Yes, the Wireless Application Protocol! What other WAP could there possibly be? This long-dormant cellphone standard is now once again available on the web, thanks to [Sean] over at ActionRetro modifying his FrogFind portal as a translation engine. Now any web site can be shoved through the WAP!

WAP was rolled out in 1999 as HTML for phones without the bandwidth to handle actual HTML. The idea of a “mobile” and a “desktop” site accessed via HTTP hadn’t yet been conceived, you see, so phoning into sites with WAP would produce a super-stripped down, paginated, text-only version of the page. Now FrogFind has a WAP version that does the same thing to any site, just as the HTTP (no S!)  FrogFind translates the modern web into pure HTML vintage browsers can read.

Of course you’ll need a phone that can connect to FrogFind with a WAP browser, which for many of us, may be… difficult. This protocol didn’t last much longer than PETS.COM, so access is probably going to be over 2G. With 2G sunset already passed in many areas, that can be a problem for vintage computer enthusiasts who want to use vintage phone hardware. [Sean] does not have an answer — indeed, he’s actively searching for one. His fans have pointed out a few models of handsets that should be able to access WAP via WiFi, but that leaves a lot of retro hardware out in the cold. If you have a good idea for a 2G bridge that can get out to the modern web and not attract the angry attention of the FTC (or its local equivalent), fans of ActionRetro would love to hear it — and so would we!

Vintage phone hacks don’t show up often on Hackaday, and when they do, it’s either much older machines or upgrading to USB-C, not to modern communications protocols. We haven’t seen someone hacking in the WAP since 2008. Given the collective brainpower of the Hackaday commentariat, someone probably has an idea to let everyone dive right into the WAP. Fight it out in the comments, or send us a tip if you have link to a howto.

What can you do with a laptop enough to drink even in the Puritan ex-colonies? 21 years is a long time for computer hardware– but [Chris] is using his early-2004 iBook G4 for game dev thanks to NetBSD.

Some of you might consider game dev a strong word; obviously he’s not working on AAA titles on the machine he affectionately calls “Brick”. NetBSD includes pygame in its repositories, though, and that’s enough for a 2D puzzle game he’s working on called Slantics. It’s on GitHub, if you’re curious.

Why NetBSD? Well, [Chris] wants to use his vintage hardware so that, in his words “collecting does not become hoarding” and as the slogan goes: “Of course it runs NetBSD!” It’s hard to remember sometimes that it’s been two decades since the last PPC Macintosh. After that long, PPC support in Linux is fading, as you might expect.

[Chris] tried the community-supported PPC32 port of Debian Sid, but the installer didn’t work reliably, and driver issues made running it “Death by a thousand cuts”. NetBSD, with it’s institutional obsession with running on anything and everything, works perfectly on this legally-adult hardware. Even better, [Chris] reports NetBSD running considerably faster, getting 60 FPS in pygame vs 25 FPS under Linux.

This is almost certainly not the year of the BSD Desktop, but if you’ve got an old PPC machine you feel like dusting off to enjoy a low-powered modern workflow, NetBSD may be your AI-code-free jam. It’s great to see old hardware still doing real work. If you’d rather relive the glory days, you can plug that PPC into a wayback proxy to browse like it’s 2005 again. If you get bored of nostalgia, there’s always MorphOS, which still targets PPC.

While it might not be accurate to say VHS is dead, it’s certainly not a lively format. It continues on in undeath thanks to dedicated collectors and hobbyists, some of whom may be tempted to lynch Reddit user [CommonKingfisher] for embedding a video player inside a VHS tape.

The hack started with a promotional video card via Ali Express, which is a cheap enough way to get a tiny LCD player MP4 playing micro. As you can see, there was plenty of room in the tape for the guts of this. The tape path is obviously blocked, so the tape is not playable in this format. [CommonKingfisher] claims the hack is “reversible” but since he cut a window for the LCD out of the casing of the cassette, that’s going to be pretty hard to undo. On the other hand, the ultrasonic cutter he used did make a very clean cut, and that would help with reversibility.

The fact that the thing is activated by a magnetic sensor makes us worry for the data on that tape, too, whether or not the speaker is a peizo. Ultimately it doesn’t really matter; in no universe was this tape the last surviving copy of “The Matrix”, and it’s a lot more likely this self-playing “tape” gets watched than the VHS was going to be. You can watch it yourself in the demo video embedded below.

VHS nostalgia around here usually involves replicating the tape experience, rather than repurposing the tape. We’re grateful to [George Graves] for the tip. Tips of all sorts are welcome on our friendly neighborhood tips line.

We did explicitly ask for projects that use a 555 timer for the One Hertz Challenge, but we weren’t expecting the 555 to be the project. Yet, here we are, with [matt venn]’s Open Source 1Hz Blinky, that blinks a light with a 555 timer… but not one you’d get from Digikey. 

Hooking a 555 to blink an LED at one hertz is a bog-simple, first-electronics-project type of exercise, unless you have to make the 555 first. Rather than go big, as we have seen before, [matt venn] goes very small, with a 555 implemented on a tiny sliver of Tiny Tapeout 6.

We’ve covered projects using that tapeout before, but in case you missed it, Tiny Tapeout gives space to anyone to produce ASICs on custom silicon using an open Process Design Kit, and we have [matt venn] to thank for it. The Tiny Tapeout implementation of the 555 was actually designed by [Vincent Fusco].

Of course wiring it up is a bit more complicated than dropping in a 555 timer to the circuit: the Tiny Tapeout ASIC must be configured to use that specific project using its web interface.  There’s a demo video embedded below, with some info about the project– it’s not just a blinking LED, so it’s worth seeing. The output isn’t exactly One Hertz, so it might not get the nod in the Timelord category, but it’s going to be a very strong competitor for other 555-based projects– of which we could really use more, hint-hint. You’ve got until August 19th, if you think you can use a 555 to do something more interesting than blink an LED.

We loved keygens back in the day. Our lawyers advise us to clarify that it’s because of the demo-scene style music embedded in them, not because we used them for piracy. [Patch] must feel the same way, as he has a lovely historical retrospective out on “The Internet’s Most Illegal Music” (embedded below).

After defining what he’s talking about for the younger set, who may never have seen a keygen in this degenerate era of software-by-subscription, traces the history of the jaunty chiptunes that were so often embedded in this genre of program. He starts with the early demoscene and its relationship with cracker groups — those are coders who circulate “cracked” versions of games, with the copyright protection removed. In the old days, they’d embed an extra loading screen to take credit for the dastardly deeds that our lawyer says to disavow.

more after the break…

Because often the same people creating the amazing audio-video demos of the “demoscene” were involved in cracking, those loading screens could sometimes outshine the games themselves. (We saw it at a friend’s house one time.) There was almost always excellent music provided by the crackers, and given the limitations of the hardware of the era, it was what we’d know of today as a “chiptune”.

The association between crackers and chiptunes lasted long after the chips themselves had faded into obsolescence. Part of the longevity of the tracker-built tunes is that in the days of dial-up you’d much rather a keygen with a .MOD file embedded than an .mP3, or god forbid, an uncompressed .WAV that would take all day to download.

Nowadays, chiptunes are alive and well, and while they try and hearken back more to the demoscene than the less savory side of their history, the connection to peg-legged programmers is a story that deserves to be told. The best part of the video is the link to keygenmusic.tk/ where you can finally find out who was behind that bopping track that’s been stuck in your head intermittently since 1998. (When you heard it at a computer lab, not on your own machine, of course.)

The demoscene continues to push old machines to new heights, and its spirit lives on in hacking machines like the RP2040.

The Z80 might be decades obsolete and a few years out of production, but it’s absolutely a case of “gone but not forgotten” in the hacker world. Case in point is SymbOS, a multitasking OS for Z80 machines by Amstrad, Sinclair, and the MSX2 family of computers that updated to version 4.0 earlier this year.

The best way to describe SymbOS is like looking at an alternate reality where Microsoft created Windows 95 ten years early to put on the MSX instead of the BASIC they were paid to provide. SymbOS 4.0 comes even further into alignment with that design language, with a new file explorer that looks a lot like Windows Explorer replacing (or supplementing) the earlier Midnight Commander style utility in version 3.

Thanks to the preemptive multitasking, you can listen to tracker music while organizing files and writing documents, and even play a port of DOOM. Chat with your friends on IRC while watching (low res) videos on SymboVid. If you’re looking for productivity, all the old business software written for CP/M can run in a virtual machine. There’s even an IDE if you can stand the compile times on what is, we have to remember, an 8-bit, 1980s machine. It’s hard to remember that while watching the demo video embedded below.

The operating system supports up to 1024 KB of RAM (in 64 KB chunks, of course) and file systems up to 2 TB, which is an absolutely bonkers amount of space for this era’s machines.  One enterprising dev has even got his CPC talking to ChatGPT, if that’s your jam. You can try SymbOS for free online on an MSX emulator, or toss it onto a spare Raspberry Pi.  If you’re feeling adventurous, there’s a port in the works for the Isetta TLL retrocomputer.

This isn’t the first modern OS we’ve featured for the Z80, the processor which will live forever in our hearts and tapeouts.

Thanks to [Manuel] for the tip.

Everything fails eventually, but moving parts fail fastest of all– and optical drives seemingly more than others, at least in our experience. Even when they work, vintage drives often have trouble with CD-R, and original media isn’t always easy to find. That’s why it’s so wonderful that [polpo]’s RP2040 ISA card, the PicoGUS 2.0, now supports CD-ROM emulation.

We covered PicoGUS when it first appeared as an ISA sound card,  and make no mistake, it can still emulate sound cards for retro-PC beeps and boops. It’s not just the Gravis Ultrasound (GUS) from which the project took its name, but Sound Blaster 2.0, MPU-401 for MIDI, Tandy 3-voice, and CMS/GameBlaster are all soft options. Like most sound cards back in the day, PicoGUS provides game port support as well.

We don’t recall sound cards that served as CD-ROM controllers, but apparently, that was a thing before IDE became the standard for optical drives. We do recall old CD-ROM drives that shipped with proprietary driver boards, and PicoGUS emulates Panasonic’s MKS standard, which apparently did show up on some sound cards. For the end-user, that doesn’t matter much: once it’s all set up using the open-source utilities (and appropriate drivers), you’ll have an optical drive sitting at D:.

There’s a USB port on the PicoGUS that lets you use a FAT32 formatted USB stick not as a CD drive, but a CD changer. You can access multiple disk images from the drive, selecting them with the utility software. There’s even a feature that lets you automatically advance to the next disk by removing and reinserting the drive, which is invaluable for multi-CD game installers. It’s not super speedy: in USB mode, expect it to run as fast as a 4x drive. (2x if the PicoGUS is emulating a Sound Blaster at the same time.) Considering that’s all with a single RP2040 in charge, it’s pretty fast. For a DOS box, it’s probably period appropriate, too.

The Almighty Algorithm reminded us about PicoGUS in a video by [vswitchero], which is embedded below for those of you who would like more information in the form of rapidly flickering images and sound.

Homebrew bills itself as the package manager MacOS never had (conveniently ignoring MacPorts) but they leave the PPC crowd criminally under-served, to say nothing of the 68k gang. Enter [that-ben] with MR Browser, a simple utility to fetch software from Macintosh Repository for computers too old to hit up the website.

If you’re not familiar with Macintosh Repository, it is what it says on the tin: a repository of vintage Macintosh software, like Macintosh Garden but apparently less accessible to vintage machines.

There are two versions available, depending on the age of your machine. For machines running System 6, the appropriately-named MR Browser sys6 will run on any 68000 Mac in only 157 KB of and MacTCP networking. (So the 128K obviously isn’t going to cut it, but a Plus from ’86 would be fine.)

The other version, called MR Browser 68K, ironically won’t run on the 68000. It needs a newer processor (68020 or newer, up-to and including PPC) and TCP/IP networking. Anything starting from the Macintosh II or newer should be game; it’s looking for System 7.x upto the final release of Mac OS 9, 9.2.2.  You’ll want to give it at least 3 MB of RAM, but can squeak by on 1.6 MB if you aren’t using pictures in the chat.

Chat? Yes, perhaps uniquely for a software store, there’s a chat function. That’s not so weird when you consider that this program is meant to be a stand-alone interface for the Macintosh Repository website, which does, indeed, have a chat feature. It beats an uncaring algorithm for software recommendations, that’s for sure. Check it out in action in the demo video below.

It’s nice to see people still making utilities to keep the old machines going, even if coding on them isn’t always the easiest.  If you want to go online on with vintage hardware (Macintosh or otherwise) anywhere else, you’re virtually locked-out unless you use something like FrogFind.

Thanks to [PlanetFox] for the tip. Submit your own, and you may win fabulous prizes. Not from us, of course, but anything’s possible!

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What has 8 ARM cores, 8 GB of RAM, fits in a pocket, and runs NixOS? It’s no pi-clone SBC, but [MWLabs]’s smartphone– a OnePlus 6, to be precise.

The video embedded below, and the git link above, are [MWLabs]’s walk-through for loading the mobile version of Nix onto the cell phone, turning it into a tiny-screened Linux computer. He’s using the same flake on the phone as on his desktop, which means he gets all the same applications set up in the same way– talk about convergence. That’s an advantage to Nix in this application, compared to the usual Alpine-based PostMarketOS.

Of course some of the phone-like features of this pocket-computer are lacking: the SIM is detected, and he can text, but 4G is nonfunctional. The rear camera is also not there yet, but given that Mobile-NixOS builds on the work done by well-established PostMarketOS, and PostMarketOS’ testing version can run the camera, it’s only a matter of time before support comes downstream. Depending what you need a tiny Linux device for, the camera functionality may or may not be of particular interest. If you’re like us, the idea of a mobile device running Nix might just intrigue you,

Smartphones can be powerful SBC alternatives, after all.  You can even turn them into SBCs. As long as you don’t need a lot of GPIO, like for a server,a phone in hand might be worth two birds in the raspberry bush.

3D printing is arguably over-used in the maker community. It’s just so easy to run off a quick prototype and then… well, it’s good enough, right? Choosing the right plastic can go a long way to making sure your “good enough” prototype really is good enough for long term use. If you’re producing anything with gearing, you might want to cast your eyes to a study by [Mert Safak Tunalioglu] and [Bekir Volkan Agca] titled: Wear and Service Life of 3-D Printed Polymeric Gears.

The authors printed simple test gears in ABS, PLA, and PETG, and built a test rig to run them at 900 rpm with a load of 1.5 Nm against a steel drive gear. The gears were pulled off and weighed every 10,000 rotations, and allowed to run to destruction, which occurred in the hundreds-of-thousands of rotations in each case. The verdict? Well, as you can tell from the image, it’s to use PETG.

The authors think that this is down to PETG’s ductility, so we would have liked to see a hard TPU added to the mix, to say nothing of the engineering filaments. On the other hand, this study was aimed at the most common plastics in the 3D printing world and also verified a theoretical model that can be applied to other polymers.

This tip was sent in by [Benjamin], who came across it as part of the research to build his first telescope, which we look forward to seeing. As he points out, it’s quite lucky for the rest of us that the U.S. government provides funding to make such basic research available, in a way his nation of France does not. All politics aside, we’re grateful both to receive your tips and for the generosity of the US taxpayer.

We’ve seen similar tests done by the community — like this one using worm gears — but it’s also neat to see how institutional science approaches the same problem. If you need oodles of cycles but not a lot of torque, maybe skip the spurs and print a magnetic gearbox. Alternatively you break out the grog and the sea shanties and print yourself a capstan.

Among this crowd, it’s safe to say that the original 68000 Macintosh computers need no introduction, but it’s possible some of you aren’t familiar with Chip8. It was an interpreted virtual machine originally created for the COSMAC VIP microcomputer by [Joe Weisbecker] way back in 1977. It enabled coding simple games on the COSMAC VIP without getting into machine code on the VIP’s CDP1802 processor. For the obvious reason of “Why not?” [KenDesigns] decided to put the two together with Chip4Mac68000, a Chip8 emulator for the original Macintosh.

Chip4Mac68000 is not actually a Macintosh program; it doesn’t run in the System Software. Instead, it is a bootdisk that runs bare-metal on the 68000 processor, bypassing Apple’s ROM completely. Doing that is probably more impressive than emulating Chip8 — anyone who wants to get into writing emulators starts with Chip8. That’s not to knock on anyone who goes to the effort of writing an emulator, it’s just that given its origins in a 1970s micro, it’s understandably a very simple system. Not many people do bare-metal coding on this sort of hardware anymore; it’s not like there’s an SDK you can go grab.

Or there wasn’t, anyway, because in order to get this emulator to work, [KenDesigns] wrote a bare-metal SDK for 68000-based Macs. Note that when he says 68000, he does mean 68000 — anything newer than a Macintosh Classic is out. It’s 68000, not 680xx. It was not a trivial endeavour. In the demo video embedded below, you can see his 512k Macintosh in pieces because he’s been poking at it with a logic analyzer to verify the hardware does what he thinks it’s being told.

If you want to try it out, apparently you don’t need real hardware: [KenDesigns] says MAME is accurate enough to make it all work, but miniVmac is not. No word if it would work on the RP2040-based PicoMac; if you try it, let us know how it works out.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen people writing new software for old Macs of late. If you’re working new magic on very old machines, drop us a line. We’d love to hear about it.

Sure, Apple’s Lisa wasn’t the first computer released with a graphical user interface — Xerox was years ahead with the Alto and the Star workstation — but Lisa was the first that came within the reach of mere mortals. Which doesn’t mean many mortals got their hands on one; with only about 10,000 sold, they were never common, and are vanishingly rare nowadays. Enter [Andrew Yaros], who has graced the world with LisaGUI, an in-browser recreation of the Lisa Office System in Javascript.

Lisa’s GUI varies from modern conventions in a few interesting ways. For one, it is much more document-focused: if you double-click on LisaType, you do not start the program. Instead you “tear off” a document from the “pad” icon of LisaType, which you can then open with another double click. The desktop is also not a folder for files to live permanently, but a temporary space. You can “set aside” a file to the desktop, but its home on disk is unchanged.

Unlike the family of Mac emulators, LisaGUI does not purport to be a perfect replica. [Andrew] has made a few quality-of-life improvements for modern users, as well as a few innovations of his own. For instance, menus are now “sticky”– on the Lisa, you had to hold down the mouse to keep them open, and release on the appropriate entry. LisaGUI leaves the menu open for you to click the entry, as on a later Macintosh.

Obviously the menu bar clock and FPS counter are not native to the Lisa; nor is the ability to theme the icons and change (1-bit) colour palettes. The ability to draw unique icons to assign to documents is all [Andrew], but is something we wish we had back in the day. He also makes no attempt to enforce the original aspect ratio, so you’ll be dragging the window to get 4:3 if that’s your jam.

Right now it does not look as though there’s much original software aside from LisaType. We would have loved to see the famous LisaProject, which was the original “killer app” that led NASA to purchase the computer. Still, this is an Alpha and it’s possible more software is to come, if it doesn’t run afoul of Apple’s IP. Certainly we are not looking too hard at this gift horse’s chompers. What’s there is plenty to get a feel for the system, and LisaGUI should be a treat for retrocomputer enthusiasts who aren’t too anal about period-perfect accuracy.

We stumbled across this one in a video from [Action Retro] in which he (the lucky dog) also shows off his Lisa II, the slightly-more-common successor.

Sometimes, all you need to make something work is to come at it from a different angle from anyone else — flip the problem on its head, so to speak. That’s what [Keizo Ishibashi] did to create his Cantareel, a modified guitar that actually sounds like a hurdy-gurdy.

We wrote recently about a maker’s quest to create just such a hybrid instrument, and why it ended in failure: pressing strings onto the fretboard also pushed them tighter to the wheel, ruining the all-important tension. To recap, the spinning wheel of a hurdy-gurdy excites the strings exactly like a violin bow, and like a violin bow, the pressure has to be just right. There’s no evidence [Keizo Ishibashi] was aware of that work, but he solved the problem regardless, simply by thinking outside the box — the soundbox, that is.

Unlike a hurdy-gurdy, the Cantareel keeps its wheel outside the soundbox. The wheel also does not rub directly upon the strings: instead, it turns what appears to be a pair of o-rings. Each rosined o-ring bows 2 of the guitar’s strings, giving four strings a’ singing. (Five golden rings can only be assumed.) The outer two strings of this ex-six-string are used to hold the wheel assembly in place by feeding through holes on the mounting arms. The guitar is otherwise unmodified, making this hack reversible.

It differs from the classic hurdy-gurdy in one particular: on the Cantareel, every string is a drone string. There’s no way to keep the rubber rings from rubbing against the strings, so all four are always singing. This may just be the price you pay to get that smooth gurdy sound out of a guitar form factor. We’re not even sure it’s right to call it a price when it sounds this good.

Thanks to [Petitefromage] for the tip. If you run into any wild and wonderful instruments, don’t forget to let us know.

Magnetic Core memory was the RAM at the heart of many computer systems through the 1970s, and is undergoing something of a resurgence today since it is easiest form of memory for an enterprising hacker to DIY. [Han] has an excellent writeup that goes deep in the best-practices of how to wire up core memory, that pairs with his 512-bit MagneticCoreMemoryController on GitHub.

Magnetic core memory works by storing data inside the magnetic flux of a ferrite ‘core’. Magnetize it in one direction, you have a 1; the other is a 0. Sensing is current-based, and erases the existing value, requiring a read-rewrite circuit. You want the gory details? Check out [Han]’s writeup; he explains it better than we can, complete with how to wire the ferrites and oscilloscope traces to explain why you want to wiring them that way. It may be the most complete design brief to be written about magnetic core memory to be written this decade.

This little memory pack [Han] built with this information is rock-solid: it ran for 24 hours straight, undergoing multiple continuous memory tests — a total of several gigabytes of information, with zero errors. That was always the strength of ferrite memory, though, along with the fact you can lose power and keep your data. In in the retrocomputer world, 512 bits doesn’t seem like much, but it’s enough to play with. We’ve even featured smaller magnetic core modules, like the Core 64. (No prize if you guess how many bits that is.) One could be excused for considering them toys; in the old days, you’d have had cabinets full of these sorts of hand-wound memory cards.

Magnetic core memory should not be confused with core-rope memory, which was a ROM solution of similar vintage. The legendary Apollo Guidance Computer used both.

We’d love to see a hack that makes real use of these pre-modern memory modality– if you know of one, send in a tip.

If you’re looking for a long journey into the wonderful world of instrument hacking, [Arty Farty Guitars] is six parts into a seven part series on hacking an existing guitar into a guitar-hurdy-gurdy-hybrid, and it is “a trip” as the youths once said. The first video is embedded below.

The Hurdy-Gurdy is a wheeled instrument from medieval europe, which you may have heard of, given the existence of the laser-cut nerdy-gurdy, the electronic midi-gurdy we covered here, and the digi-gurdy which seems to be a hybrid of the two. In case you haven’t seen one before, the general format is for a hurdy-gurdy is this : a wheel rubs against the strings, causing them to vibrate via sliding friction, providing a sound not entirely unlike an upset violin. A keyboard on the neck of the instrument provides both fretting and press the strings onto the wheel to create sound. 

[Arty Farty Guitars] is a guitar guy, so he didn’t like the part with about the keyboard. He wanted to have a Hurdy Gurdy with a guitar fretboard. It turns out that that is a lot easier said than done, even when starting with an existing guitar instead of from scratch, and [Arty Farty Guitar] takes us through all of the challenges, failures and injuries incurred along the way. 

Probably the most interesting piece of the puzzle is the the cranking/keying assembly that allows one hand to control cranking the wheel AND act as keyboard for pressing strings into the wheel. It’s key to the whole build, as combining those functions on the lower hand leaves the other hand free to use the guitar fretboard half of the instrument. That controller gets its day in video five of the series. It might inspire some to start thinking about chorded computer inputs– scrolling and typing?

If you watch up to the sixth video, you learn that that the guitar’s fretting action is ultimately incompatible with pressing strings against the wheel at the precise, constant tension needed for good sound. To salvage the project he had to switch from a bowing action with a TPU-surfaced wheel to a sort of plectrum wheel, creating an instrument similar to the thousand-pick guitar we saw last year.

Even though [Arty Farty Guitars] isn’t sure this hybrid instrument can really be called a Hurdy Gurdy anymore, now that it isn’t using a bowing action, we can’t help but admire the hacking spirit that set him on this journey. We look forward to the promised concert in the upcoming 7th video, once he figures out how to play this thing nicely.

Know of any other hacked-together instruments that possibly should not exist? We’re always listening for tips. 

If you’re into Macs, you’ll always remember your first. Maybe it was the revolutionary classic of 1984 fame, perhaps it was the adorable G3 iMac in 1998, or even a shiny OS X machine in the 21st century. Whichever it is, you’ll find it emulated in [Marcin Wichary]’s essay “Frame of preference: A history of Mac settings, 1984–2004” — an exploration of the control panel and its history.

[Marcin] is a UI designer as well as an engineer and tech historian, and his UI chops come out in full force, commenting and critiquing Curputino’s coercions. The writing is excellent, as you’d expect from the man who wrote the book on keyboards, and it provides a fascinating look at the world of retrocomputing through the eyes of a designer. That design-focused outlook is very apropos for Apple in particular. (And NeXT, of course, because you can’t tell the story of Apple without it.)

There are ten emulators on the page, provided by [Mihai Parparita] of Infinite Mac. It’s like a virtual museum with a particularly knowledgeable tour guide — and it’s a blast, getting to feel hands-on, the design changes being discussed. There’s a certain amount of gamification, with each system having suggested tasks and a completion score when you finish reading. There are even Easter eggs.

This is everything we wish the modern web was like: the passionate deep-dives of personal sites on the Old Web, but enhanced and enabled by modern technology. If you’re missing those vintage Mac days and don’t want to explore them in browser, you can 3D print your own full-size replica, or a doll-sized picoMac.

The volume slider on our virtual desktops is a skeuomorphic callback to the volume sliders on professional audio equipment on actual, physical desktops. [Maker Vibe] decided that this skeuomorphism was so last century, and made himself a physical audio control box for his PC.

Since he has three audio outputs he needs to consider, the peripheral he creates could conceivably be called a fader. It certainly has that look, anyway: each output is controlled by a volume slider — connected to a linear potentiometer — and a mute button. Seeing a linear potentiometer used for volume control threw us for a second, until we remembered this was for the computer’s volume control, not an actual volume control circuit. The computer’s volume slider already does the logarithmic conversion. A Seeed Studio Xiao ESP32S3 lives at the heart of this thing, emulating a Bluetooth gamepad using a library by LemmingDev. A trio of LEDs round out the electronics to provide an indicator for which audio channels are muted or active.

Those Bluetooth signals are interpreted by a Python script feeding a software called Voicmeeter Banana, because [Maker Vibe] uses Windows, and Redmond’s finest operating system doesn’t expose audio controls in an easily-accessible way. Voicmeeter Banana (and its attendant Python script) takes care of telling Windows what to do. 

The whole setup lives on [Maker Vibe]’s desk in a handsome 3D printed box. He used a Circuit vinyl cutter to cut out masks so he could airbrush different colours onto the print after sanding down the layer lines. That’s another one for the archive of how to make front panels.

If volume sliders aren’t doing it for you, perhaps you’d prefer to control your audio with a conductor’s baton. 

Some people slander retrocomputing as an old man’s game, just because most of those involved are more ancient than the hardware they’re playing with. But there are veritable children involved too — take the [ComputerSmith], who is recreating Conway’s game of life on a Macintosh Plus that could very well be as old as his parents. If there’s any nostalgia here, it’s at least a generation removed — thus proving for the haters that there’s more than a misplaced desire to relive one’s youth in exploring these ancient machines.

So what does a young person get out of programming on a 1980s Mac? Well, aside from internet clout, and possible YouTube monetization, there’s the sheer intellectual challenge of the thing. You cant go sniffing around StackExchange or LLMs for code to copy-paste when writing C for a 1986 machine, not if you’re going to be fully authentic. ANSI C only dates to 1987, after all, and figuring out the quirks and foibles of the specific C implementation is both half the fun, and not easily outsourced. Object Pascal would also have been an option (and quite likely more straightforward — at least the language was clearly-defined), but [ComputerSmith] seems to think the exercise will improve his chops with C, and he’s likely to be right. 

Apparently [ComputerSmith] brought this project to VCS Southwest, so anyone who was there doesn’t have to wait for Part 2 of the video to show up to see how this turns out, or to snag a copy of the code (which was apparently available on diskette). If you were there, let us know if you spotted the youngest Macintosh Plus programmer, and if you scored a disk from him.

If the idea of coding in this era tickles the dopamine receptors, check out this how-to for a prizewinning Amiga demo.  If you think pre-ANSI C isn’t retro enough, perhaps you’d prefer programming by card?

Yes, you read that right– not benchy, but beanie, as in the hat. A toque, for those of us under the Maple Leaf. It’s not 3D printed, either, except perhaps by the loosest definition of the word: it is knit, by [Kevr102]’s motorized turbo knitter.

The turbo-knitter started life as an Addi Express King knitting machine. These circular knitting machines are typically crank-operated, functioning  with a cam that turns around to raise and lower special hooked needles that grab and knit the yarn. This particular example was not in good working order when [Kevr102] got a hold of it. Rather than a simple repair, they opted to improve on it.

A 12 volt motor with a printed gear and mount served for motorizing the machine. The original stitch counter proved a problem, so was replaced with an Arduino Nano and a hall effect sensor driving a 7-digit display. In theory, the Arduino could be interfaced with the motor controller and set to run the motor for a specific number of stitches, but in practice there’s no point as the machine needs babysat to maintain tension and avoid dropping stitches and the like. Especially, we imagine, when it runs fast enough to crank out a hat in under six minutes. Watch it go in the oddly cropped demo video embedded below.

Five minutes would still be a very respectable time for benchy, but it’s not going to get you on the SpeedBoatRace leaderboards against something like the minuteman we covered earlier.

If you prefer to take your time, this knitting machine clock might be more your fancy. We don’t see as many fiber arts hacks as perhaps we should here, so if you’re tangled up in anything interesting in that scene, please drop us a line.