Collaborate Disseminate
Controlling most desktop 3D printers is as easy as sending them G-code commands over a serial connection. As you might expect, it takes a relatively quick machine to fire off the commands fast enough for a good-quality print. But what …read more
Continue reading Apple II Talks to 3D Printer With a Little Modern help
Back in 1990 [Benjamin Zotto] wrote – while in elementary school – a dog racing game called Wonderland 2. The BASIC source code and images for the game were stored on a single ProDOS formatted, soft-sectored 5.25″ floppy disk. …read more
Continue reading Reconstructing Data From A Corrupt Apple ][ Floppy Disk
These days, we’re alerted to the rise of Bitcoin and the fall of nations via little buzzes from the smartphones in our pocket. Go back fifty years or so and it was all a bit more romantic, with noisy teletype …read more
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 bot out there that can let you experience an old 8-bit Atari …read more
Making certain games run on systems which were never designed to run such games (or any games at all) is a favorite hobby of some, with [deater] being no exception. His latest creation involves porting Myst to the Apple II, or ‘demake’ in his own words. This means taking a …read more
For many 8-bit computing veterans, the original Prince of Persia game was our first exposure to fluid life-like animation on screen. This groundbreaking technical achievement earned the game’s place in nostalgia and history. Ars Technica invited its original creator [Jordan Mechner] to sit in front of a camera and talk …read more
Continue reading Ingenious Hacks That Brought The Original Prince Of Persia To Life
What’s more fun than porting an old game released for an old system such as the Apple IIgs to its 10-year-older predecessor, the Apple II from 1977? Cue [Deater]’s port of the classic video game ‘Another World‘ to the original Apple II. As was fairly obvious from the onset, the …read more
We spend a lot of time in our community discussing the many home computers from the 8-bit era, while almost completely ignoring their industrial equivalents. While today a designer of a machine is more likely than not to reach for a microcontroller, four decades ago they would have used a …read more
Continue reading Reverse Engineering An Ancient SBC With An Apple ][
Vintage parts may be documented, but that doesn’t mean they’re particularly useful or accessible. If the phrase “eyestrain from unsearchable, badly-scanned PDF datasheets” makes your lower eyelid twitch in sympathy, read on.
While [Bald Engineer] was researching how he might make a portable Apple II, he was delighted to find …read more
Continue reading Bit Preserve: A Sanctuary For Modern Captures Of Vintage Schematics
The Altair 8800 was, to its creators, a surprise hit. Despite looking nothing like what we would today consider to be a computer, it sold thousands of units almost immediately upon its launch, way back in 1975. A few years later, the Apple II burst onto the scene, and the …read more