Retro is in the air today as [John] has tipped us off about a new game he has written for the Tandy Color Computer (CoCo), The game, inspired by the homebrew game DOWNFALL for the Atari Jaguar, features what looks like snappy game play, lots of bright colorful animation and has just entered the Alpha [...]

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[XVortex] pulled off a pretty incredible firmware hack. He managed to get a firmware upgrade for Synology running on a QNAP machine. These are both Network Attached Storage devices, but apparently the Synology firmware is better than what QNAP supplies with their offerings. The nice thing is that this is not a one-off hack. You [...]

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[Andrea] built this LED chaser using one logic chip. It illuminates all but one of the six LEDs, with the dim bit moving back and forth along the row in a chase sequence. This is something like an inverse Larson Scanner without the fading tail. But doing it with a logic chip instead of a [...]

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Confronted with the issue of finding a use for his mounting pile of junk electronics, [Rue] set out to build a persistence of vision device using a hardware state machine. We have a suspicion that his original link may go down if there’s too much traffic so here’s a cached link just in case. Any [...]

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You probably know that if you spin a motor (mechanically) it generates electricity on what would normally be the inputs. This can be a problem when you shut off a spinning motor and is the reason that protection diodes are built into motor driver circuits. But [Dino] isn’t interested in driving a motor, he wanted [...]

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[Tim Hunkin], builder extraordinaire and host of The Secret Life of Machines is a bit frustrated with the current economic climate and decided to take out his frustrations with a game of Whac-A-Banker. [Tim]‘s version of the classic Whac-A-Mole game uses tiny air cylinders to actuate five banker figurines up and down. The figures were cast with [...]

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Any self-identified geek that spent some time in the 80s will tell you how they used to type out programs into their ‘microcomputer’ with BASIC. It was a simpler time when a computer’s raison d’etre was simply being a BASIC interpreter. These days are long past us now; you can’t simply turn on a computer and [...]

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Any self-identified geek that spent some time in the 80s will tell you how they used to type out programs into their ‘microcomputer’ with BASIC. It was a simpler time when a computer’s raison d’etre was simply being a BASIC interpreter. These days are long past us now; you can’t simply turn on a computer and [...]

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Here’s something we thought we would never see: computing with just pipes, /dev/zero, and /dev/null. As a thought experiment, [Linus] imagined a null byte represented an electron. /dev/zero would have an infinite supply of electrons and /dev/null would make a wonderful positive power supply. With a very short program (named mosfet.c), [Linus] can use Linux pipes [...]

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[George] is a Neo Geo aficionado, and among his collection of paraphernalia, he has a MVS-Mini game console. His mini “Multi Video System” is a 2-slot model, meaning that it can hold two game cartridges at a time, which are indicated by plastic cards inserted in the cabinet’s face plate. Instead of swapping those cards [...]

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For a computer that debuted in the early 80s the MSX was a very respectable machine. Of course  these were the days that superimposing graphics over a video was an amazing feat, but  [Danjovic] and [Igor] are still having fun with their boxen. They designed a software interface for the Wii Nunchuck (translation) on their trusty MSX computer. [...]

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Who wouldn’t want to build a computer out of relays? We do, but we’ve got too many projects on our plate already. It looks like [rory] has his priorities in order because his build is one of the most amazing we’ve ever seen. We’ve seen [Harry Porter]‘s amazing relay computer and we’re familiar with [Konrad Zuse]‘s WWII era endeavours. [...]

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As a life long lover of his venerable Commodore 64, [Frank] was looking for a way to speed up the development time when writing C64 demos. His solution is a universal C64 cartridge that will connect to a PC over a USB port. The board is powered by a CLPD and a microcontroller loaded with code [...]

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[Chris Fenton] needs your help. After constructing a 1/10th scale, cycle accurate Cray-1 supercomputer and finding a disk with Cray software on it, he’s ready to start loading the OS. There’s a small problem, though: no one knows how to boot the thing. [Chris] posted a disk image for a Cray-1/X-MP with the help of the people at [...]

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[John Zitterkopf] is in the middle of restoring a vintage Sega Star Trek Captain’s Chair arcade game for the upcoming 2012 Texas Pinball festival, though one prerequisite for the show is that the game supports some sort of free play mode. At this point he doesn’t have the option of tracking down a freeplay ROM [...]

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For a young geek in the 80s, the it computer was the IBM PCjr. On paper, it was a truly remarkable leap in technology. With a wireless keyboard, light pen, and optical mouse it was an impressive, if maligned, piece of hardware. There was a small problem with the optical mouse, though; it required a special [...]

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Building your first circuit is empowering, but make sure it’s not too empowering. [Jon] sent in a great tutorial of power protection circuits to make sure you don’t release the mystical blue smoke that make electronics work. There’s an in-depth tutorial of the classic series diode that’s the simplest of all power protection circuits. There’s not much to [...]

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[Bob Alexander] wrote in to share a hobby of his that we thought was pretty timely considering the new year is quickly approaching. For several years now he has put together a custom calendar for himself, including both dates he finds important along with sweet pictures of vintage computer equipment. Friends and family found his [...]

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Ammo crate PCs have been around since Unreal Tournament LAN parties, but this one goes further back than that; [Simon] put an Apple II in an ammo crate. It’s a fitting anachronistic build from the same guy that built the TARDIS MAME cabinet. Thankfully, [Simon] didn’t tear apart an Apple IIc for this build. A [...]

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We don’t know why, but the Atari Jaguar is getting a lot of attention this week. [10P6] just came up with this Jaguar/CD combo that reminds us what Atari could have come up with in 1993. The build itself is relatively simple once you get past [kevincal]‘s ‘April Fools’ type joke he played on the Atari [...]

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Nixies and VFDs are great displays, but when using them you’ve got to deal with some fairly high voltages, at least for the micro projects we see on Hack a Day. Luckily, there’s another ancient technology that can be driven at tiny voltages. [Kenneth] put up a great tutorial on Numitron tubes to show the Internet [...]

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If you’ve ever torn into very old equipment for a little refurbishment, you’ve seen ancient capacitors among tube sockets and carbon resistors. These caps are long past their life expectancy and are dried out. Putting a brand-new metal can cap in a piece of equipment from the 40s just seems wrong, though. Luckily, [unixslave] posted [...]

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Most of you probably have a webcam sitting around somewhere, and after all the high voltage projects you’ve done using disposable cameras, we bet you have some camera lenses too. You could always do what [Butch] did and combine the lens from the camera with the webcam to do some up close inspection. This seems [...]

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What makes a project really exceptional? Part of it is a, ‘gee, that’s clever’ angle with a little bit of, ‘that’s actually possible.’ One thing the Hack a Day crew really appreciates is awesome enclosures. Altoids tins will get you far, but to step up to the big leagues you’ve got to bend some aluminum. [...]

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If you are considering repurposing some old computer equipment to create music, be aware that the bar has been raised just a tad. YouTube user [BD594] spent some time sifting through his bin of used electronics and put together a 5-piece band that plays a pretty awesome rendition of The Animals’ “House of the Rising [...]

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On his blog, [Kenneth Finnegan] recently showed off a replica of a fun toy he used to play with as a kid, a telephone intercom system. The setup is pretty simple, requiring little more than a pair of analog phones, a battery, and a resistor. The phones are connected to one another using a standard [...]

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[Carl] sent in his keyboard he made for his FIGnition microcomputer. At least now he has more than 8 buttons. The FIGnition is a tiny little microcomputer that harkens back to the 8-bit days of yore. Designed to be an educational computer like the Altair or Heathkit (sans blinkenlights), the FIGnition gives its students ‘bare metal’ access to everything in [...]

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Yesterday, Korg released a firmware update to their ribbon controller synth, the Monotribe. The firmware is just an audio file that needs to be played to the sync input of the box. [gravitronic] thought this was rather interesting, so he decided to decode the monotribe firmware. It’s the first step to custom Monotribe firmware, and [...]

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When it came time to try out some old-school computing [Quinn Dunki] grabbed a 6502 processor and got to work. For those that are unfamiliar, this is the first chip that was both powerful, affordable, and available to the hobby computing market back in the 1970′s. They were used in Apple computers, Commodore 64, and [...]

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[Andrea] built a seismic wave detector that warns of a possible impending earthquake. Because P waves travel much faster than the “make everything shake” S waves, building a device that detects P waves serves as an early warning system that alerts building occupants to go under a door frame. [Andrea]‘s build detects these fast-moving P [...]

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