Jaromir Sukuba: The Supercon 2018 Badge Firmware
If you missed it, the Hackaday Supercon 2018 badge was a complete retro-minicomputer with a screen, keyboard, memory, speaker, and expansion ports that would make a TRS-80 blush. Only instead of taking...
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SVG Rendering Comes To 8-bit Atari Computers
Bringing modern protocols and techniques to vintage computers is a favorite pastime for hackers, and over the years we’ve seen some absolutely incredible hardware and software projects designed...
View ArticleScripting Language Rapidly Develops A Clock
In the past, you might very well have started programming in Basic. It wasn’t very powerful language and it was difficult to build big projects with, but it was simple to learn, easy to use, and the...
View ArticleBootBasic Fits Your Favorite Language in the Boot Sector
Humans seem to have a need to do things that aren’t practical. Make the biggest ball of twine. Engrave the Declaration of Independence on a grain of rice. We want to make things bigger, smaller,...
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Catch The Old School BASIC Bug With This Computer Kit
Does the complexity of modern computing ever get you down? Do you find yourself longing for the old days, where you could actually understand what your desktop machine’s hardware and software was doing...
View ArticleConverting an Atari 2600 into a Home Computer; Did That Ever Work?
[Tony] posted an interesting video where he looks at the Atari 2600 and the way many companies tried to convert it into a real home computer. This reminded us of the ColecoVision, which started out as...
View ArticleHackaday Links: April 5, 2020
Git is powerful, but with great power comes the ability to really bork things up. When you find yourself looking at an inscrutable error message after an ill-advised late-night commit, it can be a...
View ArticleClassic 8-Bit Computing the Atari Way
In the classic gaming world, even before the NES arrived on the scene, there was no name more ubiquitous than Atari. Their famous 2600 console sold almost as many units as the Nintendo 64, but was...
View ArticleMicrosoft Releases the Source Code You Wanted Almost 30 Years Ago
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, if you had a personal computer there was a fair chance it either booted into some version of Microsoft Basic or you could load and run Basic. There were other...
View ArticleJack Tramiel Got A Good Deal, And Ruined Everything
A sideshow in the playground wars of the early 1980s over who had the best home computer lay in the quality of their onboard BASIC interpreters. Where this is being written the cream of the crop was...
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A Pocket Retro Computer Anyone Can Build
Not satisfied with any of the DIY retro computer kits on the market, [Leonardo Leoni] decided to make his own. Built using only the finest through-hole technology and powered by the ATmega328...
View ArticleBoot-To-BASIC Box Packs A Killer Graphics Engine
In the early days of the home computer era, many machines would natively boot into a BASIC interpreter. This was a great way to teach programming to the masses. However on most platforms the graphics...
View ArticleAccess an 8-bit Atari through Twitter
Building a retro computer, or even restoring one, is a great way to understand a lot of the fundamentals of computing. That can take a long time and a lot of energy, though. Luckily, there is a Twitter...
View ArticleAll The Best Computers From Cambridge Boot To Basic
The Raspberry Pi is a fine machine that appears in many a retrocomputing project, but its custom Linux distribution lacks one thing. It boots into a GNU/Linux shell or a fully-featured desktop GUI...
View ArticleBasic in 10 Lines or Less
For the last 11 years [Gunnar Kanold] has run the annual BASIC 10 Liner contest, and the rules for the 2021 edition are now available. There are four categories and each category has specific...
View ArticleEverything Old is New Again: Another 6502 Board is Born
[Jeff] says that designing your own 6502 computer is a rite of passage, and he wanted the experience. His board can accept a real 6502 or the newer CMOS variant that is still available. There are a few...
View ArticleThe Tube Map, In Glorious 8-Bit!
There was a time when visitors to London would carry an A to Z map to navigate the city’s Undergound railway system, referring to the iconic London Transport map printed on its back as they did so. Now...
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BASIC: Cross-Platform Software Hacking Then And Now
Surely BASIC is properly obsolete by now, right? Perhaps not. In addition to inspiring a large part of home computing today, BASIC is still very much alive today, even outside of retro computing. There...
View ArticleThe Famous Basic Computer Games Book Gets a 2021 Update
If you are a certain age, your first programming language was almost certainly BASIC. You probably at least saw the famous book by Ahl, titled BASIC Computer Games or 101 BASIC Computer Games. The...
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A Lockdown Brightened By A Library Of Vintage Usborne Books
Lockdown is boring. No, let’s emphasize that, lockdown is really boring. Walking for exercise is much less fun than it was last year because it’s a wet and muddy February, and with nowhere open, a rare...
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