A teardown of TI’s Little Professor vintage calculator from KuzyaTech: This thing was sold for parts and repair since the seller did not think it was working. As it turned out, everything worked just fine, but not in an expected way. This is not your typical calculator, but rather a teaching one. More details at KuzyaTech.com.
Category Archives: vintage
Die photos and analysis of the revolutionary 8008 microprocessor, 45 years old
Ken Shirriff has written an article detailing die photos of the vintage Intel 8008 that reveal the circuitry it used: Intel’s groundbreaking 8008 microprocessor was first produced 45 years ago.1 This chip, Intel’s first 8-bit microprocessor, is the ancestor of the x86 processor family that you may be using right now. I couldn’t find good […]
Inside card sorters: 1920s data processing with punched cards and relays
Ken Shirriff did an in-depth write-up of the punched card sorter: Punched card sorters were a key part of data processing from 1890 until the 1970s, used for accounting, inventory, payroll and many other tasks. This article looks inside sorters, showing the fascinating electromechanical and vacuum tube circuits used for data processing in the pre-computer […]
C64/SX64 RAM Cartridge (SD2IEC part)
Sjaak designed and built a C64 RAM/ROM cartridge, which has a 6264 SRAM chip and an Atmel 644. He did program an Atmega with a Bus Pirate: Today came in the Atmega644P’s in TQFP package I scored on eBay. Today I’m focusing on the SD2IEC part of the RAM cartridge. I was a bit scary to order […]
Video: Retrocomputing and machines that made the Net
CircleCitycon 2014 was held in Indianapolis, Indiana in June, 2014. Pete Friedman gave this presentation on the Unix and Unix-like systems that formed the early internet, and how they can provide interesting historical and technical perspectives for the modern hacker.
Arduino + NES controller = USB keyboard
Grouflon has written up a unique project using an Arduino and an NES controller. “This week I worked on little script/manipulation that turns an Arduino and a NES controller into a USB Keyboard. Maybe it can be of use to some of you, so feel free to grab the code on this github repo. This […]
Apple II DOS source code available
Could you write a Disk Operating System in 7 weeks? That was the time frame in which the Apple II DOS was developed! According to the Computer History Museum, “On April 10, 1978 Bob Shepardson and Steve Jobs signed a $13,000 one-page contract for a file manager, a BASIC interface, and utilities. It specified that […]
STM32F429 discovery board running Sega master system emulator
Fabrice Muller writes informing of this recent efforts using the STM32F429 Discovery Board to run a Sega emulator: Yesterday I made this adaptation from the Alessandro Rocchegiani sega master system emulator. You can seen the original work here. After trying to adapt this emulator to my smt32 VGA output board I faced some problems with […]
VT100 BeagleBone Mod
Brendan Powers writes, “I’ve recently finished my DEC VT100 BeagleBone mod project. You can find the details, including schematic and board files here.” He’s designed an STP add-on board for the VT100 series terminals that allows the use of an internal BeageBone instead of an external serial connected computer. Via the contact form .
Arduino retro gamebox
Based on the Arduino Uno R3, five switches, three resistors, and a couple of casino trực tuyến RCA sockets this vintage video gamebox can run versions of old school favorites including Asteroids, Sudoku, Parachute and Space Invaders. The project was developed by Darren Yates at APCMag, and he estimates its total cost at around $33. […]
Arduino Pong game
Pong is the classic video game, essentially the “Hello world” of gaming development. James Bruce, working at the parhaat uudet nettikasinot company, has developed a simple implementation of Pong for the Arduino which requires the addition of only an RCA jack, two 10K potentiometers, a pushbutton and a handful of resistors. The video output is […]
SIDCog v1.3 produces C64 sound on Propeller
Johannes Ahlebrand has released version 1.3 of SIDCog. This Spin language object emulates the famous sound chip in the Commodore 64 running in a single Propeller cog. The developer reports it’s much closer to the 8580 than the 6581 when it comes to filter emulation and combined waveforms. Features include a 31kHz sample rate, >16bit […]
Online source lets you send and receive Enigma cipher comms
The Enigma machine was a World War II era encryption device used by the German army. It was the subject of substantial efforts by Allied cryptographers which finally resulted in the successful cracking of the code, which led to decryption of German military comms. We found this website which allows you to encode and decode […]
1937 radio hacked into an iPhone dock
Øyvind Dahl writes, “I just hacked a 75 year old radio into an iPhone dock. I used a simple amplifier circuit, parts from an old speaker, an Arduino, some LEDs and a mini dock plug.” You can find more info on the build at Øyvind’s Build Electronic Circuits website. Via the contact form.
MIDI OUT for vintage Korg CX-3
Michael from AcidBourbon writes, “This project is about adding a MIDI output to a vintage organ, the Korg CX-3 (famous Hammond compact organ clone). My Korg was built in 1979, so before the introduction of the General Midi standard. But tapping into the right (only three) conducting paths on the main PCB and using a […]
Car cassette player converted for MP3 play
Ivan Creations wanted to use his old car cassette player (that sounds descent) to somehow play MP3 files. He devised this hack using PIC16F877A to control CECL08D MP3 player and Grundig WKC 1704 RDS Infomat Cassette player with remote control via Blaupunkt RC10 remote. “The MP3 player output signal is hooked up to the cassette […]
Homebrew Cray-1A on Xilinx Spartan-3E board
Chris Fenton has spent the last year and a half or so constructing his own 1/10-scale, binary-compatible, cycle-accurate Cray-1. He says this project falls purely into the “because I can!” category.” The actual design was implemented in a Xilinx Spartan-3E 1600 development board. For vintage computing enthusiasts, Chris also provides an interesting link to the […]
Hive retro computer
The crew from the German HIVE Project are developing a retro style DIY computer with Parallax Propeller chips. The design includes three Propeller chips (containing a total of 24 RISC processors), VGA graphics, video output, stereo sound, about 1 MB of RAM, SD Card reader, LAN, mouse and keyboard. The design uses all DIP and […]
Retrochallenge 2013WW
The crew over at Retrochallenge has announced the commencement of their 2013 Winter Warmup contest. The RetroChallenge is a loosely disorganised gathering of RetroComputing enthusiasts who collectively do stuff with old computers for a month. The event is very much open to interpretation… individuals set there own challenges, which can range from programming to multimedia […]
Open pinball project
The Open Pinball Project is a cooperative effort to develop open source pinball hardware and software. Their stated goal is to “to build the perfect pinball machine, or at least a pinball machine for a reasonable price!” To date they’ve worked at restoring a number of old machines, learning valuable lessons in the process. Their […]