Tiny PONG, Big Ambitions: World’s Smallest Arcade

London, Ontario college student [Victoria Korhonen] has captured the attention of tech enthusiasts and miniaturization lovers with her creation of what might be the world’s smallest arcade machine.…

The 6809 8-Bit Microcomputer: A Father-Son Odyssey

If you’re nostalgic for the golden age of microprocessors and dream of building your own computer, this story might spark your imagination. [Eric Lind], passionate retro enthusiast and his 14…

A Hundred Year Old Solid State Amplifier

Conventional wisdom has it that the solid state era in electronics began in 1948 with the invention of the transistor, or if you wish to split hairs, with the 1930s invention by the Russian [Oleg L…

Chess What: One More Pi-Powered Board

Chess is timeless, but automating it? That’s where the real magic begins. Enter [Tamerlan Goglichidze]’s Pi Board, an automated chess system that blends modern tech with age-old strategy. Inspired …

When Transistor Count Mattered

Many Hackaday readers have an interest in retro technology, but we are not the only group who scour the flea markets. Alongside us are the collectors, whose interest is as much cultural as it is te…

Your Undocumented Project May Also Baffle People Someday

What’s life without a little mystery? There’s one less rolling around after historians finally identified a donated mystery machine that had been in storage for years. The main pieces o…

World’s First Virtual Meeting: 5,100 Engineers Phoned In

Would you believe that the first large-scale virtual meeting happened as early as 1916? More than a century before Zoom meetings became just another weekday burden, the American Institute of Electr…

Retrogadgets: Oscilloscope Cameras

Today, if you want to get a picture from your oscilloscope — maybe to send to a collaborator or to stick in a document or blog post — it is super easy. You can push an image to a USB st…

Building A DIY Nipkow Disk Display

Before flat screen technologies took over, we associate TV with the CRT. But there were other display technologies that worked, they just weren’t as practical. One scheme was the Nipkow disk,…

An RP2040-based PC-FX Development Cartridge

[David Shadoff] has a clear soft spot for the NEC console systems and has been collecting many tools and data about them. When developing with these old systems, having a way to upload code quickly…

Hands On With A Giant Nixie Tube

[Sam Battle] is no stranger to these pages, nor is his Museum is not Obsolete. The museum was recently gifted an enormous Nixie tube created by Dalibor Farný, a B-grade (well, faulty) unit that cou…

Keeping Tabs On An Undergraduate Projects Lab’s Door Status

Over at the University of Wisconsin’s Undergraduate Projects Lab (UPL) there’s been a way to check whether this room is open for general use by CS undergraduates and others practically …

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…

75-In-One Music

It’s likely that many Hackaday readers will have had their interest in electronics as a child honed by exposure to an electronics kit. The type of toy that featured a console covered in elect…

Symbolic Nixie Tubes Become Useful For Artistic Purposes

When it comes to Nixie tubes, the most common usage these days seems to be in clocks. That has people hunting for the numerical version of the tubes, which are usually paired with a couple of LEDs …

Braun TS2 Radio Turns 68, Gets Makeover

The Braun TS2 radio was a state-of-the art tube set in 1956. Today it still looks great, but unsurprisingly, the one that [Manuel Caldeier] has needed a little tender loving care. The table radio h…

What Happened To Duracell PowerCheck?

Remember Duracell’s PowerCheck? The idea was that a strip built into the battery would show if the battery was good or not. Sure, you could always get a meter or a dedicated battery tester &#…

Ceefax: The Original News On Demand

Long before we had internet newsfeeds or Twitter, Ceefax delivered up-to-the-minute news right to your television screen. Launched by the BBC in 1974, Ceefax was the world’s first teletext service,…

Curing CRT Cataracts Freshens Up Retro Roundy TVs

It’s been a long time since the family TV has had a CRT in it, and even longer since that it was using what was basically an overgrown oscilloscope tube. But “roundies” were once …

Reverse Time Back To The Days Of RPN

While Texas Instruments maintains dominance in the calculator market (especially graphing calculators), there was a time when this wasn’t the case. HP famously built the first portable scient…