BreezyBox: A BusyBox-Like Shell And Virtual Terminal For ESP32

February 6, 2026 by 12 Comments

Much like how BusyBox crams many standard Unix commands and a shell into a single executable, so too does BreezyBox provide a similar experience for the ESP32 platform. A demo implementation is also provided, which uses the ESP32-S3 platform as part of the Waveshare 7″ display development board.

Although it invokes the BusyBox name, it’s not meant to be as stand-alone as it uses the standard features provided by the FreeRTOS-based ESP-IDF SDK. In addition to the features provided by ESP-IDF it adds things like a basic virtual terminal, current working directory (CWD) tracking and a gaggle of Unix-style commands, as well as an app installer.

The existing ELF binary loader for the ESP32 is used to run executables either from a local path or a remote one, a local HTTP server is provided and you even get ANSI color support. Some BreezyBox apps can be found here, with them often running on a POSIX-compatible system as well. This includes the xcc700 self-hosted C compiler.

You can get the MIT-licensed code either from the above GitHub project link or install it from the Espressif Component Registry if that’s more your thing.

Continue reading “BreezyBox: A BusyBox-Like Shell And Virtual Terminal For ESP32” →

Getting The VIC-20 To Speak Again

February 5, 2026 by 8 Comments

The Commodore Amiga was famous for its characteristic Say voice, with its robotic enunciation being somewhat emblematic of the 16-bit era. The Commodore VIC-20 had no such capability out of the box, but [Mike] was able to get one talking with a little bit of work.

The project centers around the Adventureland cartridge, created by Scott Adams (but not the one you’re thinking of). It was a simple game that was able to deliver speech with the aid of the Votrax Type and Talk speech synthesizer box. Those aren’t exactly easy to come by, so [Mike] set about creating a modern equivalent. The concept was simple enough. An Arduino would be used to act as a go between the VIC-20’s slow serial port operating at 300 bps and the Speakjet and TTS256 chips which both preferred to talk at 9600 bps. The audio output of the Speakjet is then passed to an LM386 op-amp, set up as an amplifier to drive a small speaker. The lashed-together TTS system basically just reads out the text from the Adventureland game in an incredibly robotic voice. It’s relatively hard to understand and has poor cadence, but it does work – in much the same way as the original Type and Talk setup would have back in the day!

Text to speech tools have come a long way since the 1980s, particularly when it comes to sounding more natural. Video after the break.

Continue reading “Getting The VIC-20 To Speak Again” →

Comparing A Clone Raspberry Pi Pico 2 With An Original One

February 4, 2026 by 36 Comments

Although [Thomas] really likes the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 and the RP2350 MCU, he absolutely, totally, really doesn’t like the micro-USB connector on it. Hence he jumped on the opportunity to source a Pico 2 clone board with the same MCU but with a USB-C connector from AliExpress. After receiving the new board, he set about comparing the two to see whether the clone board was worth it after all. In the accompanying video you can get even more details on why you should avoid this particular clone board.

In the video the respective components of both boards are analyzed and compared to see how they stack up. The worst issues with the clone Pico 2 board are an improper USB trace impedance at 130 Ω with also a cut ground plane below it that won’t do signal integrity any favors.

There is also an issue with the buck converter routing for the RP2350 with an unconnected pin (VREG_FB) despite the recommended layout in the RP2350 datasheet. Power supply issues continue with the used LN3440 DC-DC converter which can source 800 mA instead of the 1A of the Pico 2 version and performed rather poorly during load tests, with one board dying at 800 mA load.

Continue reading “Comparing A Clone Raspberry Pi Pico 2 With An Original One” →

Symbian On Nokia Lives Again, In 2026

February 4, 2026 by 51 Comments

Do you remember Nokia phones, with their Symbian OS? Dead and gone, you might think, but even they have dedicated enthusiasts here in 2026. Some of them have gone so far as to produce a new ROM for the daddy of Symbian phones, the Nokia N8, and [Janus Cycle] is giving it a spin.

For many people, the smartphone era began when the first Apple iPhones and Android devices reached the market, but the smartphone itself can be traced back almost two decades earlier to an IBM device. In the few years before the birth of today’s platforms many people even had smartphones without quite realizing what they had, because Nokia, the market leader in the 2000s, failed to make their Symbian platform user friendly in the way that Apple did. The N8 was their attempt to produce an iPhone competitor, but its lack of an on-device app store and that horrific Windows-based installation system meant it would be their last mass-market flagship before falling down the Microsoft Windows Phone rabbit hole.

In the video below the break he takes a pair of N8s and assembles one with that beautiful camera fully working, before installing the new ROM and giving it a spin. We get to see at last what the N8 could have been but wasn’t, as it gains the last Symbian release from Nokia, and the crucial missing app store. Even fifteen years later it’s a very slick device, enough to make us sorry that this ROM won’t be made for the earlier N-series sitting in a drawer where this is being written. We salute its developers for keeping the N8 alive.

Oddly, this isn’t the only Nokia from that era that’s received a little 2020s love.

Continue reading “Symbian On Nokia Lives Again, In 2026” →

A VIC-20 Emulator In Your Browser

February 3, 2026 by 11 Comments

The Commodore VIC-20 was a solid microcomputer that paved the way for the legendary Commodore 64 to come. If you’re a fan of the machine and want to revisit its glory days, you could hunt one down on an auction site and hope that it’s in working order. Or you could just emulate the VIC-20 in your browser thanks to the work of [Lance Ewing].

The project is called JVic—because it’s a VIC-20 emulator written in Java. It’s primarily intended for playing old VIC-20 games, and is designed with mobile devices front of mind—so it works well on a phone screen. You can enjoy the built-in library of games, or you can even direct JVic to boot up a ROM from a ZIP file hosted on a given URL or attached to a forum post. You can also install it on your own device rather than running it online, if so desired. [Lance] provides a range of setup options for running it locally or putting it on your own web server if that’s how you like to do things. Files are on Github for those eager to dive in.

We get lots of VIC-20 hacks around these parts. Even if it’s not the most popular machine that Commodore ever built, it’s certainly up there in the rankings. If you want to learn Forth, or even build a VIC-20 from scratch, we’ve explored that before. If you’ve got your own retrocomputer hacks kicking around, don’t hesitate to let us know!

[Thanks to Stephen Walters for the tip!]

Rewinding A Car Alternator For 240 Volt

February 3, 2026 by 22 Comments
Two phases installed on the stator. (Credit: FarmCraft101, YouTube)
Two phases installed on the stator. (Credit: FarmCraft101, YouTube)

As part of his quest to find the best affordable generator for his DIY hydroelectric power system, [FarmCraft101] is trying out a range of off-the-shelf and DIY solutions, with in his most recent video trying his hands at the very relaxing activity of rewiring the stator of an alternator.

Normally car alternators output 12VDC after internal rectification, but due to the hundreds of meters from the turbine to the shed, he’d like a higher voltage to curb transmission losses. The easiest way to get a higher voltage out of a car alternator is to change up the wiring on the stator, which is definitely one of those highly educational tasks.

Disassembling an alternator is easy enough, but removing the copper windings from the stator is quite an ordeal, as they were not designed to ever move even a fraction of a millimeter after assembly.

With that arduous task finished, the rewinding was done using 22 AWG copper enamel wire, compared to the original 16 AWG wire, and increasing the loops per coil from 8 to 30. This rewinding isn’t too complicated if you know what you’re doing, with each coil on each of the three windings placed in an alternating fashion, matching the alternating South/North poles on the rotor.

Continue reading “Rewinding A Car Alternator For 240 Volt” →

How Resident Evil 2 For The N64 Kept Its FMV Cutscenes

February 3, 2026 by 12 Comments

Originally released for the Sony PlayStation in 1998, Resident Evil 2 came on two CDs and used 1.2 GB in total. Of this, full-motion video (FMV) cutscenes took up most of the space, as was rather common for PlayStation games. This posed a bit of a challenge when ported to the Nintendo 64 with its paltry 64 MB of cartridge-based storage. Somehow the developers managed to do the impossible and retain the FMVs, as detailed in a recent video by [LorD of Nerds]. Toggle the English subtitles if German isn’t among your installed natural language parsers.

Instead of dropping the FMVs and replacing them with static screens, a technological improvement was picked. Because of the N64’s rather beefy hardware, it was possible to apply video compression that massively reduced the storage requirements, but this required repurposing the hardware for tasks it was never designed for.

The people behind this feat were developers at Angel Studios, who had 12 months to make it work. Ultimately they achieved a compression ratio of 165:1, with software decoding handling the decompressing and the Reality Signal Processor (RSP) that’s normally part of the graphics pipeline used for both audio tasks and things like upscaling.

Continue reading “How Resident Evil 2 For The N64 Kept Its FMV Cutscenes” →