hardware

130 Articles

The Many-Sprites Interpretation Of Amiga Mechanics

December 31, 2025 by 21 Comments

The invention of sprites triggered a major shift in video game design, enabling games with independent moving objects and richer graphics despite the limitations of early video gaming hardware. As a result, hardware design was specifically built to manipulate sprites, and generally as new generations of hardware were produced the number of sprites a system could produce went up. But [Coding Secrets], who published games for the Commodore Amiga, used an interesting method to get this system to produce far more sprites at a single time than the hardware claimed to support.

This hack is demonstrated with [Coding Secrets]’s first published game on the Amiga, Leander. Normally the Amiga can only display up to eight sprites at once, but there is a coprocessor in the computer that allows for re-drawing sprites in different areas of the screen. It can wait for certain vertical and horizontal line positions and then execute certain instructions. This doesn’t allow unlimited sprites to be displayed, but as long as only eight are displayed on any given line the effect is similar. [Coding Secrets] used this trick to display the information bar with sprites, as well as many backgrounds, all simultaneously with the characters and enemies we’d normally recognize as sprites.

Of course, using built-in hardware to do something the computer was designed to do isn’t necessarily a hack, but it does demonstrate how intimate knowledge of the system could result in a much more in-depth and immersive experience even on hardware that was otherwise limited. It also wasn’t free to use this coprocessor; it stole processing time away from other tasks the game might otherwise have to perform, so it did take finesse as well. We’ve seen similar programming feats in other gaming projects like this one which gets Tetris running with only 1000 lines of code.

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39C3: Hardware, And The Hard Bit

December 29, 2025 by 11 Comments

The 39th annual Chaos Communication Congress (39C3) is underway, and it kicked off with a talk that will resonate deeply with folks in the Hackaday universe. [Kliment] gave an impassioned invitation for everyone to start making hardware based on his experience both in the industry and in giving an intro-to-surface-mount workshop to maybe thousands of hackers over the years.

His main points are that the old “hardware is hard” cliche is overdone. Of course, working on a complicated high-reliability medical device isn’t child’s play, but that’s not where you start off. And getting started in hardware design and hobby-scale manufacture has never been easier or cheaper, and the open-source tooling gives you a foot in the door.

He tells the story of an attendee at a workshop who said “I kept waiting for the hard part to come, but then I was finished.”  Starting off with the right small-scale projects, learning a few techniques, and ramping up skills built on skills is the way to go. ([Kliment] is a big proponent of hand-placed hot-plate reflow soldering, and we concur.)

This is the talk that you want to show to your software friends who are hardware-curious. It’s also a plea for more experimentation, more prototyping, more hacking, and simply more people in the hardware / DIY electronics scene. Here at Hackaday, it’s maybe preaching to the choir, but sometimes it’s just nice to hear saying it all out loud.

Back To The 90s On Real Hardware

August 22, 2025 by 8 Comments

As the march of time continues on, it becomes harder and harder to play older video games on hardware. Part of this is because the original hardware itself wears out, but another major factor is that modern operating systems, software, and even modern hardware don’t maintain support for older technology indefinitely. This is why emulation is so popular, but purists that need original hardware often have to go to extremes to scratch their retro gaming itch. This project from [Eivind], for example, is a completely new x86 PC designed for the DOS and early Windows 98 era.

The main problem with running older games on modern hardware is the lack of an ISA bus, which is where the sound cards on PCs from this era were placed. This build uses a Vortex86EX system-on-module, which has a processor running a 32-bit x86 instruction set. Not only does this mean that software built for DOS can run natively on this chip, but it also has this elusive ISA capability. The motherboard uses a Crystal CS4237B chip connected to this bus which perfectly replicates a SoundBlaster card from this era. There are also expansion ports to add other sound cards, including ones with Yamaha OPL chips.

Not only does this build provide a native hardware environment for DOS-era gaming, but it also adds a lot of ports missing from modern machines as well including a serial port. Not everything needs to be original hardware, though; a virtual floppy drive and microSD card reader make it easy to interface minimally with modern computers and transfer files easily. This isn’t the only way to game on new, native hardware, though. Others have done similar things with new computers built for legacy industrial applications as well.

Thanks to [Stephen] for the tip!

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A Non-Sony Playstation Motherboard Replacement

July 27, 2025 by 12 Comments

As hardware ages, it becomes harder and harder to keep it in service. Whether that’s because of physical aging or lack of support from the company who built it in the first place, time is not generally good for electronics, especially when it comes to our beloved retro gaming systems. The first Playstation, for example, is starting to see some of the deleterious effects of having originally been built in the 90s, and [LorentioB] has a new, third-party motherboard to bring to the table to keep these systems online as well as adding some features in that Sony removed.

The motherboard is known as the nsOne, meaning Not Sony’s One since this is the first motherboard built by a single person outside of Sony. It’s not based on any FPGAs or emulators and is completely compatible with all of the original hardware, chips, and other circuitry of the original Playstation. Based on the PU-23 series, it even revives the removed parallel port, which Sony removed after the first versions of the hardware because of region locking concerns and other pro-consumer issues. Every chip footprint and connector was reverse engineered manually, using optical sanding, scanning, and net-by-net tracing.

For such a complex piece of hardware this is quite the feat, and for anyone who wants to restore old hardware or add the parallel port back on to their system this could be a game changer. [LorentioB] is not quite finished yet but hopes to have a finished version shortly. As far as fully opening up the system goes, there are some software hacks to look at that allow more games to run on the system and some hardware hacks that open the system up as well.

Vintage Hardware Find Includes Time Capsule Of Data

July 16, 2025 by 5 Comments

Before social media brought the Internet to the masses, and before even Napster, ICQ, and AIM gave those with a phone line a reason to connect online at all, those who went online often went to a BBS messageboard. By modern standards these text-only environments would have been extremely limited, with only weather updates, stock information, limited news, some email and messaging, and perhaps some classifieds or other miscellaneous information. This was an important time for the early Internet though, and [Nicola] recently discovered a time capsule of sorts from this era.

He first got a tip about a piece of vintage hardware, a DEC VAXstation II which was missing from his collection. But after painstakingly preserving the data on the hard drive he found it had been hosting one of these BBS servers and had plenty of gems from the era to show off. Not only does this build restore the DEC hardware but [Nicola] was able to virtualize the server using the data he recovered on a SIMH emulator, granting insights into how the Internet of this era was used.

[Nicola] also brought the BBS messaging system back online, although he notes that running it on the original hardware wouldn’t be feasible so for now it runs in the cloud. It’s a fascinating look into the Internet of the past, far beyond when many of us first went online as well. For a deep dive on how these systems worked, as well as an introduction to some of the Internet culture of the day, we saw this guide to the BBS a little while ago.

Will HP Create A Carfax System For PCs?

July 15, 2025 by 23 Comments

When buying used cars there are plenty of ways to check on their history. In many countries there are systems, like Carfax for parts of North America and Europe, that can provide crash history in some situations and alert a potential buyer of hidden damage. Not so for computers, where anyone can run an intensive mining, gaming, rendering, or AI application for years on hardware which might not otherwise show any outward signs of heavy use. And that’s just for hard use; there’s all kinds of other ways of damaging hardware. HP is hoping to solve this problem with a PC history report of sorts.

Aimed at the enterprise or business arena, where companies tend to follow replacement schedules for laptops and other hardware which might get discarded before reaching a true end-of-life, HP is suggesting adding a data recorder at the firmware level of some computers. This software would monitor the computer’s temperatures, SSD wear, and other telematics on the computer and store a record that could be viewed by a potential buyer when the IT department is ready to take them out of service. And, since it’s 2025, HP is also claiming that this system needs and uses an AI of some sort.

Although HP is billing this as a way to improve sustainability and limit e-waste, we’d theorize that even with a report like this available, the economic gain of a program like this would be marginal at best. While the idea of giving each decommissioned laptop a clean bill of health is noble, it’s hard to imagine overworked IT staff carefully curating device histories when most used enterprise machines are already sold by the pallet.

HP is also proposing something that sounds a lot like Intel’s Management Engine, which we’re not too thrilled about around here. And also keep in mind that this is a company that has failed to innovate in any industry-leading way for as long as we can remember so we won’t expect this system to be widely adopted anytime soon.

A Crypto Miner Takes The Straight And Narrow

July 1, 2025 by 29 Comments

As it stands, cryptocurrency largely seems to be a fad of the previous decade, at least as far as technology goes. During that time, many PC users couldn’t get reasonably priced graphics cards since most of them were going into these miners. In contrast, nowadays any shortages are because they’re being used to turn the Internet into an AI-fueled wasteland. But nonetheless, there is a lot of leftover mining hardware from the previous decade and unlike the modern AI tools getting crammed into everything we own, this dated hardware is actually still useful. [Zendrael] demonstrates this by turning an old mining rig into a media server.

The mining rig is essentially nothing more than a motherboard with a large number of PCI slots, each designed for a GPU. PCI slots can do many other things, though, so [Zendrael] puts a terabyte solid state drive in each but one of the PCI cards using NVMe to PCI adapters. The final slot still hosts a GPU since the computer is being converted to a media server, and this allows it to do various encodings server-side. Even with only 4 GB of memory, the machine in its new configuration is more than capable of running Debian and spinning up all of the necessary software needed for a modern media server like Jellyfin, Nextcloud, and Transmission.

With many people abandoning miners as the value of them declines over time, it’s possible to find a lot of hardware like this that’s ready to be put to work on something new and useful. Hopefully all of the GPUs and other hardware being put to use today in AI will find a similar useful future, but until then we’ll note that you don’t need super powerful hardware to run some of those models on your own.

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