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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
Jeri Ellsworth is facinated by retro computing technology. In her latest endeavor she’s researched the principles behind magnetic core logic, a technology used to store data in the pre-transistor days. We’d have appreciated a close up of the device under … Read more
For all you Commodore retro enthusiasts, there’s an online mag for you. Known as CommodoreFree, its a free to download magazine dedicated to Commodore Computers and is available in text, HTML and PDF formats, as well as including Commodore 64 … Read more
This HP Printer Display Hack by Chris Miller is a simple background application that periodically checks the current price of a selected stock and sends it to the display of HP (and compatible) laser printers. It is a takeoff on … Read more
Andre Fachat has written a post on his 6502.org blog detailing his DIY 6502 computer build. “I have built a DIY 6502 computer, which is mostly TTL logic only except for 65xx chips and ROMs, but the most TTL-ish part … Read more
Drone writes to inform us about the release of a major tech document from the early days of microwave development. The seminal 1963 1,096 page tome on microwave filters by Matthaei, Jones, and Young, “Microwave Filters, Impedance-Matching Networks, and Coupling … Read more
Markus Gritsch has built a dedicated ATARI POKEY chiptunes player using a DP QFP proto boards. “I successfully compiled the ASAP (Another Slight Atari Player) library for a PIC32MX795F512H. ASAP emulates a 6502 CPU and the famous POKEY sound chip … Read more
Jeff Ledger wrote informing us of a retro-style computer based on the Parallax Propeller described in this Instructable. It utilizes the Pocket Mini Computer Kit from GadgetGangster. This board is based on the Propeller chip and includes VGA, audio and … Read more
O’Reilly is offering a free webcast relating vintage video gaming techniques to today’s web-based games. “Back in the day, game developers were in a similar position to where web-based game developers using HTML5 Canvas are today; Graphics rendering methods were … Read more
If you are into vintage computing here’s a podcast for you. Earl Evans of Retrobits has returned from a one-year hiatus to bring us more episodes of The Retrobits Podcast. This podcast is about all aspects of retrocomputing. Like he … Read more
Ante Vukorepa draws our attention to this video of Claude Paillard, a French radio amateur (F2FO), making his own tubes (also known as thermionic valves) from scratch. “The video depicts the whole process, from winding the filament through making the … Read more
tubebooks.org Vintage info from the days of vacuum tubes Kelvin informs us of an online stash of vintage engineering docs at tubebooks.org. He especially recommends you check out the technical books section/link. Tubebooks is “a collection of vintage engineering texts, … Read more
Here’s something for retro video game enthusiasts. This talk by Sven Oliver (‘SvOlli’) Moll from the recent 28C3 conference in Berlin covers the history, the hardware and how to write programs for the Atari 2600 gaming console. The Atari 2600 … Read more
Dennis Ferron developed this Parallax Propeller Laptop with a 6502 co-processor and 64K of static RAM as his entry to a Parallax Propeller design contest. He observed that hardware prototyping has evolved from building-block hardware (TTL) to programmable hardware (PLA’s … Read more
Steve at Big Mess o’ Wires has resumed work on his Macintosh floppy drive emulator project. Previously he had developed the project on a breadboard using an Altera EPM7128S CPLD and an Atmel ATMEGA32u4 microcontroller. Now he has assembled it … Read more
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