Recreating A Camera Shot

People rolling off shields and spears clashing against swords as the camera zooms in and out wildly makes the hallmark action sequences in the movie 300 so iconic. Unfortunately, achieving this eff…

Upscaling The Sierras

If you played many games back in the mid-80s to 90s, you might remember the iconic graphics from Sierra’s Online Adventure Games. They were brightly colored (16 colors) and dynamic with some …

See How To Effectively Use A Green Screen In A Limited Space

Virtual green screens are pretty neat, but for results, nothing beats the real thing. But what if you have limited space? [Fred Emmott] had about 30 inches behind his desk to work with, and shares …

Make Your Own Virtual Set

An old adage says out of cheap, fast, and good, choose two. So if you’re like [Philip Moss] and trying to make a comedy series on a limited budget rapidly, you will have to take some shortcut…

Monochrome LCD Video Hacks Galore!

[Wenting Zhang] is clearly a fan of old school STN LCD displays, and was wondering how various older portable devices managed to drive monochrome LCDs panels with multiple grey levels. If the displ…

Retrotechtacular: How Television Worked In The 1950s

Watching television today is a very different experience from that which our parents would have had at our age, where we have high-definition digital on-demand streaming services they had a small n…

Flip Book Animations On The Inside Of 3D Prints

We’ve all seen 3D printed zoetropes, and drawn flip book animations in the corner of notebooks.  The shifting, fluid shape of the layers forming on a 3D printer is satisfying. And we all know…

Designing For The Small Grey Screen

With the huge popularity of retrocomputing and of cyberdecks, we have seen a variety of projects that use a modern computer such as a Raspberry Pi bathed in the glorious glow of a CRT being used as…

Twitch And Blink Your Way Through Typing With This Facial Keyboard

For those that haven’t experienced it, the early days of parenthood are challenging, to say the least. Trying to get anything accomplished with a raging case of sleep deprivation is hard enou…

A 3D Printed 35mm Movie Camera

Making a camera can be as easy as taking a cardboard box with a bit of film and a pin hole, but making a more accomplished camera requires some more work. A movie camera has all the engineering cha…

How Did Dolby Digital Sound Work On Film?

When we go to the cinema and see a film in 2022, it’s very unlikely that what we’re seeing will in fact be a film. Instead of large reels of transparent film fed through a projector, we…

It’s Bad Apple, But On A 32K EPROM

The Bad Apple!! video with its silhouette animation style has long been a staple graphics demo for low-end hardware, a more stylish alternative to the question “Will it run DOOM?”. It&#…

Invisible 3D Printed Codes Make Objects Interactive

An interesting research project out of MIT shows that it’s possible to embed machine-readable labels into 3D printed objects using nothing more than an FDM printer and filament that is transp…

Commodore Promotional Film From 1984 Enhanced

Over on Retro Recipe’s YouTube channel, [Perifractic] has been busy restoring an old promotional video of how Commodore computers were made back in 1984 (video below the break). He cleaned up…

AI Camera Knows Its S**t

[Caleb] shares a problem with most dog owners. Dogs leave their… byproducts…all over your yard. Some people pick it up right away and some just leave it. But what if your dog has run of…

OpenCV Knows Where Your Hand Is

We have to say, [Murtaza]’s example game in his latest video isn’t very exciting. However, the OpenCV technique he uses to track a hand and determine its distance from a single camera i…

The Seductive Pull Of An Obsolete Home Movie Format

It’s dangerous for a hardware hacker to go into a second-hand store. I was looking for a bed frame for my new apartment, but of course I spent an age browsing all the other rubbish treasures …

Oscilloscope Probes Itself To Add Video

Modern oscilloscopes are often loaded with features, but every now and then you run into a feature that seems easy to implement yet isn’t available. [kgsws] wanted to use his Rigol DS1074 to …

ESP32 Clock Pushes Outrun Graphics Over Composite

We’ve covered plenty of clocks powered by the ESP32, but this one from [Marcio Teixeira] is really something special. Rather than driving a traditional physical display, the microcontroller i…

Super 8 Camera Brought Back To Life

The Super 8 camera, while a groundbreaking video recorder in its time, is borderline unusable now. Even if you can get film for it (and afford its often enormous price), it still only records on 8m…