VGA isn’t much used anymore, but it’s not hard to get a hold of monitors with that input. How about the older standards like EGA, CGA, or MDA? Well, it’s good luck on eBay or at the recycling yard to get a period-appropriate monitor, but the bulky, fragile CRTs seem to have been less likely to survive than computers that drove them. That’s what [Scrap Computer]’s MCE Blaster is for: it sits betwixt the retrocomputer’s TTL output and the VGA input of a (more) modern monitor, be it CRT or LCD.
Although most modern cars have moved to using proprietary components nearly everywhere, especially when it comes to infotainment systems, for a brief moment which peaked in the 90s and 00s most cars shipped with radios that fit in a standard size opening called a DIN slot. If you wanted a new Pioneer or Kenwood stereo it was usually a simple matter to slide the factory radio out and put your choice of aftermarket head unit in its place. [Stefan] has an E39 BMW from this era and wanted to upgrade the factory radio but use the original hardware instead of replacing it.
This isn’t just a simple stereo upgrade either. [Stefan] has gone all-out for this build which he started in 2020. Beginning with a Kotlin/Jetpack Compose Linux application to handle control input from the vehicle’s various knobs and buttons he moved on to a map application and an on-screen keyboard. From there he implemented VGA to send video to the OEM screen, and now has a fully functional system based on a Raspberry Pi. It does everything the original unit can do including playing music and showing the feed from the backup camera, plus adds plenty of new, modern features like Bluetooth.
For a certain classic car enthusiast, this build hits a sweet spot of modernizing a true classic like the E39 without removing or permanently modifying any OEM components. The amount of work that went into it is pretty staggering as well, with [Stephan] putting in over 100 hours of work just to get the video signal timing correct. We also like it because it reminds us of the flash-in-the-pan “carputer” trend from the late 00s where people in the pre-smartphone age were shoving all kinds of computing horsepower in their trunks.
These days, video cards are virtually supercomputers. When they aren’t driving your screen, they are decoding video, crunching physics models, or processing large-language model algorithms. But it wasn’t always like that. The old video cards were downright simple. Once PCs gained more sophisticated buses, video cards got a little better. But hardware acceleration on an old-fashioned VGA card would be unworthy of the cheapest burner phone at the big box store. Not to mention, the card is probably twice the size of the phone. [Bits and Bolts] has a look at several old cards, including a PCI version of the Tseng ET4000, state-of-the-art of the late 1990s.
You might think that’s a misprint. Most of the older Tseng boards were ISA, but apparently, there were some with the PCI bus or the older VESA local bus. Acceleration here typically meant dedicated hardware for handling BitBlt and, perhaps, a hardware cursor.
EFI from cables is something every ham loves to hate. What if you modulated, that, though, using an ordinary cable as an antenna? If you used something ubiquitous like a video cable, you might have a very interesting exploit– which is exactly what [Xieyang Sun] and their colleagues have done withTEMPEST-LoRa, a technique to encode LoRa packets into video files.
The concept is pretty simple: a specially-constructed video file contains information to be broadcast via LoRa– the graphics card and the video cable serve as the Tx, and the Rx is any LoRa module. Either VGA or HDMI cables can be used, though the images to create the LoRa signal are obviously going to differ in each case. The only restriction is that the display resolution must be 1080×1920@60Hz, and the video has to play fullscreen. Fullscreen video might make this technique easy to spot if used in an exploit, but on the other hand, the display does not have to be turned on at the time of transmission. If employed by blackhats, one imagines syncing this to power management so the video plays whenever the screen blanks.
This image sends LoRa. Credit: TEMPEST-LoRa
According to the pre-print, a maximum transmission distance of 81.7m was achieved, and at 21.6 kbps. That’s not blazing fast, sure, but transmission out of a totally air-gapped machine even at dialup speeds is impressive. Code is on the GitHub under an MIT license, though [Xieyang Sun] and the team are white hats, so they point out that it’s provided for academic use.There is a demo video, but as it is on bilbili we don’t have an easy way to embed it. The work has been accepted to the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (2025), so if you’re at the event in Taiwan be sure to check it out.
Thanks to [Xieyang Sun] for the tip! We’ll be checking the tips line for word from you, just as soon as we finish wrapping ferrites around all our cables.
[James Sharman] designed and built his own 8-bit computer from scratch using TTL logic chips, including a VGA adapter, and you can watch it run a glorious rotating cube demo in the video below.
The rotating cube is the product of roughly 3,500 lines of custom assembly code and looks fantastic, running at 30 frames per second with shading effects from multiple light sources. Great results considering the computing power of his system is roughly on par with vintage 8-bit home computers, and the graphics capabilities are limited. [James]’s computer uses a tile map instead of a frame buffer, so getting 3D content rendered was a challenge.
The video is about 20 seconds of demo followed by a detailed technical discussion on how exactly one implements everything required for a 3D cube, from basic math to optimization. If a deep dive into that sort of thing is up your alley, give it a watch!
Making a microcontroller speak to a VGA monitor has been a consistent project in our sphere for years, doing the job for which an IBM PC of yore required a plug-in ISA card. Couldn’t a microcontroller talk to a VGA card too? Of course it can, and [0xmarcin] is here to show how it can be done with an Arduino Mega.
The project builds on the work of another similar one which couldn’t be made to work, and the Trident card used couldn’t be driven in 8-bit ISA mode. The web of PC backwards compatibility saves the day though, because many 16-bit ISA cards also supported the original 8-bit slots from the earliest PCs. The Arduino is fast enough to support the ISA bus speed, but the card also needs the PC’s clock line to operate, and it only supports three modes: 80 x 25, 16 colour text, 320 x 200, 256 colour graphics, and 640 x 480, 16 colour graphics.
Looking at this project, it serves as a reminder of the march of technology. Perhaps fifteen years or more ago we’d have been able to lay our hands on any number of ISA cards to try it for ourselves, but now eight years after we called the end of the standard, we’d be hard placed to find one even at our hackerspace. Perhaps your best bet if you want one is a piece of over-the-top emulation.
If Apple has a reputation for anything other than decent hardware and excellent industrial design, it’s for selling its products at extremely inflated prices. But there are some alternatives if you want the Apple experience on the cheap. Buying their hardware a few years out of date of course is one way to avoid the bulk of the depreciation, but at the extreme end is this working Mac clone that cost just $14.
This build relies on the fact that modern microcontrollers absolutely blow away the computing power available to the average consumer in the 1980s. To emulate the Macintosh 128K, this build uses nothing more powerful than a Raspberry Pi Pico. There’s a little bit more to it than that, though, since this build also replicates the feel of the screen of the era as well. Using a “hat” for the Pi Pico from [Ron’s Computer Videos] lets the Pico’s remaining system resources send the video signal from the emulated Mac out over VGA, meaning that monitors from the late 80s and on can be used with ease. There’s an option for micro SD card storage as well, allowing the retro Mac to have an incredible amount of storage compared to the original.
The emulation of the 80s-era Mac is available on a separate GitHub page for anyone wanting to take a look at that. A VGA monitor is not strictly required, but we do feel that displaying retro computer graphics on 4K OLEDs leaves a little something out of the experience of older machines like this, even if they are emulated. Although this Macintosh replica with a modern e-ink display does an excellent job of recreating the original monochrome displays of early Macs as well.
