retro

281 Articles

Channel Surfing Nostalgia Machine

October 17, 2025 by 5 Comments

As any generation of people get older, they tend to look back fondly on their formative years when there was less responsibility and more wonder. Even if things have objectively improved, we often have a fondness for the past. Such is the case for cable television, where even though ads were everywhere and nothing was on-demand, we can see that something was lost from this era in the modern streaming ecosystem. [Ricardo] brought back the good parts of this golden era of cable TV with this small channel surfing television.

The project attempts to keep the good parts of this era while discarding things we certainly don’t miss. The ability to channel surf is still here, with a rotary encoder standing in for an antique television channel selector knob, but dealing with any telecommunications company is out, including those of the Internet variety. Instead it is a fully offline machine with the user able to curate their own channels and programming with a Flask application, and [Ricardo]’s includes his own collection of commercials from Argentina.

The hardware itself is fairly straightforward as well, with a Raspberry Pi doing the heavy lifting, paired with a small screen and enclosed in a retro-themed television case. It’s a clever throwback to a time where we might not know what we wanted to see but there was always something on. Builds like this are gaining popularity right now as well, and we’ve even seen them recreate the cable company’s preview channel as well.

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Hackaday Links: September 14, 2025

September 14, 2025 by 1 Comment

Is it finally time to cue up the Bowie? Or was the NASA presser on Wednesday announcing new findings of potential Martian biosignatures from Perseverance just another in a long line of “We are not alone” teases that turn out to be false alarms? Time will tell, but from the peer-reviewed paper released simultaneously with the news conference, it appears that biological activity is now the simplest explanation for the geochemistry observed in some rock samples analyzed by the rover last year. There’s a lot in the paper to unpack, most of which is naturally directed at planetary scientists and therefore somewhat dense reading. But the gist is that Perseverance sampled some sedimentary rocks in Jezero crater back in July of 2024 with the SHERLOC and PIXL instruments, extensive analysis of which suggests the presence of “reaction fronts” within the rock that produced iron phosphate and iron sulfide minerals in characteristic shapes, such as the ring-like formations they dubbed “leopard spots,” and the pinpoint “poppy seed” formations.

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O Brother, What Art Thou?

September 9, 2025 by 19 Comments

Dedicated word processors are not something we see much of anymore. They were in a weird space: computerized, but not really what you could call a computer, even in those days. More like a fancy typewriter, with a screen and floppy disks. Brother made some very nice ones, and [Chad Boughton] got his hands on one for a modernization project.

The word processor in question, a Brother WP-2200, was chosen primarily because of its beautiful widescreen, yellow-phosphor CRT display. Yes, you read that correctly — yellow phosphor, not amber. Widescreen CRTs are rare enough, but that’s just different. As built, the WP-2200 had a luggable form-factor, with a floppy drive, ̶m̶e̶c̶h̶a̶n̶i̶c̶a̶l̶ clacky keyboard, and dot-matrix printer in the back. Continue reading “O Brother, What Art Thou?” →

NFC Hidden In Floppy Disk For Retro-Themed PC

August 29, 2025 by 13 Comments

As we all look across a sea of lifeless, nearly identically-styled consumer goods, a few of us have become nostalgic for a time when products like stereo equipment, phones, appliances, homes, cars, and furniture didn’t all look indistinguishable. Computers suffered a similar fate, with nearly everything designed to be flat and minimalist with very little character. To be sure there are plenty of retro computing projects to recapture nostalgia, but to get useful modern hardware in a fun retro-themed case check out this desktop build from [Mar] that hides a few unique extras.

The PC itself is a modern build with an up-to-date operating system, but hidden in a 386-era case with early-90s styling. The real gem of this build though is the floppy disk drive, which looks unaltered on the surface. But its core functionality has been removed and in its place an Arduino sits, looking for NFC devices. The floppy disks similarly had NFC tags installed so that when they interact with the Arduino, it can send a command to the computer to launch a corresponding game. To the user it looks as though the game loads from a floppy disk, much like it would have in the 90s albeit with much more speed and much less noise.

Modern industrial design is something that we’ve generally bemoaned as of late, and it’s great to see some of us rebelling by building unique machines like this, not to mention repurposing hardware like floppy drives for fun new uses (which [Mar] has also open-sourced on a GitHub page). It’s not the first build to toss modern hardware in a cool PC case from days of yore, either. This Hot Wheels desktop is one of our favorites.

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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Get Your Tickets For Supercon 2025 Now!

August 5, 2025 by 3 Comments

The wait is over — once this post hits the front page, ticket sales for the 2025 Hackaday Supercon will officially be live!

As is tradition, we’ve reserved 100 tickets priced at $148 (plus fees) for what we like to call the True-Believers. Those are the folks that are willing to sign up even without knowing who will be speaking or what this year’s badge looks like. Once those are sold out, the regular admission tickets will cost $296 (plus fees). We might be slightly biased, but even at full price, we like to think Supercon is a screaming deal.

Those who join us in Pasadena, California from October 31st through November 2nd can look forward to a weekend of talks, workshops, demos, and badge hacking. But what’s more, you’ll experience the unique sense of camaraderie that’s produced when you pack hundreds of hardware hackers into an alleyway and ply them with as much caffeine as they can handle. Some treat it like a normal hacker con, others as a social experiment, but nobody thinks of it as anything less than a fantastic time.

We’re still working closely with our friends at Supplyframe, DigiKey, and Framework to put together a full itinerary for Supercon 2025, so stay tuned over the coming weeks as things are finalized. But in the meantime, we’ve got a couple new additions this year that we’re pretty excited about.

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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.