Tag: hackaday
Hackaday is featuring a project by Marcel van Kervinck where he has built a functioning color computer with an ALU constructed entirely from small- and medium-scale integrated 74xxx series TTL logic chips. This project is an evolution of his earlier TTL-only VGA output board, but now he has replaced the Trinket Pro “CPU” with one of his own design. The…
Hackaday has an interesting write-up today about the 1957 machine that was built to pick winning lottery numbers for the British National Savings and Investments “Premium Bonds” program. Short for Electronic Random Number Indicator Equipment, it was built to provide truly random numbers for the lottery picks and included an all-important hardware entropy source. Random noise in the current output…
Hackaday has a piece from their 2016 Hackaday SuperConference where IC expert Ken Shirriff talks about his “bizarre hobby of reverse-engineering old chips”. He starts off with the venerable Z80 CPU, mapping the signal flows from the address lines, through the decoder and into the ALU. Did you know that the Z80 only had a 4-bit ALU?!? Man, those were…
Over on Hackaday, Elliot Williams details a very cool Easter Egg hidden in the ESP32: a BASIC interpreter. Apparently this is build in to the processor and not part of the on-board flash ROM either. Pull GPIO 12 high, reset the cpu and PRINT “HELLO WORLD” to your heart’s content! The interpreter claims to be derived from TinyBasic, so don’t…
Over on hackaday.io, user kodera2t is documenting his build of a minimalist 8-bit computer. The design is based on Grant’s 6-chip 6809 computer, but kodera2t has gone the next step and released the source files for his PC board. Not into etching your own boards? That’s okay – this computer can even be built on a breadboard! All you need…
We know you can play MSX games on-the-go on your smartphone, but how about do it using a Sega Game Gear!? It is like emulating an Altair in your Commodore 64, but cooler! Developed in Japan, the GGMSX is an adapter that allows you to use MSX1 cartridges in your Game Gear. The video below shows it in action. [youtube q9lrUXYykJ8 nolink]…
The feat is fairly old, from 2008, but Hackaday has published an article about it today. Joshua Bell, the author of the Apple’s VNC client, shows a video streaming Second Life (!!!!) from a Windows XP to the Apple IIc over a 115kbps serial connection. If you haven’t seen it, or if you don’t rememeber what Second Life is (ba-dum-pump chsh!), check…
Using 10m² of 3mm MDF, a Raspberry Pi and a 19″ computer monitor, Ilhan Ünal has built a gigantic Gameboy. The idea came a year ago from a informal conversation between Ilhan and the organizer of a Belgian Chiptune festival called Nintendoom. After one year of hard work, the “handheld” is ready, as you can see from the picture above….
The PiDP-8 is a project to replicate the hardware of the 8/I in a modern format. Instead of hundreds of Flip Chips, this PDP-8 is powered by a Raspberry Pi running the SIMH emulator. The 40-pin GPIO connector on the Pi is broken out to 92 LEDs and 26 toggle switches on a large PCB. The creator of the project…
