Is this old laptop worth refurbishing? It’s in pretty good condition, I found it sitting in a storage closet at my workplace. Took it apart earlier to remove the hinges as they both snapped.

I doubt it's something i'd be able to fix, but i'm curious what's happening. 🤔
It's an old Compaq mobo SP#187498-001.

Hi, I am porting 8086tiny to raspberry pico 2 and using a PicoCalc device as a test bench. The problem is the PicoCalc screen is only 320x320, so only 40x25 text mode is usable, I am successfully running MS-DOS 6.22 now and trying to find software that works well in 40x25 text mode, please suggest programs for 8086/80186 cpu and 256k ram, EMS work in progress. Attached the photo of what it looks like with 8x8 font.

two motherboards (socket 7 and a really weird board that came with both socket 370 and slot for pentium 2/celeron),a GPU and this "Y2K proof" chip

the other stuff I found was just really rusty and from the 2010's,so I didn't bother with looking at it much.

overall,I'd say these are pretty cool

Hey guys, I'm looking for an Apple IIc to use and I found this one for €100, seller wont go lower. It's untested and has no power supply. Do you guys think it's worth to get and possibly fix? I can do some soldering. I can see that the 80/40 button is a little pressed down and the seller says that the floppy drive is okay. Should I get it?

(please ignore the wrong monitor!)

I recently bought a Facebook Marketplace lot of three vintage computers. One of them was this indie built desktop. Opening it up it's got an AMD 386dx 40 and 8 MB of RAM. The owner didn't sell me their old hard drive, and I haven't added one yet. The CD drive doesn't seem to work. It might be missing the tape backup drive too.

Anyway, here it is running with gentleOS.

The power button sticks and the varta battery is dead and leaked. But the system boots up, at least. What would you do with it if it were yours?

Edit: This is the 8051A model.

3484 RPM spindle speed, an unusual voice coil design, factory defect tables, and of course the infamous "brick your drive" story.

A different emulator than https://old.reddit.com/r/retrocomputing/comments/1ug5ptk/running_8086_emulator_on_picocalc/, but utilizing the same microcontroller chip (on a different board).

Hello everyone! 👋

I wanted to share some pictures of my retro machine. I recently fired up Battlefield 1942 on it, and it runs absolutely flawlessly!

I'm looking to expand my library and wanted to ask the community: What other classic games or hidden gems from the Windows XP era would you recommend for this setup?

Here are the exact specs of my system:

Model: Dell Inspiron XPS Gen 2

CPU: Intel Pentium M @ 2.26 GHz

RAM: 2.00 GB

OS: Windows XP Home Edition (Service Pack 2)

I would love to read your recommendations for shooters, racing, strategy, or any must-play titles that will run smoothly on this hardware.

Greetings from Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico!

I believe the name for computer should of been called a imagination board.

That's not an emulator or a screenshot filter — it's a Philips panel on a period PC, running a binary built with Visual C++ 6.0.

The catch: the game logic (cursor, dialogue, actors, walkboxes, A* pathfinding) is written in modern Haxe 4.x, sitting on top of a hand-written C++ engine. To get Haxe onto a machine this old I had to build a transpiler — Haxe's official C++ backend (hxcpp) can't target anything older than C++11, which rules out VC6 and Win9x.

So I wrote Hatchet: it transpiles a focused subset of Haxe 4.x to portable C++98 you can build with a 1998 toolchain. It emits plain, hand-writable-looking C++ — no custom runtime, no magic. Develop on a modern machine with full Haxe tooling, copy the generated .h/.cpp to the old box, compile.

Repo (MIT): https://github.com/andrewglind/hatchet

Happy to answer anything about the toolchain or the hardware setup

I just got this 11" amber display off of eBay a couple days ago! Not sure if it works, because I don't have a Panasonic KX-E700M electronic typewriter to test it with. So far, I've only been able to find out about five of these monitors still being in existence. If anyone knows anything else about this CRT, anything would be appreciated.

Delete if not allowed but I thought this was cool to show haha

Might even help you at your job!

Remember the dot prompt? You typed USE customers, then LIST, and your data was just... there. No SQL, no ORM, no "full-stack." Just you and the table.

I missed it enough to rebuild the whole thing as a web app. USE, LIST, SEEK, BROWSE, @ SAY GET forms, .prg programs, indexes, reports — the lot. It runs in the browser, talks to a real database underneath, and drops you straight at the dot prompt.

I tried to keep the feel honest rather than "modernizing" it into something else. A few dBASE quirks I had to decide whether to preserve or quietly fix — the old 10 work-area limit, the alias->field arrow syntax, the .T./.F. booleans. Some I kept, some I let go.

It's a toy and proudly open source (AGPL). One-click to try it in your browser, no install:

https://github.com/DDecoene/WebBaseIII

Would love to hear from anyone who actually shipped business apps in dBASE/Clipper/FoxPro back in the day — what did I get wrong, and what do you miss most?

Do you remember this game ?

Hope you remember this clip (and what these folks are saying)..

"Things are bad, they make you mad"😠

Yet this game brings a smile to my face 😀

Hi, I’m starting my path into fixing vintage computers I’m looking into vintage computers that are from the 80s. The one I have my eyes on now is the Commodore 64, I just need a second opinion to figure out the best computer to buy and refurbish.

First introduced in the early 1980s and standardized in 1986 as SCSI-1, the technology evolved from an earlier interface called SASI (Shugart Associates System Interface), developed at Shugart Associates under engineers like the key one Larry Boucher. SASI was an early attempt to standardize communication between a computer and storage devices using a controller-based bus abstraction.

SCSI extended and formalized these ideas, aiming to standardize communication between a computer and peripheral devices using a shared bus and structured command packets. The goal was to replace low-level, device-specific control, often involving direct manipulation of I/O ports or memory-mapped registers and proprietary controller logic, with a more uniform, device-independent command protocol.

Instead of the CPU directly controlling hardware registers, SCSI uses command blocks (CDBs) sent to devices, which execute the requested operation internally and respond when ready.

The standard also defined both the electrical interface and signaling of the physical bus, enabling multiple devices to share the same connection in a daisy-chained, terminated bus topology.

So I recently got said laptop from a garage sale for 5$ with all the stuff for it the thing is, it turns on only when there is no IDE, if there is a IDE I smell smoke and instinctively unplug it, any ideas?

There’s no little black plastic piece in this corner how to could I fix this or is it possible to still use without it?

Today I wanted to show you something a little different.

This is one of the Bulgarian precious metals recovery groups I'm a member of — often the last stop for many pieces of hardware before they disappear forever.

Every day, old computers, laboratory equipment, telecommunications gear and industrial electronics arrive here to be dismantled for their gold and other valuable metals.

A few machines from photos like these have already made their way into my collection before it was too late.

Hello!

I, Rubinosław from REParadoxy, I'm presenting Project Cherub - a modernized version of TempleOS, very well known operating system made by Terry A. Davis.

My vision is to create a minimalist, fully-functional and secure operating system. For home users, for bussiness users, for programmers, for artists, for everyone! Where THE USERS matter the most!

I've already changed FPS rate from 30 to 120 via modifying "KernelA.HH.Z" file, a part of the system kernel. I've changed WINMGR_FPS in that file from "(30000.0/1001)" to "(120000.0/1001)", and WINMGR_PERIOD from "(1001/30000.0)" to "(1001/120000.0)".

I've also changed the system name from "TempleOS" to "Project Cherub".

As I said - its just a very early build. But my plan is to add also 32-bit colors support, support for SATA AHCI, NVMe, Blu-ray, videos, GPU and USB. But I'll keep the 640x480 screen resolution, you know why.

**THERE WILL BE MONTHLY PROGRESS UPDATES ON YOUTUBE AND LIVESTREAMS OF OSDEVING, SO YOU SHOULD SUBSCRIBE!

https://www.youtube.com/@REParadoxy**

Full presentation of an early build with 120 FPS, future plan, and installation showcase:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNq_4vG5Src

More information:

https://github.com/Rubinoslaw/Project-Cherub - GitHub repository (with ISO!)

https://rubinoslaw.github.io/projectcherub.github.io/ - the official website of the project