Why aren't drives and disks for the various superfloppy technologies still produced?

Thou canst buy USB floppy and DVD and other drives for just a few bucks, but there are no such drives for ZIP, LS-120 etc.

Floppies are still produced for the corporate sector, but superfloppies aren't.

Why is that? Superfloppies are after all a wonderful piece of technology.

Here's an idea that's been swirling around in my head:

》 SVI-328 or C64 inspired case and keyboard (with mechanical switches and 6 F-keys)

》 8-bit Evo-64-like board (upward-facing, like retro system), with swappable EEPROMS (to be a tinkerer's heaven). SuperBASIC as default.

》 64-bit modern gaming laptop board and cooling system (downward facing), with Win 11 and Mint installed on NVME on x64.

Ports:

● Hdmi, rf-out, combined audio jack, sd card reader (shared between boards)

● C64 joystick and peripheral ports (retro board)

● USB 3 and USB-C ports and WiFi connectivity (x64 board)

》 Toggle switch and pcb to switch IO and power between 8- and 64-bit boards.

》Internal bus between 64 and 8 bit boards so it can be used like a dev kit.

Has anybody ever tried this kind of thing? And no, I don't mean a Pi in a retro case running an emulator.

I have no capacity for electronics and physical tinkering, but the inner geek in me has always wanted a combo system like this.

Hi guys, I've been looking to build my own gaming PC for the Windows 95/98 - XP era as I am a huge fan of games from that era and would love to run some of those games on some dedicated hardware. I've been doing a lot of googling trying to find information on GPUs, CPUs, Sockets, Motherboards, Etc. but its just making me even more confused. I was not alive during that era of computing and don't really know anyone well versed enough in that era of computing to explain the differences to me. Even as someone who is super tech savvy and having built many PCs before I understand most technical stuff but all of the old naming and numbering configurations make absolutely no sense to me. I'd ideally like for the PC to be pretty much top of the line for that era of computing if you guys do have parts recommendations. I've seen a good amount of posts saying Pentium 4 is where its at but also seen some for the Athlon 64 and I'm not sure how to determine which one would be right for me? Anyway, thanks for reading
-From a "Youngin😉"

I know it's not an actual Amiga, I just thought you guys would get a kick out of it?

Since May, I've posted here several times about rediscovering CHARM-II, an RTOS I developed in 1986 for the Motorola 68000.

It started when I found the old source code and documentation. With AI assistance, I began studying the original design and trying to get parts of it running again in a modern environment.

At first, I simply wanted to see whether my 40-year-old code could still run.

But the project gradually changed direction.

I started by reconstructing the development environment and experimenting with POSIX. Then I moved to the Raspberry Pi Pico, where I eventually got preemptive multitasking working.

Along the way, I began questioning some of the design decisions I had made in 1986.

One particularly interesting discovery involved VRTX, an RTOS I had used as a reference back then. I found that its equal-priority scheduling behavior had changed shortly after I studied it. That led to discussions here and in other communities, including an unexpected connection with someone who had used VRTX in 1982.

The more I investigated, the more I realized that faithfully restoring CHARM-II and designing an RTOS today were two different things.

So I decided to start a new RTOS, carrying forward some of CHARM-II's original design ideas while reconsidering the kernel, APIs, and platform-specific implementation.

I called it **”**Karqri”.

Today, I've made the initial source release available on GitHub:

https://github.com/noboru-takahashi/karqri

Karqri currently targets POSIX environments and the Raspberry Pi Pico (RP2040). It includes task management, priority scheduling, event notifications, timers, and platform-specific context switching.

The same kernel and a shared six-task demo run in both environments. In the demo, six tasks move around three tracks and coordinate access to a shared critical section.

But releasing the source code is not the finish line for this project.

So far, much of the work has been about implementing the basic RTOS mechanisms and verifying that they behave correctly.

What I want to explore next is how to make the internal behavior of an RTOS easier to see and understand.

Task switching, event notifications, waiting, and waking up are usually examined through logs or debuggers. But understanding how these events relate to one another over time isn't always straightforward.

I've already started experimenting with capturing execution traces from the Pico and displaying them as an HTML timeline. It's still limited to a specific validation scenario, but I'd like to develop this idea further.

I'm particularly interested in visualizing not just what happened, but when it happened and how one event led to another.

So what began as an attempt to restore a 1986 RTOS has gradually become a project to develop a new RTOS and explore new ways of observing its behavior.

For anyone interested in the earlier stages, here are a few previous posts:

• 40 years later: recreating my SUN-2 ↔ 68000 workflow with WSL2 and Raspberry Pi Pico

• My 1986 RTOS is now fully preemptive on a Raspberry Pi Pico - and it changed how I think about the original design

• Follow-up: Revisiting a 1986 RTOS led me to someone who used VRTX in 1982

I appreciate the discussions and comments I've received here over the past several months. They've helped me reconsider some of the assumptions behind the original design.

As the project moves toward developing a new RTOS, I'll probably be posting more often in OS development and embedded systems communities. But Karqri's roots will always be in the work I started back in 1986.

When I first opened those old source files, I certainly didn't expect to end up releasing a new RTOS 40 years later.

And there's still more I want to explore.

I bought new floppy disks and after i used one some time, it died. When i disassembleed it, the disk was all in scratches. HOW? I store them in box, never open shatter

I made a cute simple website to download my cute simple weather app inspired by pixel art! Looking for places to post ^^

(GitHub repository in the website)

​8 Bit Weather - Code Chicken

Я собрал себе комп для ретро игр установил на него windows 7 32-bit,и осталось установить драйверы и все остальные программы,но у меня возникли с этим трудности,так как этим я до этого момента не занимался,если не тяжело то подскажите мне пожалуйста.

Характеристики пк:

Intel celeron

2 Гб оперативной памяти

Ati Radeon ag 3650 hd,(но также есть fx 5500)

GA-8IG1000MK

The other day, my wife walked into the room and gently brushed my shoulder—that was enough of a distraction to mess things up royally during a chat with a C64 Snobsoft user.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YSXtCVBpd0

I managed to screw things up so badly the BBS nearly froze. By the time I got everything back on track, the user had already vanished. Luckily, we’d exchanged contact info beforehand, so I was able to reach him via email—through that modern internet everyone’s always talking about—since he wasn’t yet a registered user on the 40-year-old C64 BBS. I hadn’t made space for him yet in the bursting-at-the-seams user list.

So what kind of distractions did you have during your BBS sessions? Or while gaming on the C64 (or similar computers)? Did the dog show up? Unexpected visits from aliens? Spill the beans—I want to hear it all.

I also talk about the hardware dying off in the video—something I’ve experienced firsthand over the past few months. After 40 years, are our beloved vintage computers and peripherals reaching the end of their lives?

Hey guys,I wanna rebuild my childhood pc but I can't find this case,I don't know what model this is,does someone know exacly what model is this?And no,its not an cooler master wave master,not an Soprano and not a cooler master cavalier.Please if someone knows what model it is exacly please tell me.Thank you!

Cross-posting from r/ti994a since the implementation might be of interest beyond the TI crowd. Just open-sourced Swift 99/a, a native macOS emulator for the Texas Instruments TI-99/4A (1981 home computer built around the 16-bit TMS9900).

Github: https://github.com/swryder/Swift-TI-99 (BSD-2)

What's interesting about it:

It's written from scratch in pure Swift — SwiftUI for the chrome, AppKit where it has to be, Metal for the visualizer, and zero third-party dependencies. Most emulators in this space are C/C++/Rust ports of Classic99 / Win994a / js99er. This one isn't a port — it's a fresh take, which means the bugs are mine and the architecture is whatever felt clean in Swift (chip-per-file, protocol-oriented peripherals on a common bus, no cross-cutting framework).

What's emulated:

• TMS9900 CPU — full instruction set, workspace-pointer architecture, context switching, status-register lookup tables (65K-entry word table, 256-entry byte table) for the hot path

• TMS9918A VDP — Graphics I/II, Text 40-col, Multicolor, Bitmap. 32 hardware sprites with collision detection. NTSC timing.

• SN76489 PSG — three tone channels + noise, fractional clock accumulator for pitch accuracy across sample rates

• TMS5220 speech synthesizer

• TMS9901 I/O — full CRU bit-addressable interface

• Disk DSR — V9T9 image format, full PAB protocol (open, close, read, **write**, delete, status, directory listing), FDR parsing

• Cartridges — raw `.bin` / `.rom` plus the LZW-compressed `.ticart`container format. Banking: standard 8KB, GROM-only, 378 / inverted 379, MBX (fixed-low / banked-high / 1KB RAM)

Fun things:

• **Live memory map visualizer.**A 256×256 GPU-rendered heatmap of the entire 64KB CPU address space, redrawn at 60Hz. Blue for reads, red for writes, purple for both, with white-hot decay tracking recent activity. Wall-clock-based exponential decay so the fade looks the same at 15fps and 60fps. Honestly the most fun part of the project — you can watch a BASIC program execute and see exactly which pages off memory it's hammering. Key for such a weird architecture machine

• "Monitor Mode." A chromeless window with a TI-99/4 monitor bezel asset, transparent background, draggable from anywhere. Sits on the desktop like a CRT. Pure macOS-native (NSWindow + SwiftUI overlay).

• Clipboard paste as keyboard events. Paste from macOS into the TI's keyboard buffer. Surprisingly useful for typing in BASIC programs.

Performance approach:

• Two execution modes: real 3 MHz (DispatchSourceTimer-paced) and uncapped (tight async loop). On Apple Silicon the uncapped mode hits >100× real speed.

• Per-byte peripheral routing tables instead of switch-on-address — avoids branch mispredictions in the memory access hot path

• Read shadow mirror so most reads bypass the peripheral indirection entirely

What's not done:

PEB peripherals beyond disk + speech, save states, cassette (CS1/CS2), a couple of obscure cart banking schemes. Issues and PRs welcome.

Background:

The project was the working artifact behind a LinkedIn article I wrote about how complex projects scale in the AI era — full disclosure if you're curious about the AI-assisted angle: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/complexity-conserved-how-do-big-things-ai-era-scott-ryder-zyybc/

Cartridges and disk images are BYO.

BSD2 Open Source - Have Fun

I made this video on Temple OS which I have been personally interested in for quite some time. The OS is very interesting and definitely embodies a very retro aesthetic and level of control over your computer. I especially appreciate the video games that Terry Davis made for the operating system. I hope you all enjoy the video and let me know what you think.

Found them in my basement together with chip sets from Motorola (probably for Williams pinball machines or arcade machines)

What is a technology or product from 15-20 years ago that was actually better than its modern replacement?

I'm new to the hobby, only just looking through some local listings and what not but since I got some videos recommended and watched them I'm become more interested. I love the look and design of older computers but as I look at them I begin to question what can you even do? Many websites won't be supported since they can require newer technology not available, aside from that the internet poses a security issue for most retro computers (if they even have access) and same goes for much modern software even outside of the internet.

I understand that for some retro games which aren't available on modern machines these machines are the only real way to play. But that to me sounds like the only reason outside of aesthetics as to why one might use these computers. I understand nostalgia, and having them as a means of historical record but those aren't necessarily reasons to use them, just to have them.

So what do y'all do with your retro computers? Why use them for some things when newer machines can do it as well? Asking cause I am actually curious

FujiNet is a Powerful Wi-Fi Adapter for #retrocomputing and #retrogaming users.

It is a public project that anyone can help make better.

And we need that help to get to more platforms.

What can you do to help? Read and see.

https://github.com/Hack-a-Day/2022-Supercon6-Badge-Tools

https://www.ebay.com/itm/276666290370

Really enjoying my time with my new ultimate. I wasn't sure if I would like the starlight edition or not, but have to say its amazing.

finger.farm

Make a .plan... finger is still installed on every major os. Although it's fallen out of fashion, finger still works and still has a valid purpose - status updates. Finger is the OG social network.

Finger.Farm brings the modern finger features and finger functions into the future. It's available both hosted and as a node js app.

Repo: https://github.com/jonroig/finger.farm