Doing 1080p Video, Sort Of, On The STM32 Microcontroller

When you think 1080p video, you probably don’t think STM32 microcontroller. And yet! [Gabriel Cséfalvay] has pulled off just that through the creative use of on-chip peripherals. Sort of. The…

Dual-Port RAM For A Simple VGA Card

Making microcontrollers produce video has long been a staple of hardware hacking, but as the resolution goes up, it becomes a struggle for less capable silicon. To get higher resolution VGA from an…

Simon Says With An RP2040

The team of [Michael] and [Chimdi] from Cornell’s Designing with Microcontrollers (ECE 4760) Fall 2023 session designed a version of Simon Says on an RP2040 which they call Pico Says. It uses…

Gyro-Controlled Labyrinth Game Outputs To VGA

This gesture-controlled labyrinth game using two Raspberry Pi Pico units does a great job of demonstrating how it can sometimes take a lot of work to make something look simple. To play, one tilts …

Designing A Macintosh-to-VGA Adapter With An LM1881

If you’re the happy owner of a vintage Apple system like a 1989 Macintosh IIci you may know the pain of keeping working monitors around. Unless it’s a genuine Apple-approved CRT with th…

Upgraded Graphics Gremlin Adds HDMI Video To Vintage PCs

Although new VGA-equipped monitors can still be bought, the old standard is definitely on its way out by now, being replaced by high-speed digital interfaces like HDMI and DisplayPort. It therefore…

RGB Graphics On A DEC Rainbow With Reverse-Engineered Monitor

One of the delights of the boring pre-VGA era is that you get to express your creativity when it comes to making a random color CRT work with an equally exciting dual CPU computer like the DEC Rain…

An Easy Z80 And VGA Upgrade For The Apple II

The Apple II was at the forefront of the home computer revolution when it came out in 1977. In its era, nobody really cared about hooking up the Apple II to a VGA monitor, but these days, it’…

Much Better VGA From An ESP32

The ESP32 series from Espressif have been a successful line of products, offering a powerful microcontroller with on-chip wireless networking. There’s a snag though in their practice of calli…

Upgrade Your Voodoo With More Memory

In 1996, the 3Dfx VooDoo VGA chipset changed computer graphics forever. Because of the high cost of memory, most of the boards had only 4 MB of memory — which seemed a lot back then. However,…

EPROM Does VGA

If you wanted to create a VGA card, you might think about using an FPGA. But there are simpler ways to generate patterns, including an old-fashioned EPROM, as [DrMattRegan] points out in a recent v…

From A 6502 Breadboard Computer To Lode Runner And Beyond

As disruptive and generally unpleasant as the pandemic lockdowns of 2020 were, they often ended up being a catalyst for significant personal growth. That was often literal growth, thanks to stress …

TinyLlama Is A 486 In Your Pocket

We love retrocomputing and tiny computers here at Hackaday, so it’s always nice to see projects that combine the two. [Eivind]’s TinyLlama lets you play DOS games on a board that fits i…

Colorful Split Keyboard Uses VGA Connections

When it comes to building a split keyboard, you have a lot of options when it comes to the cable. Many will use a standard 3.5 mm TRRS cable, and others might use something more esoteric like RJ-45…

TRS-80 Gains Multiple Monitor Support, And High-Resolution Graphics

To call [Glen Kleinschmidt] a vintage computing enthusiast would be an understatement. Who else would add the ability to control and address multiple VGA monitors to a rack-mounted TRS-80 Model 1? …

Z80 Single-Board Computer Looks Like It Could Have Been A Killer Product

Most retrocomputer builds seem to focus on either restoring old machines or rebuilding them from scratch. Either way, the goal is to get as close as possible to the original machine, and while we c…

Have You Heard Of MCGA?

In the world of PC graphics, the early standards followed the various video cards of the day. There was MDA, familiar through the original text-based DOS prompt, CGA, then EGA, and the non-IBM Herc…

Retro Serial Terminal Uses Modern Chips To Get CP/M Machine Talking

The hobbyists of the early days of the home computer era worked wonders with the comparatively primitive chips of the day, and what couldn’t be accomplished with a Z80 or a 6502 was often rel…