PC Classics, Right In Your Browser With EmuOS

[Emupedia]’s work to preserve computer history by way of making classic and abandoned games and software as accessible as possible is being done in a handy way: right in your browser with EmuOS.

A few moments of BIOS startup kicks off EmuOS right in a browser window.

Doing things this way has powerful “Just Works” energy. Visit that link in a modern browser and in no time at all you’ll be looking at a Windows 95 (or Windows 98, or Windows ME) desktop, filled with a ton of shortcuts to pre-installed and ready-to-run classic software. Heck, you can even keep it simple and be playing the original Microsoft Solitaire in no time flat. There is also a whole ton of DOS software waiting to be fired up, just double-click the DOSBox icon, and browse a huge list. The project is still in development, so not everything works, but the stuff that does is awfully slick.

Here’s some additional background that goes into more detail about the project and its capabilities, but if you’d prefer to just click around to explore, here’s the main link again (and here’s a list of mirrors.)

If OS emulation is your thing, don’t miss emulating the IBM PC on an ESP32 microcontroller. And if you’re more into lesser-known vintage operating systems, how about re-inventing PalmOS to run on x86 architecture?

Digital Replica Of Antique Weather Monitoring Instrument

Computers and digital sensors have allowed for the collection and aggregation of data barely possible to imagine to anyone in the instrumentation scene even sixty years ago. Before that, things like weather stations, seismometers, level sensors, and basically any other way of gathering real data about the world would have been performed with an analog device recording the information on some sort of spool of paper. This was much more tedious but the one thing going for these types of devices was their aesthetic. [mircemk] is back to bring some of that design inspiration to a digital barometric display.

The barometer is based around an Arduino Arduino Nano and a relatively large I2C display to display the captured data. It also uses a BME 280 pressure sensor board, but the technical details of this project are not the focal point here. Instead, [mircemk] has put his effort in recreating the old analog barographs, which display barometric data on a spool of paper over time, on the I2C display. As the device measures atmospheric pressure, it adds a bar to the graph, displaying the data over time much as the old analog device would have.

We’ve discussed plenty of times around here that old analog meters and instrumentation like this recreation of a VU meter are an excellent way of getting a more antique aesthetic than is typically offered by digital replacements. Adding in a little bit of style to a project like this can go a long way, or you can simply restore the original antique instead.

IRL minesweeper render showing game on top of a campaign map

Meat-Space Minesweeper Game Hits The Mark

Hackers of a certain age will remember that before the Internet was available to distract us from our work, we had to find our own fun. Luckily, Windows was there to come to our aid, in the shape of “Minesweeper” – a classic of the age that involved figuring out/occasionally just guessing where a selection of mines had been hidden on a grid of squares via numerical clues to their proximity. For those missing such simple times, [Martin] has brought the game into physical space with his 3D-printed travel-game version.

GIF showing how to play IRL minesweeper game

A number of pre-determined game fields can be inserted (by a friend… or enemy, we presume!) and covered by tiles, which the mine-clearing player can then remove with their plastic shovel to reveal the clues. The aim of the game is to avoid uncovering a bomb, and to place flags where the bombs are hiding.

Aficionados of the game may remember that a little guessing was often inevitable, which sometimes ended in disaster. On the computer version, this merely entailed clicking the Smiley Face button for a new game, but in this case would require a new sheet to be inserted. Blank sheet templates are included for producing your own fiendish bomb-sites, and all the pieces pack away neatly into a handy clam-shell design that would be ideal for long car journeys when the data package on the kids’ tablets has run out.

We wonder what other classic games may lend themselves to a travel remake and look forward to the first 3D-printed travel set of Doom with anticipation!

If you’re above solving your own Minesweeper games, then you can learn how to write a solver in Java here. Continue reading “Meat-Space Minesweeper Game Hits The Mark”

This Vintage Alphanumeric Display Was Huge, Hot, Heavy, And Expensive

It’s easy to take display technology for granted nowadays, but the ability to display data in a human-readable way was not always easy. This is demonstrated well by the Pinlite 30003 Alphanumeric Display Module, a four-character display that was pure luxury for its time.

Each display is a rectangular vacuum tube containing 17 incandescent light filaments.

Not only were the 17 segments that make up each display capable of showing any letter or number, but they were even daylight-readable! Each of those 17 segments is an incandescent lamp filament, which is how the required brightness was achieved. The sturdy module shown here holds four such displays, each of which is on its own pluggable board with a dedicated character decoder chip directly behind it.

As [AnubisTTL] points out, the resulting unit is bulky, has terrible character spacing, and was no doubt very costly. By today’s standards, it is almost unimaginably heavy, hot, and impractical. But before high-brightness LEDs were a thing, a daylight-readable alphanumeric character display was really something special. It would absolutely have been worth the money and effort to the right people.

Before small and efficient displays were commonplace, the solution to the problem of how to display data efficiently and in an easy-to-read format took a lot of really unusual (and clever) turns as engineers worked around the limitations of the time. This resulted in oddities like the SD-11 Sphericular Display, which is mostly empty space on the inside. Another great example is the Eidophor, a projector from before projectors were even a thing.

Want To Use A Classic Mac Mouse On A Modern Computer? No? Here’s How To Do It Anyway

Need to hook a classic Mac mouse up to your modern machine with the help of a DIY USB adapter? [John Floren] has you covered. [John]’s solution uses a board with an ATmega32U4 microcontroller on it to connect to the Mac mouse on one end, and emulate a USB HID (Human Interface Device) on the other. A modern machine therefore recognizes it like it would any other USB input device.

Why is this necessary? The connector on the classic Mac mouse may look like a familiar DE-9 connector, but it is not an RS-232 device and wouldn’t work if it were plugged into a 9-pin serial port. The classic Mac mouse uses a different pinout, and doesn’t have much for brains on the inside. It relies on the host computer to read its encoders and button states directly.

This project is actually a bit of an update to a piece of earlier work [John] did in making a vintage Depraz mouse work with modern systems. He suspected that it wouldn’t take much to have it also work with a classic Mac mouse, and he was right — all it took was updating the pin connections and adding some pull-up resistors. The source code and design files are on GitHub.

Even if one does not particularly want to use a classic Mac mouse for daily work, there’s definitely value in this kind of thing for those who deal in vintage hardware: it allows one to function-check old peripherals without having to fire up a vintage machine.

Continue reading “Want To Use A Classic Mac Mouse On A Modern Computer? No? Here’s How To Do It Anyway”

Antique Map Of Paris With Modern Tech

There’s plenty to love about antiques, from cars, furniture, to art. While it might be a little bit of survivorship bias, it’s easy to appreciate these older things for superior quality materials, craftsmanship, or even simplicity. They are missing out on all of our modern technology, though, so performing “restomods” on classics is a popular activity nowadays. This antique map of Paris, for example, is made of a beautiful hardwood but has been enhanced by some modern amenities as well.

At first the creator of this project, [Marc], just wanted to give it some ambient lighting, but it eventually progressed over the course of two years to have a series of Neopixels hidden behind it that illuminate according to the current sun and moon positions. The Neopixels get their instructions from an ESP8266 which calculates these positions using code [Marc] wrote himself based on the current date. Due to the limitations of the ESP8266 it’s not particularly precise, but it gets the job done to great effect.

To improve on the accuracy, [Marc] notes that an ESP32 could be used instead, but we can give the ESP8266 a pass for now since the whole project is an excellent art installation even if it is slightly off on its calculations. If you need higher accuracy for tracking celestial objects, you can always grab a Raspberry Pi too.

Teleconferencing Like It’s 1988: Connecting Vintage Hardware To Zoom

Hang up your car phone and toss that fax machine in the garbage. Even back in the late 80s it was possible to do away with these primitive technologies in favor of video conferencing, even though this technology didn’t catch on en masse until recently. In fact, Mitsubishi released a piece of video conferencing equipment called the VisiTel that can be put to use today, provided you can do a bit of work to get it to play along nicely with modern technology.

[Alex] was lucky enough to have one of these on hand, as soon as it was powered up he was able to get to work deciphering the messaging protocol of the device. To do this he showed the camera certain pictures with known properties and measured the output waveforms coming from the device, which were AM modulated over an RJ9 connection which he had changed to a 3.5 mm headphone jack.

It communicates in a series of pictures instead of sending an actual video signal, so [Alex] had a lot of work to do to properly encode and decode the stream. He goes into incredible detail on his project page about this process and is worth a read for anyone interested in signal processing. Ultimately, [Alex] was able to patch this classic piece of technology into a Zoom call and the picture quality is excellent when viewed through the lens of $399 80s technology.

We have been seeing a lot of other hacks around video conferencing in the past six months as well, such as physical mute buttons and a mirror that improves eye contact through the webcam.