HDMI For The Color Computer 2

September 2, 2026 by 8 Comments

[Scott Baker] bought a TRS-80 Color Computer off eBay some five years ago. He’d always intended to add a CoCoVGA or CoCoDV upgrade to hook it up to a monitor, but the device was sold out and his name never made it off the waitlist. Thus, he decided to build his own solution to give the classic machine a proper HDMI output.

The concept behind the project is simple enough—grab the digital signals that feed the MC6847 IC responsible for generating the analog video output, and use them to create an all-digital video output over HDMI. [Scott] achieved this by using a Tang Nano board, which hosts a Gowin GW1N-1 FPGA. It’s able to snoop the signals heading to the MC6847 and, with some supporting components and level shifters, it can spit out video befitting modern screens. To make the system nicely complete, an analog-to-digital converter is also included to pick up the analog sound output from the TRS-80 and spit it out down the same HDMI cable. Such convenience!

There’s something strangely anachronistic about grabbing a TRS-80 off the shelf and hooking it up to a flatscreen with a single HDMI cable. Regardless, it’s a pretty great way to play with your old machine without having to futz with heavy old CRTs. We’ve featured plenty of similar projects before, too. Continue reading “HDMI For The Color Computer 2” →

Hackaday Europe 2026: Playstation 4 To Psychometer

September 1, 2026 by No comments

There are many ways to detect stress in an individual. You can use self-reporting checklists, you could try and measure various vital signs like respiratory rate and pulse and infer things, or you could observe the levels of hormones like cortisol in the blood.

Or… you could pull some parts out of a Playstation 4, and get hacking. Edwin Hwu did precisely that, creating a device that can image the skin down to the nanometer and potentially even determine fine details about an individual’s health status. He came to Hackaday Europe 2026 to tell us all about it.

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Hackaday Links: August 30, 2026

August 30, 2026 by 12 Comments

The big news today is, of course, the successful launch and deployment of NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope earlier this morning. The space agency’s latest observatory lifted off at 7:26 AM Eastern from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy, and by 8:00 AM it was separated from the rocket’s upper stage and flying on its own.

While the sound and fury of launch is exciting, it’s just the beginning of the journey for Roman. It will take several months for the spacecraft to complete its roughly 1.5 million-kilometer trek out to Earth’s second Lagrange point (L2), where it will set up shop near — in cosmic terms, anyway — the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Along the way, it will switch on and test various systems and components, with its primary 300 megapixel infrared camera scheduled to power up in three weeks or so.

There’s a lot to cover about the Roman Space Telescope. Built from spy satellite spare parts donated by the National Reconnaissance Office and featuring a field of view 100 times greater than that of Hubble, its launch is widely considered to be one of the most important scientific milestones of the decade. We’ll be bringing you more about the past, present, and future of this flagship mission as it progresses.

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Eenk Provides EInk, ESP32 Powered Text Adventures

August 27, 2026 by 18 Comments

There’s a niche genre of text adventure that’s halfway between a traditional novel and a videogame. Think Zork if it had an extra few novels worth of words of well-crafted story to go with the action. [t0mg] is a fan of such adventures, and also quite enjoys carrying around his palm-sized ESP32 powered Xteink e-ink reader, so decided to create a project to merge the two interests, called eeink.

The Xteink readers have gotten popular lately because their modest internals and size make them very affordable. Not to mention hackable, since they’re basically an ESP32-C3 e-ink dev board that comes with a nice case and battery. The X4 Pro notably comes with an ESP32-S3 which means a lot more RAM, but this project targets both that and the X3/X4 that use the C3 version. Using the C3 means working within some rather stringent limits, as Xteink didn’t spring for any PSRAM, so [t0mg] had less memory to work with than folks did in the 80s.

This project is specifically focused on adventures using the scripting language ink, and comes with its own IDE called eenky to roll your own choose your own adventure book. It’s all on GitHub under an MIT license, and if you want to see it in action there’s a demo video embedded below.

Speaking of Zork, it wasn’t just the first commercial text adventure; it brought some important technological innovations, too.

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Hackaday Europe 2026: PCBs With A Plot

August 26, 2026 by No comments

Printed circuit boards were developed first for function over form. They were a way to mount components and connect them in a stable, robust fashion, while taking into regard things like packaging and cooling requirements to enable a circuit to function. Circuit boards often end up looking cool in a techy kind of way, but their aesthetic is usually very much secondary to their actual purpose.

Katrin Dietzsch likes to use her PCBs a little differently, however. She designs boards that are intended to be a narrative tool for tabletop roleplaying, and came down to Hackaday Europe 2026 to walk us through the development of this very whimsical hardware.

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Native SMB3 Client Brings Modern NAS Access To 20-Year-Old PowerPC Macs

August 25, 2026 by 17 Comments

As software updates cease for operating systems, they eventually begin to lose access to parts of the LAN and internet due to out of date encryption features, as well as the inability to handle file sharing protocols like SBM3, which is somewhat of a necessity if you have e.g. a NAS on the LAN. Such too was the case with [watermark_hd]’s 20-year old PowerPC Macs and their installations of OS X Tiger and Leopard.

Cue Aqualink, a native SMB3 client for these older OS X versions that uses [Ronnie Sahlberg]’s libsmb2 server/client library for SMB2 and SBM3. The source code can be found over on GitHub, along with a Japanese translation. By using a local WebDAV server Tiger’s built-in mount_webdav feature can be used to mount these remote volumes.

While you can often still use SMB1 even on modern Windows and Linux/BSD via Samba, allowing even retro systems like these PowerMacs to speak SMB3 is at least a great boost for network security, even if the aforementioned encryption shortcomings mean that you cannot quite run encrypted file shares yet.

Although OS X eventually began to adopt modern SMB versions, some of us may remember how incredibly buggy they were, to the point that us OS X users often had to fall back to CIFS (SMB 1.0), so this is another potential use for this Aqualink application.

A 1990s Homebrew OS With GUI And Web Browser, In AM29000 Machine Code

August 24, 2026 by 11 Comments

The AM29000 series of processors were AMD’s entry into the world of super-fast next-generation silicon of the late 1980s. It was a time when ARM was still a niche architecture in a British educational computer, the 68000 series was still a major player, and it was by no means certain that the x86 would maintain its position. It therefore wasn’t an unreasonable choice for someone building a high performance computer at the time, which is what [Oscar Toledo G.] and his father did. If that wasn’t enough, he went on to write an operating system for it in AM29000 assembly, complete with a GUI, a C compiler, and an up-to-date web browser for the late 1990s. The story makes for an engaging read.

It’s written across two parts, with the first looking at the computer and the early software development, and the second at the C compiler and web browser. It’s a tale of epic mastery of the machine, and something we remember ourselves, piecing together knowledge in a time before the Internet placed it all at our fingertips. Tales such as hand porting — we can’t really say compiling — C code into AM29000 machine code are completely next-level. You have to read these two write-ups, and there’s even an in-browser emulator should you want to try it.

Meanwhile, in case you think something is a little familiar here, he’s the same person who brought us a Transputer in the browser.