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For those of us who have a penchant for older technology, there is something special about operating with older hardware. Whether it’s a decade-old camera, a vintage keyboard, or a home computer from the 1980s, the modern equivalent doesn’t compare at all. But working with older parts is certainly not for the faint-hearted, as over time their reliability has been affected. What about acknowledging that the supply of replacement vintage parts is not infinite and switching to more modern alternatives from using the original hardware? [Retro Recipes] A particularly difficult to find Amiga error raises this question, and discusses it when evaluating a replacement Amiga made entirely from the modern part.

The new Amiga is a recreation of an A1200 with a redesigned case and keyboard and the courage of an A500 mini retro console to replace the Commodore board. He went through the process of creating an Amiga hard drive image on a USB drive using the image from his original drive in his teens and booted it both on a 500 mini based machine and the UAE emulator on a Mac laptop. You can follow him in the video below to break.

We see the argument that real hardware is a valuable resource that should not be run for fear of breaking it, but by the same token we still stand by that first sentence. But should the enjoyment of an old machine be limited to those who have an original? We don’t think so, so if enjoying an amiga without an amiga can be as good as the real thing, we’re all for it.

Of course, there are other ways to bring back those whose original Amigas is already broken.

When full-3D video games began to arrive in the early 90’s, some companies were more prepared for change than others. In fact, it will take almost a decade of experimentation before 3D virtual spaces feel natural. Even then, Konami seems to have shot herself in the leg with their first entry into the 3D arcade game at the beginning of this era. [Mog] Shows the in-and-outs of these platforms as we try to bring them to life via MAME.

These arcade machines were first available with a full-3D environment, but curiously less powerful than other companies’ offers, even for the time being. They only include a single digital signal processor that is tasked with calculating all the visual geometry when competing machines will use multiple DSP chips to do the same thing. As a result the resolution and frame rate are very low. Still, [Mog] It is set out to work in MAME.

To accomplish this task, [Mog] In the early 90’s Konami became a set of development tools provided by developers that would mimic the system on PCs of the time. Surprisingly it still works with minor tweaks in Windows 10, and with some other tools provided by others working on MAME for decades, these old Komi machines have got some new life with this emulator support.

Not everything works perfectly, however [Mog] Reports that most bugs and other issues have been worked on recently or other experts in the field are actively working. If you remember these arcade-era games from the early 80’s and 90’s, it might be time to relaunch it by grabbing an old CRT.

We’ve all heard of smoke testing, and we know it’s the lowest possible time for the performance of an electronic device. If it does not explode in the fire while applying the force, you can go for a more effective test. But smoke testing means something else for the car, especially powered by diesel fuel. And passing the diesel exhaust test can become something of a job.

To make it easier to pass these tests, [Janis Alnis] He has come up with a diesel exhaust monitor that measures the opacity of his car’s emissions. The sensor itself is quite simple, and mimics what a commercial exhaust analyzer uses: an LED and a photodiode at the opposite end of a tube of a certain length. The exhaust particles passing through the tube will scatter light in a predictable way and the numbers prove that the passing grade is 53% more than the transmission.

The sensor body is assembled from a brass pipe fitting with epoxy glass windows at each end. The exhaust enters through a T-fitting attached to a hose and sampling tube and exits through the other T. One window of the sensor has a cheap battery-powered flashlight as the light source, the other end has a Texas Instruments OPT101 photodiode sensor. The sensor is connected to one of the Arduino’s analog inputs, which drives a 128 × 64 pixel LCD display – inspired by this air quality meter – to show current smoke graphically and as a percentage. The video below shows the sensor working.

Although there were some problems in making ink using sensors and condensing water vapor [Janis] It has been discovered that the little bit things on a warm-up drive have become hot enough to clear up some of his ride’s smoking tendencies, allowing him to pass his inspections.

When you think of customizing the face of a smartwatch, you can probably imagine something like choosing a new wallpaper on an Android device, or changing the color scheme a bit. But no [Sebastian SARBU], His plan was a little bigger than that. So he cracked Open Android Studio and started writing the face of a truly custom watch that would benefit the most from the device’s display. Fortunately for us, he not only released the source code for others to study, but also documented the development process in a series of videos that you will see below the break.

He called the new interface his “Pizza Watch Face” because it shatters the round screen into pieces with multi-colored “crust” bits that can display different notifications using as few pixels as possible. There is no question that the layout is capable of packing a lot of information in a relatively small space, and while the aesthetics are naturally thematic, we think it looks quite chic.

While this may sound technically correct for Android Studio templates, we actually think it’s a misnomer to call it a mere “clock face”, because it’s really close to the total UI overhaul. As [Sebastian] As explained in the second video in his series, part of his design includes a refined interface for viewing data from other apps, such as battery levels and weather conditions, allowing him to maximize how much information he can access with a minimal number of taps. And swipes across the screen.

He even shuts down the video series with a demonstration of how to upload an Android Studio project to your WearOS device via WiFi, making it a valuable start-to-finish guide to custom face development even if you don’t use his code. We’ve seen some mixed reactions to smartwatches in the community, but while they may not be something we’re all particularly interested in, there’s no arguing that giving more information about working openly with them is a net positive.

Of course, if you really want to get something you want, then maybe a custom open source smartwatch is more than you.

It has been an anniversary year with the 40th birthdays of both the Commodore 64 and the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. But there is another anniversary that, in a sense above all of them, today marks the 50th anniversary of the inclusion of Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney Atari Inc, a name that will forever be synonymous with the development of the computer game industry. PC Magazine Marked events with a previous perspective, a loving look at progress from Space war! The failed Jaguar console’s currency-ups of the 1990s, and it doesn’t put any strain on the lazy management that oversaw its collapse in the years that followed.

The high point of the Atari story for us was the VCS console and computer ST line, which probably represents the best of the brand’s success in Europe where it is being written. It’s something we remember seeing an ad for an attic link in a British movie, where laughter came when teen-helplessly high prices were revealed. At least Atari fans can take comfort in the fact that by then Commodore is running evenly on the ground.

There is only one criticism PC Magazine The present Atari incarnation is doing little beyond reviving the glory of the past, and perhaps they are right. Last year we released some new cartridges for their VCS.

When it comes to design decisions, we are often advised to “think outside the box”. This is usually good advice, if a little abstract – it could really mean something. But it turns out that someone took this Nifty with a small smart knob display and input device quite literally.

[Dimitar]Inspiration for RoenDi – “Rotary Encoder and Display” – comes from an unusual source: a car dashboard, and in particular, a versatile knob that is often created in a car’s climate control cluster. Designed for ease of use while driving while creating as little scattering as possible, such knobs often combine a rotating encoder with one or more indicators or buttons. RoenDi builds on a theme by placing a 1.7 ″ round LCD display in the middle of a ring connected to an Alps rotary encoder, allowing you to customize the knob for whatever you want to present. The backplane has a powerful STM32 microcontroller with lots of GPIO pins broken, so customization and interfacing is limited only by your imagination. The design is open source, so you can either create your own or support the project through crowdfunding.

In contrast to the Haptic Smart Knob, we’ve been seeing something lately that has a round LCD in the center, with RoenDi’s response encoder’s physical detention. We think both devices are great, and they fill the various niches of the new input ecosystem.