Travel The World Looking For Retro Tech, Virtually

February 21, 2023 by Tom Nardi 1 Comment

For those who have a passion for vintage hardware, whether it be a classic computer or a war-surplus ham radio rig, finding the things without resorting to paying shipping fees on eBay can sometimes be tricky. Your best bet is to find a local fair or swap event, but it always seems they’re the kind of thing you find out about the weekend after they were held.

Looking to make these sort of events more visible and easier to keep track of, [RobSmithDev] has created the Retro.Directory. Scrolling your way across the globe you can see markers that indicate places of interest for the retro aficionado, such as museums, repair shops, and old school arcades, as well as upcoming events. Continue reading “Travel The World Looking For Retro Tech, Virtually” →

BBS Builder Is A Framework For Running Your Own PETSCII Paradise

February 16, 2023 by Lewin Day 13 Comments

The 80s and 90s were the glory days of the BBS. The plain old telephone system was responsible for bringing us connection to other digital beings, along with plenty of spuriously-obtained software and inappropriate ASCII art. [Francesco Sblendorio] has created BBS Builder to harken back to this great era, allowing people to build their own BBSs as they see fit!

BBS Builder consists of basic classes for construction a BBS that operates in PETSCII mode. If that’s unfamiliar to you, it’s the character encoding created by Commodore, also known as CBM ASCII. BBSs created through this software can be accessed by a variety of appropriately 80s machines. The Github page outlines how to create a basic BBS using the code that can be customized to your own liking.

[Francesco] notes the system is compatible with Commodore 64s running RR-NET compatible network cards, WiFi modem cards, and 1541Ultimate hardware using UltimateTerm. Various other methods are supported too, as well as PCs and Macs running Syncterm.

Running a BBS was like running your own website back in the day. With that said, they also had a distinct community flair that is somehow missing from today’s web. Be sure to sound off with your favorite BBS in the comments!

The MouSTer Adapter Now Has Amiga Scroll Support

February 16, 2023 by Lewin Day 6 Comments

The MouSTer is a device that enables modern USB HID mice to be used on various retro computers. The project has been through its ups and downs over years, but [drygol] is here to say one thing: rumors of the MouSTers demise have been greatly exaggerated. Now, the project is back and better than ever!

The team has been hard at work on quashing bugs and bringing new features to bear. The headline is that the MouSTer project will now offer mouse wheel support for Amiga users. This is quite the coup, as mouse wheels were incredibly obscure until the late 90s. Now, users of Commodore’s finest machines will be able to scroll with abandon with modern HID mice.

While the progress is grand, much is still left to be done. Despite the name, the MouSTer was never intended to solely serve Atari users. Future goals involve adding support for ADB mice for retro Macs, DB9 mouse support for even-older Apple machines, and DB9 mouse support for older PCs. The team is eager for there to be one MouSTer to rule them all, so to speak, and hopes to make the ultimate retro computer mouse adapter to serve as many purposes as possible.

We first looked at the MouSTer back in 2020, and it’s great to see how far it’s come.

Continue reading “The MouSTer Adapter Now Has Amiga Scroll Support” →

A visually accurate replica of the MCM/70 computer, an all in one system with a keyboard, dual cassette drives and a small one line display

MCM/70 Replica Embodies Proud Canadian Heritage

February 4, 2023 by Chris Wilkinson 17 Comments

When a vintage computer is all but unobtanium, software emulation is often all that remains. Unless you are [Michael Gardi], who saw an opportunity to reproduce Canada’s home-grown MCM/70 microcomputer using a combination of software emulation and modern hardware.

Short of building a brand new MCM/70 from the original schematics, this faithful facsimile of the MCM/70 does everything it can to pay homage to the original machine. The foundations of this project can be attributed to the York University Computer Museum (YUCoM) MCM/70E emulator, highly regarded for its “historical accuracy”. The MCM/70 used dual cassette tapes for storage and a funky 32-character dot matrix plasma display, which is all reproduced in software (other versions dropped one of the cassette drives for a modem, bleeding edge innovation for 1974 microcomputing).

From here, [Michael] set off to assemble the various physical components of the original computer. The chassis itself was built from scratch using a mixture of 3D printing and traditional woodwork. The high-voltage plasma display was recreated using four HCMS-2972 dot matrix modules, which minor compromises. The original computer used display memory as extra storage when executing instructions, which created a sporadic blinkenlights effect on the original display. This new display unfortunately won’t reproduce this ‘thinking’ pattern, but it’s a small sacrifice.

Similarly, the original keyboard was going to be challenging to replicate with 100% accuracy, so a brand-new recreation of an Ohio Scientific computer keyboard was used instead. The layouts are extremely similar, and anyone except your most committed Canadian retro computing enthusiasts probably wouldn’t notice the difference. Being a modern recreation of a vintage keyboard, this was relatively easy to source. A set of custom-made keycaps with APL legends really helped sell the replica.

And while working dual cassette drives would have brought this project home, it’s commendable that [Michael] has created ‘working’ cassette drives using 3D printed cassettes and some magnetic magic using hall effect sensors to identify the loaded cassette. The emulator incorporates three virtual cassette tapes which made this solution possible.

If this all sounds familiar, it might be because this project was based on a superb Hackaday writeup of the MCM/70. A truly innovative computer for its time, the story behind Micro Computer Machines (not to be confused with the toy cars) is a fascinating tale, and the write-up is worth a read if you haven’t seen it already.

Continue reading “MCM/70 Replica Embodies Proud Canadian Heritage” →

FPS Game Engine Built In Ancient Macintosh HyperCard Software

January 27, 2023 by Lewin Day 14 Comments

Wolfenstein 3D and Doom are great examples of early FPS games. Back in that era, as Amiga was slowly losing its gaming supremacy to the PC, Apple wasn’t even on the playing field. However, [Chris Tully] has used the 90s HyperCard platform to create an FPS of his own, and it’s charming in what it achieves.

If you’re not familiar with it, HyperCard was a strange combination of database, programming language, and graphical interface system all rolled into one. It made developing GUI apps for the Macintosh platform simpler, with some limitations. It was certainly never intended for making pseudo-3D video games, but that just makes [Chris’s] achievement all the more impressive.

At this stage, [Chris’s] game doesn’t feature any NPCs, weapons, or items yet. It’s thus more of a First Person Walker than First Person Shooter. It features four small rooms with perpendicular, vertical walls, rendered either greyscale or 8-bit color. Now that he’s got the basic engine running, [Chris] is looking to recreate a bit of a Doom RPG experience, rather than copying Doom itself. He hopes to add everything from monsters to weapons, lava, and working HUD elements. If you want to dive in to the code, you can – HyperCard “stacks”, as they’re known, are made up of readily editable scripts.

[Chris] built the project to celebrate the aesthetic and limitations of the original Mac platform. While it could technically run on original hardware, it would run incredibly slowly. It currently takes several seconds to update the viewport on an emulated Mac Plus with 4MB of RAM. Thankfully, emulation on a modern PC can be sped up a lot to help the framerate.

We love seeing HyperCard pushed far beyond its original limits. We’ve seen it before, too, such as when it was used on a forgotten 90s Apple phone prototype. If you’ve been hacking away on retro software yourself, we’d love to see your projects on the tipsline!

Yesterday’s Future Is Brighter Today

December 17, 2022 by Elliot Williams 31 Comments

The demoscene never ceases to amaze. Back in the mid-80s, people wouldn’t just hack software to remove the copy restrictions, but would go the extra mile and add some fun artwork and greetz. Over the ensuing decade the artform broke away from the cracks entirely, and the elite hackers were making electronic music with amazing accompanying graphics to simply show off.

Looked at from today, some of the demos are amazing given that they were done on such primitive hardware, but those were the cutting edge home computers at the time. I don’t know what today’s equivalent is, with CGI-powered blockbusters running in mainstream cinemas, the state of the art in graphics has moved on quite a bit. But the state of the old art doesn’t rest either. I’ve just seen the most amazing demo on a ZX Spectrum.

Simply put, this demo does things in 2022 on a computer from 1982 that were literally impossible at the time. Not because the hardware was different – this is using retro gear after all – but because the state of our communal knowledge has changed so dramatically over the last 40 years. What makes 2020s demos more amazing than their 1990s equivalents is that we’ve learned, discovered, and shared enough new tricks with each other that we can do what was previously impossible. Not because of silicon tech, but because of the wetware. (And maybe I shouldn’t underestimate the impact of today’s coding environments and other tooling.)

I love the old demoscene, probably for nostalgia reasons, but I love the new demoscene because it shows us how far we’ve come. That, and it’s almost like reverse time-travel, taking today’s knowledge and pushing it back into gear of the past.

Dirty TRS-80 Has A Surprise Hack

December 4, 2022 by Al Williams 12 Comments

[Adrian] had a TRS-80 model IV that looks like it was stored in a mulch pile. However, it seemed to have some surprises. The first hint that something was up was that the keyboard looks like a model III and there are two mystery knobs in the back.

So what’s going on? You” have to watch [Adrian’s] video below to find out. At about the six-minute mark, you’ll find that things are not at all what you might think.

Continue reading “Dirty TRS-80 Has A Surprise Hack” →