that’s the route [Nathan] took.

Of course, [Nathan] is a machine learning guy, so he made the best possible use of LLMs — though it’s interesting to see that unlike Z80 Assembly, Claude Code really couldn’t wrap its virtual head around the UNIVAC’s assembly language, and [Nathan] had to bang out the RISC V emulator himself. Emulator in hand, [Nathan] and friends had code to run on the museum UNIVAC. A single frame of an NES game took 40 minutes, but hey, at least it finished before they got back from lunch.

[TheScienceElf]’s YouTube treatment teases hosting Minecraft, but it wasn’t a full server, just the login portion. That they were able to get TCP/IP over serial and set up a handshake between a 2020s laptop and a 1960s computer is still mighty impressive. Just the work the Vintage Computer Federation put in to get and keep this antique running is mighty impressive all on its own, but it’s wonderful they let people play with it.

Continue reading “What Can You Run On A 1960s Univac? Anything You’re Willing To Wait For!” →

The Kentucky Cave Wars, And Going Viral In 1925

April 16, 2026 by Al Williams 10 Comments

Floyd Collins, the unfortunate star of this post. (Public Domain)

Information, it seems, flows at the speed of media. In the old days, information traveled with people on ships or horses, so if, say, a battle was won or lost, it could be months or even years before anyone back home knew what happened. While books and movable type let people store information, they still moved at the speed people moved. Before the telegraph, there were attempts to use things like semaphores to speed the flow of information, but those were generally limited to line-of-sight operations. Carrier pigeons were handy, but don’t really move much faster than people.

The telegraph helped, but people didn’t have telegraph stations in their homes. At least not ordinary people. But radio was different. It didn’t take long for every home to have a radio, and while the means of broadcasting remained in the hands of a few, the message could go everywhere virtually instantly. This meant news could go from one side of the globe to the other in seconds. It also meant rumors, fads, and what we might think of today as memes could, too.

You might think that things “going viral” is a modern problem, but, in reality, media sensations have always been with us. All that changes is the number of them and their speed.

One of the earliest viral media sensations dealt with William Floyd Collins, an unfortunate man who was exploring caves during the Kentucky Cave Wars.

Continue reading “The Kentucky Cave Wars, And Going Viral In 1925” →

Making The Forgotten 1982 Game Adventure Canoe Run On MAME

April 12, 2026 by Maya Posch 5 Comments

A while back [Jack] came across a Taito arcade game that neither he nor any of his mates recognized. The game was Adventure Canoe and part of the collection of forty preinstalled games on a Taito Egret II mini arcade cabinet. Yet despite [Jack] and his buddies being avid 1980s arcade enthusiasts, this 1982 title for the Z80-based Taito SJ system was completely unfamiliar to them.

When even a web search turned up extremely few details, [Jack] did the only reasonable thing and borrowed the rather expensive mini arcade for hopefully some extracting of the game ROM.

As expensive as this mini arcade is, it features the typical ARM-based SoC and Linux-based firmware. Although you can totally dump the Flash, [Jack] found that the firmware update ZIP file was a much easier target to poke at and hopefully extract the ROMs from.

Of course, Taito used password-protected ZIP files within the firmware, leading to some reverse-engineering to find the passwords. The first was ‘hidden’ as plain text in the egret2 binary. For the remainder of the ZIP files the password wasn’t as readily found, but required some sleuthing. This took the form of dynamic runtime analysis with gdb, using information previously gleaned from a Ghidra analysis. Eventually this yielded the final passwords.

Extracting the game’s ROM files this way allowed for them to be adapted to the format that MAME expects, after which the game just had to be added to the emulator’s source files. With this done the game fired right up, and [Jack] was able to play the game without any trouble.