Collaborate Disseminate
We’re not sure that many of you have recognised the need in your life for an x86 machine code program encoded into a QR code, but following on from someone …read more Continue reading It’s Snake, In A QR Code, But Smaller
When we write about retrocomputers, we realize that back in the day, people knew all the details of their computer. You had to, really, if you wanted to get anything …read more Continue reading Videos Teach Bare Metal RP2040
We’re not sure if there’s any single characteristic that qualifies someone as a hacker. After all, we’re a pretty eclectic bunch, with skills that range all over the map, and …read more Continue reading Connecting a Keyboard to a Vintage PC-XT, the Hard Way
When [Ezra Thomas] needed inspiration for his senior design project, he only needed to look as far as his own robot. Built during his high school years from the classic …read more Continue reading Robot Pet is A Chip Off The Old Logic Block
David Letterman made the top ten list famous. [Creel] has a top ten that should appeal to many Hackaday readers: the top 10 craziest x86 assembly language instructions. You have to admit that the percentage of assembly language programmers is …read more
Twitter isn’t interested in how the “synthetic or manipulated” media is created, but if it has the potential to cause harm it’ll be removed. Continue reading Twitter bans deepfakes, but only those ‘likely to cause harm’
Imagine you’re time-warped back to 1979 and tasked with constructing a personal computer. Could you do it? [RadicalBrad] thinks he can, and his 6502-based “Super VIC” build looks like it’s off to a great retrocomputing start.
Most emulations of old hardware these days go the FPGA route, and while we …read more
Continue reading A 6502 Computer, With Acres Of Breadboard And Dozens Of Chips
Oh, the hijinks that the early days of the PC revolution allowed. Back in the days when a 20MB hard drive was a big deal and MS-DOS 3.1 ruled over every plain beige PC-clone cobbled together by enthusiasts like myself, it was great fun to “set up” someone else’s machine to do something unexpected. This generally amounted to finding an unattended PC — the rooms of the residence hall where I lived in my undergrad days were a target-rich environment in this regard — and throwing something annoying in the AUTOEXEC.BAT file. Hilarity ensued when the mark next booted the …read more
Continue reading 35C3: A Deep Dive into DOS Viruses and Pranks
You have a clean MSDOS system, and you need to write some software for it. What do you do? You could use debug, of course. But there are no labels so while you can get machine code from mnemonics, you’ll still need to figure out the addresses on your own. That wasn’t good enough for [mniip], who created an assembler using mostly batch files. There are a few .COM files and it looks as if the first time you use debug to create those, but there’s also source you can assemble on subsequent builds with the assembler.
Why? We aren’t …read more
Continue reading Bootstrapping An MSDOS Assembler With Batch Files
Imagine having to program your computer by rewiring it. For a brief period of time around the mid-1940s, the first general-purpose electronic computers worked that way. Computers like ENIAC initially had no internal storage for code. Programming it involved manipulating thousands of switches and cables. The positions of those switches and cables were the program.
Kathleen Booth began working on computers just as the idea of storing the program internally was starting to permeate through the small set of people building computers. As a result, she was one of the first programmers to work on software and is credited with …read more
Continue reading Kathleen Booth: Assembling Early Computers While Inventing Assembly