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A maker describes building a portable 'anti AI computer' using Raspberry Pi Picos, a floppy drive, and a chorded keyboard, while reflecting on the irony that all the code was generated with AI.
An interactive essay revisiting RAND Corporation's 1966 GRAIL handwriting recognition system, explaining Gabriel Groner's real-time handprinted text recognition algorithm with interactive implementations and open-source code.
os8088 is a hobbyist Macintosh System 1-style GUI operating system for the Intel 8086/8088 PC, written entirely in real-mode assembly with preemptive multitasking and fitting in 256K of RAM. The project is complete and its source code is available.
Amiga Corporation announced new agreements with Commodore International and Hyperion Entertainment, clarifying ownership of Commodore/Amiga intellectual property and defining the future of AmigaOS development and licensing.
A technical article detailing the author's attempt to understand and program the Gigatron TTL Color Micro-computer, covering its Harvard architecture, CPU instructions, and programming techniques.
This post explores the ZX Spectrum's text mode from a machine language perspective, covering system organization, display routines, and input handling, as part of a series on programming the classic 8-bit computer.
A technical survey of sound programming on the ZX Spectrum, covering the 1-bit beeper and AY-3-8910 chip, with examples to play a C-major scale.
The first new C-Kermit release in 15 years celebrates the software's 45th anniversary, with work on updating a decades-old C codebase.
CP/M-386 is an early-stage open-source implementation of CP/M for 386 protected mode, derived from CP/M-68K, offering full BDOS parity with CP/M 2.2 and CP/M-68K 1.3.
ao486 is an open-source Verilog core implementing a full 486 SX processor and SoC capable of booting Linux and Windows 95 on an FPGA, with benchmarks and resource usage documented from 2014.
A detailed teardown of the MMI 5300 PROM chip from the 1970s, explaining how it stores 1024 bits using microscopic fuses and describing the chip's internal architecture.
A detailed teardown and live demonstration of a TR-3 vacuum-tube trigger/flip-flop module from IBM's 1948 Electronic Calculating Punch, explaining its circuitry and historical significance.
A developer trained a tiny Mamba-based autoregressive language model and built an inference engine to run it on the 6502 processor inside a BBC Micro, demonstrating modern machine learning on 1975 hardware with only 25KB of user memory.
A technical breakdown of a Commodore 64 demo that places colorful sprites in the border area using border-opening tricks, the VIC chip ghost byte glitch, and precise raster-time coding.
A detailed technical article about STV, a custom video codec that enables full-motion video playback on the 8 MHz Atari ST, borrowing ideas from Westwood's VQA format and optimizing for the 68000 CPU.
The Amiga Graphics Archive celebrates its 18th anniversary with the addition of a restored pixel art image by Jim Sachs.
A hobbyist describes an ongoing project to write a Tetris game for the BBC Bridge Companion, a 1985 Z80-based console, including hardware specs and background.
A description of the Memo-1, a 65C02-based computer built from scratch, designed for fun and learning, with detailed memory maps, VIA and ACIA specifications, and BASIC routines for joystick and tone generation.
The author reflects on his journey from manually typing code on a vintage Macintosh to embracing AI-powered code completion tools like Copilot and Claude, concluding that while the AI industry is problematic, the technology itself can be useful.
An FPGA expert recreated the F-14 Tomcat's Central Air Data Computer using an FPGA and tested it in a 3D-printed model of the fighter, which controls the swing-wing system. The recreation uses the MP944 microprocessor, which some claim was the world's first microprocessor.