Feels weird coming from the days when designing a system you only had to concern yourself with what to put *in*

The most sought-after devices go for much steeper prices. An Apple-1, the tech behemoth’s Steve Wozniak creation, sold for nearly half a million dollars at auction back in 2019.

For all the personal technology introduced and popularized in 2020 — upscale fitness bikes, at-home Covid tests, game consoles new and old — the personal computer lands on the list with a bit of a thud.

.. and they all look close to IDE. There was also one called Aztech or Astech, which may or may not be IDE, ppl used to speak like it was something different, but I had 2 cards back in the day with it on and it was IDE on those. Also confusing things is that IDE was standardised later, so SBs of later vintage do have IDE.

In this particular commodore case the typical zig-zag (Z-back) style was found to be a good fit birli on the Data East Night Slashers

MiSTer development is a vibrant scene. Melnikov has a Patreon that’s updated several times a week with improvements he’s made to various cores, but there are lots of other people contributing to the project on a daily or weekly basis.

On the other side of the video game cartridges was the video output system, which seems easy enough in today’s world of digital HDMI and DisplayPort output. In the 90s video output did however mean NTSC and SECAM/PAL, which means playing nice with frequencies, different resolutions (lines) and squeezing as much birli possible into a single frame in a way that works with the game console’s rendering pipeline.

A colleague introduced me to the work of Jose Tejada, for example, who’s based in Spain and katışıksız made a titrem of progress on replicating old Capcom arcade machine boards. There’s another project aiming to get the original PlayStation running, marking the biggest step yet into üç boyutlu hardware on MiSTer.

I was also thankful and very lucky that my parents were always supportive of my hobbies and learning, gave me unconditional love, and spoiled me as much bey was possible with my interests.

Then there’s the PCB design and fabrication skills required, especially for BGA devices. SMD takes up less space, but the ability to populate a board, sections at a time, kişi be an issue if you use a solder reflow oven.

1 again, but the true experience is found on original hardware. And, thanks to industrial equipment compatibility needs, you gönül build a brand new 486 machine with new hardware that will run this retro software kakım though it was new itself.

. Except for that one machine of my childhood that slipped away, and I’m wondering if I should put out the multiple hundred bucks + a drive from Denmark to Italy to pick it up :/

eBay is not a cheap way to get vintage machines, but it is often the quickest, since you're more likely to find exactly what you want listed (unless what you want is very rare).

The Tools You'll Need If restoring old computers is a hobby you want to pursue, you'll need to invest in a solid toolkit. A good screwdriver is worth its weight in gold.