retrocomputing

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Hackaday Links: March 23, 2025

March 23, 2025 by 8 Comments

What a long, strange trip it’s been for NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Bruce Wilmore, who finally completed their eight-day jaunt to space after 289 days. The duo returned to Earth from the ISS on Tuesday along with two other returning astronauts in a picture-perfect splashdown, complete with a dolphin-welcoming committee. For the benefit of those living under rocks these past nine months, Williams and Wilmore slipped the surly bonds way back in June on the first crewed test flight of the Boeing Starliner, bound for a short stay on the ISS before a planned return in the same spacecraft. Alas, all did not go to plan as their ride developed some mechanical difficulties on the way upstairs, and so rather than risk their lives on a return in a questionable capsule, NASA had them cool their heels for a couple of months while Starliner headed home without them.

There’s been a lot of talk about how Butch and Suni were “stranded,” but that doesn’t seem fair to us. Sure, their stay on the ISS was unplanned, or at least it wasn’t Plan A; we’re sure this is always a contingency NASA allows for when planning missions. Also unfortunate is the fact that they didn’t get paid overtime for the stay, not that you’d expect they would. But on the other hand, if you’re going to get stuck on a work trip, it might as well be at the world’s most exclusive and expensive resort.

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A Look At The Panasonic FS-A1FM

March 16, 2025 by 12 Comments

MSX computers were not very common in the United States, and we didn’t know what we were missing when they were popular. [Re:Enthused] shows us what would have been a fine machine in its day: a Panasonic FS-A1FM. Have a look at the video below to see the like-new machine.

The machine isn’t just an ordinary MSX computer. The keyboard is certainly unique, and it has an integrated floppy drive and a 1200-baud modem. The case proudly proclaims that the floppy is both double-sided and double-density. Like most MSX computers, it had a plethora of ports and, of course, a cartridge slot. Unfortunately, the machine looks great but has some problems that have not been repaired yet, so we didn’t get to see it running properly.

He was able to get to the MSX-DOS prompt to show along with the BIOS menu. We hope he manages to get the keyboard working, and we were glad to see another computer from that era we had not seen before.

We don’t think anyone made one at the time, but we’ve seen a modern take on a luggable MSX. Of course, you can emulate the whole thing on a Pi and focus on the aesthetics.

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Copying Commodore Data Tapes, 40 Years Late

February 28, 2025 by 41 Comments

Unless you handle the backups for a large corporation, bank, or government entity, you likely haven’t stored much data to tape recently. But magnetic storage used to be fairly mainstream back in the 1980s for all kinds of computer programs. Plenty of computers used standard cassette tapes for this too but you couldn’t just copy them with standard audio equipment. You’d need something like this 1560 datasette from [Jan].

The core problem with using Hi-Fi equipment to copy tapes storing data instead of audio is that data tapes need to be much more precise in order to avoid losses that might not be noticeable in an audio recording. In the 80s computer companies like Commodore built tape drives specifically for their computers, so [Jan]’s project uses two of these 1530 drives to build this “1560” datasette. (No working 1530 hardware was harmed in this build.) An inverter circuit in one tape deck is used to provide the signal to write the data to the other tape, reliably copying data from these data tapes in a way Hi-Fi never could.

[Jan] does lament not having something like this back in the 80s when the Commodore was in its heyday, but there’s still a dedicated retrocomputing scene for these machines that will get plenty of use out of projects like this. If you need to go the other direction in time, there are also interfaces that allow data tapes from old Commodores to be read by modern computers with USB.

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Satellite Internet On 80s Hardware

February 14, 2025 by 2 Comments

Portability has been a goal of a sizable section of the computing world for many decades now. While the obvious products of this are laptops, there are a number of “luggable” PCs that pack more power while ostensibly maintaining their portability. Going back in time past things like the LAN party era of the 90s and 00s takes us to the early era of luggables, with the Commodore SX-64 being one such machine of this era. Its portability is on display in this video where [saveitforparts] is using it to access the Internet over satellite.

The project uses a Glocom Inmarsat modem and antenna to access the internet through a geostationary satellite, but since this computer is about four decades old now this takes a little bit more effort than a modern computer. A Teensy microcontroller is used to emulate a modem so that the Ethernet connection from the satellite modem can be understood by the Commodore. There was a significant amount of setup and troubleshooting required as well, especially regarding IP addresses and networking but eventually [saveitforparts] got the system up and running well enough to chat on a BBS and browse Wikipedia.

One thing he found that might make a system like this relevant for a modern user is that the text-only mode of the Commodore significantly limited data use. For a normal Internet connection this might be a problem, but on a geostationary satellite network where the data is orders of magnitude more expensive, this can be surprisingly helpful. We might not recommend an SX-64 system specifically, but one inspired by similar computers like this text-only cyberdeck might do the trick with the right networking connections.

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Blinkenlights-First Retrocomputer Design

January 11, 2025 by 10 Comments

[Boz] wants to build a retrocomputer, but where to start? You could start with the computery bits, like say the CPU or the bus architecture, but where’s the fun in that? Instead, [Boz] built a righteous blinkenlights array.

What’s cool about this display is that it’s ready to go out of the box. All of the LEDs are reverse-mount and assembled by the board maker. The 19″ 2U PCBs serve as the front plates, so [Boz] was careful not to use any through-hole parts, which also simplified the PCB assembly, of course. Each slice has its own microcontroller and a few shift registers to get the bits lit up, and that’s all there is to it. They take incoming data at 9600 baud and output blinkiness.

Right now it pulls out its bytes from his NAS. We’re not sure which bytes, and we think we see some counters in there. Anyway, it doesn’t matter because it’s so pretty. And maybe someday the prettiness will lure [Boz] into building a retrocomputer to go under it. But honestly, we’d just relax and watch the blinking lights.

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Retro Big Iron For You

January 8, 2025 by 30 Comments

Many of us used “big iron” back in the day. Computers like the IBM S/360 or 3090 are hard to find, transport, and operate, so you don’t see many retrocomputer enthusiasts with an S/370 in their garages. We’ve known for a while that the Hercules emulators would let you run virtual copies of these old mainframes, but every time we’ve looked at setting any up, it winds up being more work than we wanted to spend. Enter [Ernie] of [ErnieTech’s Little Mainframes]. He’s started a channel to show you how to “build” your own mainframe — emulated, of course.

One problem with the mainframe environment is that there are a bunch of operating system-like things like MVS, VM/CMS, and TSO. There were even custom systems like MUSIC/SP, which he shows in the video below.

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Atari 65XE In Laptop Form

January 5, 2025 by 3 Comments

For better or worse, Atari is no longer a household name in computing, but for a time in the 1980s, it was a huge mover in the industry. They not only produced PCs but also a huge number of video game consoles. Although they were a major contributor to the video game crash of the 1980s, they managed to limp along a few more years afterward and produce some interesting machines in the following years, even though they weren’t ultimately able to compete with Nintendo or Sega. One of those computers from that era was a PC-console hybrid of sorts called the Atari XE, and [Sideburn] was able to turn one into a laptop.

The retro laptop began life as an Arabic PAL version of the 65XE, the PC version of the ubiquitous 65-series computer. A large portion of the computer was reworked, including the removal of the power supply in favor of a rechargeable battery with a 6-hour life. Also among the list of scrapped components was the video and sound connectors as well as the RF modulator, which would have been common for displays at the time, but this laptop is getting a 1920×1080 LCD panel to replace all of that old hardware. A 1MB memory upgrade, new speakers and amp, a WiFi card, and an SD floppy card emulator round out the build.

The final part of the build is assembling it all into a custom 3D printed case, and the resulting laptop that [Sideburn] calls the XE Book is a faithful adaptation of this niche computer into what could have been a laptop we would have seen in the late 80s or early 90s similar to the Toshiba T3200SXC. It matches the original’s footprint and still uses all of the core components, so it’s not too difficult to imagine something like this having existed in the past.

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