Samwise Makers' News
Tuesday, June 30, 2026
Hackaday Europe 2026 – Building A Retro PC From Scratch
Jeroen Domburg (sprite_tm) presented at Hackaday Europe 2026 how to build a 1995-era MS-DOS gaming PC from component-level silicon rather than sourcing vintage hardware or emulating. His final build used a classic i486 DX4-100 CPU and an FPGA (ECP5 LFE5UM-45) to replace all the surrounding chipset logic, with an ESP32-S3 handling peripherals. After surviving BGA soldering woes on a first attempt and two PCB spins, the machine booted Commander Keen and ran Doom benchmarks. Jeroen went on to shrink the whole system into a portable gaming device he dubbed the Vapourdeck. Project files are on Codeberg.
HamsterOS Crams Complete Graphical Desktop Onto 1.44 MB Floppy
John Swiderski is developing HamsterOS, a tiny 32-bit multitasking graphical operating system designed to fit on a single 1.44 MB floppy disk. Targeting 386 and 486-era hardware, it includes a suite of native applications and even offers DOS compatibility. Thoughtful features aimed at vintage hardware users include a CMOS crash counter that automatically forces the system into VGA safe mode after three consecutive failed boot attempts. Swiderski also released HamsterWeazle, a free graphical front-end for the open-source Greaseweazle USB device that makes writing to old floppy drives much more approachable. HamsterOS targets a November 2026 release.
Making A Magnetic Core Memory USB Drive
Builder [polymatt] combined retro computing nostalgia with DIY hardware skills to create a USB drive backed by a handmade 64-bit magnetic core memory module. PCBs were milled on a small CNC router, with L293 H-bridge ICs driving the cores and an ESP32 handling the USB stack and control logic. Core memory requires a destructive read cycle, so considerable logic surrounds each access to sense, interpret, and restore bit values. The two-board assembly lives inside an acrylic-windowed enclosure filled with silicone oil, which helps maintain a consistent operating temperature for reliable bit flipping.
Mechanical TV, Without The Benefit Of New Parts
[Paul Kocyla] is building a mechanical television constrained to parts available in the 1920s. His build so far includes a wooden chassis, period power supply, amplifier, synchronous motor, and a Nipkow disk. The electronics are still in progress — he has yet to source the flat-plate neon lamps the design requires. A key discovery: the amplifier suffered persistent 120 Hz hum traced to early directly heated cathode tubes whose low thermal mass causes them to "blink" at 120 Hz when fed with AC. Period copper oxide rectifiers now supply DC to the heaters and eliminate the hum. Follow-along video documentation is available on YouTube, with project files on Hackaday.io.
Hard Drive Speakers Crank Out Classic Demo
[Niv Singer] turned four Western Digital Caviar 500 GB hard drives into an unconventional stereo speaker system, then used them to play Second Reality — the legendary Future Crew demoscene release that won the Assembly 1993 competition. The principle is simple: audio fed to the coil that drives the read-write head causes the mechanism to vibrate and emit sound. Niv used two drives per channel and implemented a crossover so one handled low frequencies while the other took highs. PWM tricks also make the platters spin in time with the beat. Files are on GitHub at github.com/nivs/spin-doctor.
2026 Frikkin Lasers Challenge: Super-Simple Laser Precision For Your Stargazing
Prolific maker [mircemk] submitted a dead-simple star-finder to Hackaday’s 2026 Frikkin’ Lasers Challenge that could help any beginner stargazer. The build mounts a smartphone running AstroHopper — an astronomy app that uses GPS and inertial navigation to display a labeled view of the sky — in line with a green laser pointer on a tripod plate. Carefully aligning the laser axis with the phone’s axis means that activating the laser sends a green beam toward whatever the screen is pointing at. An external battery and an on/off switch replace the laser’s stock button. The Challenge closes on July 23, 2026.
It’s Linux, On A Sega Megadrive
The LinuxMD project has done the improbable: porting the latest mainline Linux kernel to the Sega Megadrive’s Motorola 68000 CPU. The 68000 lacks a memory management unit, so the kernel runs compiled with the -nommu option — a significant achievement on this architecture. The build boots from an SD card in a modern Megadrive storage peripheral and is reported to run on original hardware. Once running, it presents smolutils, a cut-down coreutils replacement, making it a genuine — if minimal — Linux environment. The project pushes both a classic gaming console and the Linux kernel to their combined limits.
Top Crowdfunding
Kickstarter / Indiegogo
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GitHub Trending
Makers & Hardware
1. LinuxMD/linuxmd — Linux kernel on Sega Megadrive's 68000 CPU
See github.com/trending for more
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Curated by JD · samwise.agency
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