TechyMagThings

When [Thomas] showed his 1960s-era Tektronix 545A oscilloscope in a recent video, it made us both nostalgic and happy. Nostalgic because we miss the days when our oscilloscopes were “mainframes” that could take plug-in modules. Happy because we noticed the two handles on top to manage hauling the almost 70 pounds of tubes, transformers, and glass around if you didn’t have the requisite cart.

Not only did old scopes have plugins so you could reconfigure them, but there were also handy plugins and racks that could power them so you could build different test setups easily. This scope was an early version of that idea, but it only accepted a vertical section plugin. The mainframe part of the scope has 75 tubes, and the plugin, a type D, has six tubes, too. The power consumption was about 500 watts!

If you’ve used a scope like this before, you’ll probably remember a lot of the oddities mentioned in the video. If not, you’ll gain a new appreciation for your modern, sophisticated, and lightweight scope. Of course, the old boat anchor wasn’t working. Apparently, these scopes had ceramic points that didn’t like regular solder, so there was a spool of silver solder inside the unit for repairs.

[Thomas] made a lot of progress, although it still needs work to get it working perfectly. We have no doubt he’ll get it working in time. Even the graticule on these old scopes was an issue.

It’s no secret that the size of webpages has been slowly — or not so slowly — creeping up over the years. Does a simple website need to span multiple floppy disks? [PortalRunner’s] doesn’t — or rather, he doesn’t want to burn that much of his limited mobile data. So he built a self-hosted HTTPS proxy to compress images and websites, block ads, and save his bandwidth.

The proxy itself is based on mitmproxy rather than reinventing the wheel. The biggest gains are, of course, from knocking images down to size — since he’s only going to be looking at them on a tiny screen, he can not only apply the better compression of .webp rather than the more common .PNG and .JPEG, but also toss unneeded information by reducing the resolution. Exactly how much quality to toss is left up to the individual user in a handy config.

Likewise, if you’re willing to wait a little longer for pages to load, you can force every webpage to get the highest possible level of compression — otherwise the server is only going to do that with ridiculous Java-heavy pages that absolutely need it. As a bonus, going through your home server means this acts like a private VPN to help protect your data on the go. If you want the details, check out the GitHub link above or the video embedded below.

This project is explicitly about saving data; it won’t help older hardware get online the way the publicly hosted FrogFind search engine or private-hosted MacProxy servers do. If you really want to escape the bloat of the modern internet, a proxy can also help you go way back.

Whereas PlayStation 3 and earlier were rather specialized consoles, today’s consoles like the PlayStation 5 are essentially x86-based gaming PCs in a fancy case, with custom firmware to lock it all down. Once you’re past those gates, however, you can use it to run pretty much anything. Naturally, this also means porting PlayStation 2 and Xbox 1 emulators to the PS5, in the form of the PS5X2 and XPSemu projects respectively.

In addition, Videocardz reports that Wine is being ported to the PS5 as its Proton iteration popularized by Valve’s SteamOS. This ‘PP’ project — for PS5 Proton — has no public releases yet, but it could mean that playing Windows games on your PS5 could also become reality.

The PS5X2 project is the most complete so far, offering a quite complete port of the PCSX2 PS2 emulator, including GPU acceleration via the Vulkan API using the PS5Vulkan project. Based on the list, quite a few games work at full speed, even when rendered at multiple times their original resolution.

In comparison, the XPSemu project – based on the xemu Xbox emulator – only just hit Alpha 1 level, with still sketchy game compatibility, though Halo 2 seems to run well at least. Unfortunately, none of these emulators seem to support playing the game directly from the original DVD, so you need to have that disc image taking up precious space on the PS5’s SSD.

Emulating one computer on another is an old technique. Games are the same way.

Solder stencils are a fantastic way to accurately apply solder paste to a PCB. Professionally-made stencils are cut from steel, but for the home hacker, soda cans continue to be the alternative of choice. The only trick is how to actually get those little holes made, and [Saheen Palayi] shows off both his method of laser-engraving the holes, as well as a tool for cutting the can in the first place.

To turn a soda can into a flat-ish aluminum sheet means cutting off the ends and slicing it open. Ideally, one achieves this without kinking or bending the thin metal. In practice, this is quite difficult. [Saheen]’s solution is something a little like a pipe cutter — a 3D printed tool that gradually presses a blade section from a utility knife into the empty can as it turns until it cuts through. Once the top and bottom are off, it’s easy enough to snip down the side to get a curved sheet.

The hole pattern comes from one’s PCB design software of choice, and the actual cutting is done by a fiber laser. The wavelength of fiber lasers makes them good at marking and cutting metal, and [Saheen]’s laser takes almost no time at all to cut the stencil into the thin metal.

Fiber lasers used to be the sort of tool that only industrial shops had, but they’re a prosumer-level tool that can be bought online nowadays. [Saheen] uses an xTool F1 Ultra to cut his solder stencil, and we’ve previously seen that same laser used to create a PCB by blasting away unwanted copper until only the traces remain.

We’ve seen aluminum cans etched and also machined to create stencils, and the laser is certainly the fastest. Watch it in action in the video below.

[Nick Bild] evidently has a soft spot for the 6502, given that his Vectron65 Plus home computer project uses at least one of them, depending on the add-ons. You see, he hasn’t just made a homebrew computer, he’s also produced multiple expansions. One of which, the VGA Plus Text Mode, has its own 6502 co-processor. He’s also produced two versions of a VGA graphics card capable of 640×480 output. We’re still not 100% sure how many entries we are going to count [Nick]’s work as for the contest, since the graphics cards can be used with just about anything, not just the Vectron65, but we do know they’re strong contenders every one.

We covered the start of the Vectron65 project back in 2019, and it’s only gotten more practical as it has moved off breadboard onto PCB, and into a new version as the 65 Plus with more RAM and GPIO ports. Considering that the original let you game in VR using an add-on we covered, we might have to drop the “nearly” from “nearly practical” when talking about the Plus. Especially when you consider the graphics — we covered first version of 7400-series based VGA graphics card, while the newer V2 differs mostly in doubling the RAM and producing a more stable output. The V2 VGA card can work in tandem with the Text Mode card to write 40-column text to the screen without using up all the 6502 CPU’s cycles, offloading them to the second 6502 on the card with the help of a character ROM. Hey, if Commodore could put a second 6502 in a disk drive, why not? You can check out the whole suite in action in the demo video below. We admit to being particularly tickled by the Hackaday Comment Generator he’s running in BASIC.

If you’re worried about competing with [Nick], don’t worry — the 2026 Retrocomputing contest has multiple categories. You still have a few weeks to do something retro-modern, restomod an old machine, or just do some old-school programming.

Internet radios have been a thing in some form for the last quarter century, and the advent of cheap networked microcontrollers has made them easier than ever to build. But just how small can one be made? [Milen] has made one that’s about as small as we’ve seen, and put it up on Instructables.

The hardware recipe is straightforward enough; take a microcontroller, connect it to the internet, and have your internet radio software squirt its output to a DAC. In this case the microcontroller is an ESP32-C£ on a very small dev board, and clipped to that is a custom PCB with a PCM5102A I2S DAC and an amplifier. The whole thing is tiny, small enough in fact that the two connectors are significant in size compared to it.

Whether or not it’s a practical device for listening remains to be seen, but it’s certainly tiny. But the question is, could it be made smaller? Perhaps eschewing the connectors would be an easy win, and in return for a loss in quality the ESP has a built-in DAC that’s not intended for audio but can be used. If you have any bright ideas, we’d be interested to hear them.

We’ve seen plenty of internet radios over the years, and for some reason this cassette-shaped one appeals to us.

A lot of the retrocomputing world is focused on the 1980s, and for good reason– the home computer revolution was in full swing in that decade, and there is a veritable Cambrian Explosion of capable hardware to play with, emulate or recreate. There’s plenty of retro to look back to before that halcyon decade, though, as [Michael Gardi]’s port of Lunar Lander to the PDP-1 reminds us.

Both Digital Equipment Corporation’s PDP series and the game Lunar Lander are probably iconic enough in their own right to need no introduction, but there’s actually a connection between them. While many people think the game started with Atari’s 1979 arcade cabinet, the first version– then only text based, and called the Lunar Landing Game–actually dates back 10 years before that, and was dreamed up at DEC on a PDP-8. If you’re of a certain vintage, odds are, you probably typed in the BASIC version of the Lunar Landing Game at some point.

This is not that game. Despite the 1959 PDP-1 being more restricted, hardware-wise, than the PDP-8, [Michael Gardi] manages to get Lunar Lander in all of its graphical glory running on the PDP-1. Of course, if you’ve seen SpaceWar you know DEC’s first minicomputer can handle the graphics. You can play the emulated version online, if you’d like, or download it yourself from the link above. There is one PDP-1 that survives in working order, and [Michael] hopes to get the chance to run it there one day on the machine that started hacker culture. We wish him luck!

In the meantime, this may be the most “retro” project in our ongoing retrocomputer contest. There’s no special prize for that superlative, but if you can do older, have at ‘er! There are three weeks left to go back in time and claim both bragging rights and fabulous prizes.