#HARDWARE

[retrocgads]

USA 1993

[basic-retro-programming]

The X68000 (X68k for short) was a home computer from Sharp that was sold almost exclusively on the Japanese market. Therefore, all original programs and the operating system are in Japanese, which prevented it from being distributed outside of Japan.

It was launched in 1987 as the successor to the Sharp X1, and the last models came onto the market in 1993. The computer even went into standby mode at the push of a button, giving applications time to shut down properly and write data to the hard drive.

(Wikipedia)

Post #331: Sharp X68000, 1987-1993.

1987

[adafruit]

A4988 breakout prototype testing ⚙️🔧

We got our Allegro A4988 stepper driver breakout PCBs back and are ready to test them. First, we verified that STEP and DIR worked (yes!) and that the LEDs lit (yes, but we need to tweak the resistors to make the brightness even). Then we tried all of the stepper-settings, you can select 1, 4, 8, or 16-microsteps. All the sleep/reset/enable pins work. Finally, we checked the current limiting functionality with a potentiometer that can be twisted to select up to 2A current per coil. This directly affects the torque, so it's easy to test by verifying that we can stall the motor with hands or vise-grips. We'll order these with 2oz copper and get them into production next!

[arcadebroke]

[n64retro]

photo by: Hand Held Legend

[scipunk]

Hardware AKA MARK 13 (1990)

[centralbunnyunit]

[natsumipocket]

Evan Amos The Game Console 2.0

[lorenzonuti]

Hard. Soft. Deep. Wet.

[blahblahyeezy]

NEC XP29 Plus (Guts)

28" 95kHz

[retrocgads]

USA 1993

[river-taxbird]

Have you got an old Mac that is no longer supported by Apple? It's time to give it a new life.

How to install the latest MacOS on Mac hardware that is no longer officially supported using OpenCore Legacy Patcher.

I recently discovered this and it has been a game changer. Recently my partner needed a Mac for her music course, so we bought a 2012 Macbook Pro as it was cheap and on paper still had decent hardware for working with music. We were then disappointed to find out that it is no longer supported by Apple, and therefore can't run the latest version of Logic, which she needed to inter-op with the school comptuers. Just as we thought we had bought a less than useful computer, I found this video about OpenCore Legacy Patcher from Youtuber Action Retro.

It's a community made piece of software that allows you to install the latest version of MacOS on any Intel Mac, from the late 2000s onwards. All you need to do is download the application on a mac, it will then allow you to make a bootable USB drive for any version of MacOS you want, and you just need to choose the specific mac you are targeting from a list, and it "blesses" the bootable drive, allowing you to install it on your unsupported mac using the normal install process.

I tried it and it it worked perfectly on the 2012 Macbook Pro, and the latest version of MacOS Sonoma is running perfectly well on the 12 year old hardware. It also allowed us to install the latest version of Logic, so it's working great.

Props to the team for making this and allowing hardware that would otherwise be e-waste to continue to be usable with the modern internet and software. If you end up using it, please consider donating to the team as apparently they had to jump through some serious technical hoops to get this working. Here is the link again if you need it: https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/

[prokopetz]

I've always known it was unusual that well-designed NES games could run at a steady 60fps while games for much more powerful contemporary desktop PCs struggled to hit 15, and I had an inkling that it had something to do with the system's graphics engine being implemented in hardware, but reading up on the details of that implementation really brings home how fucking nuts the decisions the system's designers made to hit that performance target are. Like, what do you mean its graphics pipeline is completely unbuffered? What do you mean it does stupid tricks with hardware registers to perform just-in-time rendering of individual pixels while the CRT television is in the middle of drawing the frame? What do you mean it schedules code execution for the horizontal blanking interval between scanlines?

Basically, what I mean to say is that hobby programmers who still develop for this thing are insane, and they have my respect.

[goryhorroor]

horror sub-genres: techno

[arcadebroke]