APU

3 Articles

A Steam Machine Clone For An Indeterminate But Possibly Low Cost

January 2, 2026 by 28 Comments

For various reasons, crypto mining has fallen to the wayside in recent years. Partially because it was never useful other than as a speculative investment and partially because other speculative investments have been more popular lately, there are all kinds of old mining hardware available at bargain prices. One of those is the Asrock AMD BC250, which is essentially a cut down Playstation 5 but which has almost everything built into it that a gaming PC would need to run Steam, and [ETA PRIME] shows us how to get this system set up.

The first steps are to provide the computer with power, an SSD, and a fan for cooling. It’s meant to be in a server rack so this part at least is pretty straightforward. After getting it powered up there are a few changes to make in the BIOS, mostly related to memory management. [ETA PRIME] is uzing Bazzite as an operating system which helps to get games up and running easily. It plays modern games and even AAA titles at respectable resolutions and framerates almost out-of-the-box, which perhaps shouldn’t be surprising since this APU has a six-core Zen 2 processor with a fairly powerful RDNA2 graphics card, all on one board.

It’s worth noting that this build is a few weeks old now, and the video has gotten popular enough that the BC250 cards that [ETA PRIME] was able to find for $100 are reported to be much more expensive now. Still, though, even at double or triple the price this might still be an attractive price point for a self-contained, fun, small computer that lets you game relatively easily and resembles the Steam Machine in concept. There are plenty of other builds based on old mining hardware as well, so don’t limit yourself to this one popular piece of hardware. This old mining rig, for example, made an excellent media server.

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Hackaday Links: January 5, 2025

January 5, 2025 by 4 Comments

Good news this week from the Sun’s far side as the Parker Solar Probe checked in after its speedrun through our star’s corona. Parker became the fastest human-made object ever — aside from the manhole cover, of course — as it fell into the Sun’s gravity well on Christmas Eve to pass within 6.1 million kilometers of the surface, in an attempt to study the extremely dynamic environment of the solar atmosphere. Similar to how manned spacecraft returning to Earth are blacked out from radio communications, the plasma soup Parker flew through meant everything it would do during the pass had to be autonomous, and we wouldn’t know how it went until the probe cleared the high-energy zone. The probe pinged Earth with a quick “I’m OK” message on December 26, and checked in with the Deep Space Network as scheduled on January 1, dumping telemetry data that indicated the spacecraft not only survived its brush with the corona but that every instrument performed as expected during the pass. The scientific data from the instruments won’t be downloaded until the probe is in a little better position, and then Parker will get to do the whole thing again twice more in 2025. Continue reading “Hackaday Links: January 5, 2025” →

Recreating Chiptunes In Verilog

June 19, 2016 by 9 Comments

The semester is wrapping up at Cornell, and that means it’s time for the final projects from [Bruce Land]’s lab. Every year we see some very cool projects, and this year is no exception. For their project, [Andre] and [Scott] implemented the audio processing unit (APU) of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). This is the classic chiptune sound that regaled a generation with 8-bit sounds that aren’t really eight bits, with the help of a 6502 CPU that isn’t really a 6502 CPU.

Unlike the contemporaneous MOS 6581 SID, which is basically an analog synthesizer on a chip, the APU in the NES is extraordinarily spartan. There are two pulse wave channels, a triangle wave channel, a random noise channel, and the very rarely used delta modulation channel (DMC) used to play very low quality audio samples. This is a re-implementation of the NES APU for a university lab; it is very understandable that [Andre] and [Scott] didn’t implement the rarely used DMC.

Everything about the circuitry of the NES is well documented, so [Andre] and [Scott] had a great wiki for their research. At the highest level, the APU runs on a 894kHz clock and controls three channels through dedicated registers. These outputs are fed through a mixer, which the guys scaled and combined into a 16-bit output played through a Wolfson WM8731 audio codec.

After implementing the NES APU, [Andre] and [Scott] added an SD card reader that can read the Nintendo Sound Format – the standard distribution format for NES chiptunes – and emulated a 6502 to control the registers. The result is a relatively simple device that plays NES chiptunes with amazing accuracy. The sound files on the project report sound like the real thing, but this is entirely emulated on modern hardware.