Collaborate Disseminate
If you’ve scrolled through the list of boot options offered on any PC’s BIOS, it reads like a history of storage technology. Up top we have the options to boot from disk, often a solid-state drive, then USB disk, optical drive, removable media, and down the bottom there’s usually an …read more
Continue reading Booting a PC from Vinyl for a Warmer, Richer OS
You can tell the age of someone in our community with a simple question: what were the first removable data storage media you used? Punched cards for the venerable, cassettes for the middle-aged, floppies for the thirtysomethings, Flash cards for the twentysomethings, and maybe even “What’s a removable storage medium?” …read more
Continue reading Proper Cassettes For Your FPGA Retrocomputer
We know what you’re thinking: this is yet another one of those “Gut the retro gear for its cool old case and then fill it up with IoT junk” projects. Well, rest assured that extending and enhancing this 1970s computer trainer is very much an exercise in respecting the original …read more
Continue reading Retro Computer Trainer Gets a Raspberry Pi Refit
A lot of projects we feature use video in some form or other, but that video is invariably digital, it exists as a stream of numbers in a computer memory or storage, and is often compressed. For some of us who grew up working with composite video there is a …read more
Continue reading Full-Colour, Full-Motion Video – On An Audio Cassette!
A fair number of hackers reach that awkward age in their careers – too old for manual pick and place, but too young for a full-fledged PnP machine. The obvious solution is to build your own PnP, which can be as simple as putting a suction cup on the Z-axis …read more
Anyone old enough to have driven before the GPS era probably wonders, as we do, how anyone ever found anything. Navigation back then meant outdated paper maps, long detours because of missed turns, and the far too frequent stops at dingy gas stations for the humiliation of asking for directions. It took forever sometimes, and though we got where we were going, it always seemed like there had to be a better way.
Indeed there was, but instead of waiting for the future and a constellation of satellites to guide the way, some clever folks in the early 1970s had …read more
Continue reading Retrotechtacular: Car Navigation Like It’s 1971
While we here at Hackaday never question why an individual took on a particular project, it surely doesn’t stop our beloved readers from grabbing their pitchforks and demanding such answers in the comments. Perhaps no posts generate more of this sort of furore than the ones which feature old audio gear infused with modern hardware. In almost every case the answer is the same: the person liked the look and feel of vintage hardware, but didn’t want to be limited to antiquated media.
That sentiment is perhaps perfectly personified by the TapeLess Deck Project, created by [Artur Młynarz]. His creations …read more
Continue reading Ditch The Tapes, Put An Android In Your Deck
For this week’s Hack Chat, we’re talking about reverse engineering the Digital Compact Cassette. Why should we care about an obsolete format that was only on the market for four years? Because if a copy of the Spin Doctor’s Pocket Full of Kryptonite costs $50 USD on the used market, it has to be good.
In the early 1990s, several different digital magnetic tape formats came onto the scene. The MiniDisc was magneto-optical, yes, but back in the day it was amazing for recording bootlegs. DAT also appeared in the early 90s, and it was a godsend for recording studios. …read more
Continue reading Friday Hack Chat: Reverse Engineering the Digital Compact Cassette
The audio cassette is an audio format that presented a variety of engineering challenges during its tenure. One of the biggest at the time was that listeners had to physically remove the cassette and flip it over to listen to the full recording. Over the years, manufacturers developed a variety of “auto-reverse” systems that allowed a cassette deck to play a full tape without user intervention. This video covers how Akai did it – the hard way.
Towards the end of the cassette era, most manufacturers had decided on a relatively simple system of having the head assembly rotate while …read more
If you are of the generation who were lucky enough to use the first 8-bit home computers in your youth, you will be familiar with their use of cassette tapes as mass storage. Serial data would be converted to a sequence of tones which could then be recorded using a standard domestic cassette recorder, this recording could then be played back into the machine’s decoder and loaded into memory as a complete piece of software. Larger programs could take a while to load, but though it was rather clunky it was a masterful piece of making the best of what …read more
