Unexpectedly Interesting Payphone Gives Up Its Secrets

Reverse engineering a payphone doesn’t sound like a very interesting project, at least in the United States, where payphones were little more than ruggedized versions of residential phones wi…

Using AI To Help With Assembly

Although generative AI and large language models have been pushed as direct replacements for certain kinds of workers, plenty of businesses actually doing this have found that using this new techno…

Seven New Street Fighter 2 Arcade Rom Hacks

[Sebastian Mihai] is a prolific programmer and hacker with a particular focus on retrocomputing and period games, and this latest hack, adding new gameplay elements to Capcom’s Street Fighter…

Quake In 276 KB Of RAM

Porting the original DOOM game to various pieces of esoteric hardware is a rite of passage in some software circles. But in the modern world, we can get better performance than the 386 processor re…

“Conflicts Are Multiplying”: U.N. Chief Warns of World at War as General Assembly Kicks Off

World leaders are gathering in New York for the United Nations General Assembly and the U.N.’s Summit of the Future. U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres spoke on Sunday. Secretary-General António Guterres: “Conflicts are raging and...

From High Level Language To Assembly

If you cut your teeth on Z-80 assembly and have dabbled in other assembly languages, you might not find much mystery in creating programs using the next best thing to machine code. However, if you …

2024 Tiny Games Contest: A Flappy Seagull Game With Sound In Only 500 Bytes

It was probably a reasonable assumption that the “Tiny” in our recently concluded Tiny Games Contest mostly referred to the physical footprint of the game. And indeed, that’s the …

Internet Appliance To Portable Terminal

Few processors have found themselves in so many different devices as the venerable Z80. While it isn’t powerful by modern standards, you can still use devices like this Cidco MailStation as a…

Baldur’s Gate III Comes To The TRS-80 Model 100

To say that Tandy’s TRS-80 Model 100 was an influential piece of computer hardware would be something of an understatement. While there’s some debate over which computer can historicall…

50-Year-Old Program Gets Speed Boost

At first glance, getting a computer program to run faster than the first electronic computers might seem trivial. After all, most of us carry enormously powerful processors in our pockets every day…

Driving An OLED Screen With A 6502 Single-Board Computer

Twenty years ago, if you wanted an LCD for a project, you’d probably end up with something salvaged from a mobile phone or an HD44780 character display. These days, little OLEDs can be had fo…

Tetris On An Oscilloscope, The Software Way

When we talk about video games on an oscilloscope, you’d be pardoned for assuming the project involved an analog CRT scope in X-Y mode, with vector graphics for something like Asteroids or Ba…

Pixel Pump, The Open Source Vacuum Pickup Tool Is Now Shipping

The Pixel Pump is an open source manual pick & place assist tool by [Robin Reiter], and after a long road to completion, it’s ready to ship. We first saw the Pixel Pump project as an entr…

Well Documented Code Helps Revive Decades-Old Commodore Project

In the 1980s, [Stephen] was working on his own RPG for the Commodore 64, inspired by dungeon crawlers of the era like Ultima IV and Telengard, both some of his favorites. The mechanics and gameplay…

Alternatives To Pins And Holes For 3D Printed Assemblies

When we have two 3D printed parts that need to fit together, many of us rely on pins and holes to locate them and fix them together. [Slant 3D] has explored some alternative ideas in this area that…

Videos Teach Bare Metal RP2040

When we write about retrocomputers, we realize that back in the day, people knew all the details of their computer. You had to, really, if you wanted to get anything done. These days, we more often…