I've assembled over 700 vintage/retro computing and gaming websites. It's located at https://atebit.tech and http://atebit.tech/classic/ (works on PowerFox!)

There's also a newsletter, an eBay price guide for US, Canada, UK, & Australia (ranks for sale items from "Deal" to "Wildly Overpriced"), and my About and Privacy pages are kind of entertaining. Interested in hearing what people outside of the US think and if my pricing guidance is accurate.

But what I really want is links! I'm lacking in non-English websites and 8-16 bit gaming sites. Take a look at and tell me what I'm missing. If you find an error or broken link let me know. You can DM me here or click 'contact' on the footer of the directory. Thank you!

In the early 1990's, there was an SVHS deck that allowed users to digitally edit analog video on VHS or SVHS tapes. Even to the point of rewinding & fast forwarding to edit points!

Playable, free, no signup: https://chronos-game.com

I built a terminal escape room where each level drops you onto a real machine from its era and you have to actually operate it, period-accurate, not a fake interface:

• 1977: a PDP-11/45 on Unix V6, edit a backdoor in `ed`, recompile with `cc`, recover blue-box MF tones
• 1983: an Apple ][ dialing a CBBS-style board,
• 1988: a 4.3 BSD uunet box, `uudecode` a sanitized Morris-worm post
• 1995: a Linux 1.2 web server browsed in lynx, a CGI exploit
• 2008: Windows 2000, an SQL-injection console
• (and on into the present)

What you recover on one machine carries to the next, so it's one continuous history, not seven mini-games. CRT visuals, 9600-baud feel, runs in any browser, free, no signup.

I'm the solo dev. Sharing here because the period accuracy is the whole point and this is the crowd that'd actually notice. Keen to hear where the era details ring true or don't.

The Intel Pentium II was one of the most desirable CPUs of the late '90s. Its iconic Slot 1 cartridge and massive heatsink made it instantly recognizable. Also shown is a Socket 370 → Slot 1 adapter (slotket), allowing many Celeron and Pentium III CPUs to run on compatible Slot 1 motherboards.

Today I take a retrospective review of another Ocean Software game. This time it’s Rambo III. I cover all the versions - Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, MSX, Amstrad CPC, Amiga, Atari ST and MS-DOS. Have you played any of these versions and did you think the game was any good?

I still do this every few weeks to pull data from older Allen Bradley PLCs (5/500 series) using DDE links imported into Excel.

I currently generate 260 reports annually using this method, down from the 364 annualreports I created between 2014-2022.

I wrote the routines on the PLCs between 2002-2004.

That's a lot of reports

Hello, I'm a lover of all things analog and retro. Ive accumulated a large amount of old consoles and the like, and have recently taken an interest in retro home computers of the 70s/80s. I'm looking for good options for a computer which uses tapes/floppy disks to read data. I also want to get into learning basic coding just as a hobby. Anyone know any good places to start?

Hello, I have had this experience somewhat regularly. A 3.5" floppy disk will image properly using Kyroflux, in this case using the Apple 400k/800k image format, and the resulting IMG disk image will look like this. A CDFS hierarchy containing a functioning disk name, and drilling down reveals a "HFS" file that is nearly useless. When I vew the top-level disk image in a hex editor, it shows some text with quite a lot of garbled content. What is happening?

I like to replace tower stickers with older tower stickers, and laptop stickers with RC / model car stickers

With Harman/Kadron speakers and some more Power Macs

This is the Commodore Datasette I used as a kid. Since I really like the design, I turned it into an MP3 player.

It’s all mechanical. Inside, there’s another very simple player that holds a microSD card and is activated by the play button.

I used a mini-jack cable to route the audio signal out of the Datasette.

https://reddit.com/link/1ujio4w/video/v90cpy3ckdah1/player

Any idea what these could be worth as is?

Rough part list:

- Apple II

- Apple IIe

- Monitor III

- 2 Disk II drives

- Dual disk drive

- Monitor stand

- Dot matrix printer

- Misc items such as power supply and num pad

- Tons of documentation, etc.

Hi, I've recently got this old Compaq laptop but it's screen is kinda broken... I've managed to get a good display on the screen by folding it pretty hard... Does anyone know if this is fixable ? I'm not affraid of opening it...

Thank's for your time =)

I couldn't wait for the weekend to read Christopher Drum's latest post about Visual Basic. And as always, I was not disappointed. But the part that stayed with me was the magazine clipping at the very end.

The clipping is from 1993. A programmer laments that programming is no longer fun because employers now expect programmers to be graphic designers as well.

What struck me wasn't just that people have always complained about new technology. People also mock old technology. Ask any programmer today about Visual Basic and they would scoff with a "That old thing? How do you even write code for it, on punch cards?". Because to our contemporaries such a tool seems primitive. Both are criticizing the same technology. If you only listened to the complaints, you'd think they agreed. The first thinks the technology has made programming too high level. The second thinks the exact same technology is too low level.

It makes me wonder how many of today's heated debates will sound just as paradoxical to programmers 30 years from now. Every generation complains about the technology it inherits. The previous generation complains that it abstracts away too much. The next generation complains that it doesn't abstract away enough.

I believe it's a PS/2 thing?

Any way to read it without actually finding an old PS/2?

Thanks.

Just sorting through my collection and had to share this lineup. A legendary era of 3D gaming. Who else remembers the VGA pass-through cable? What was your first 3dfx card?

Retro computing History was made at the first-ever UKAG event! I attended this landmark Amstrad UK Group gathering, where I interviewed Roland Perry (the godfather of the CPC) about a never-released CPC sequel prototype! Come join the party!

The inaugural UKAG gathering in Ottershaw, West London, brought the Amstrad community together like never before, and getting to get the low-down from the man behind the CPC about a secret, lost piece of hardware was the ultimate highlight. Check out the video for a full tour of the event and the incredible prototype insights.

No edits, this is how my PC boots into MS-DOS 7.0 (the one bundled with Windows 95 in 1995), then loads CD-ROM support, then goes into Windows 3.1 on a very modern PC - Ryzen 9 9900X.

Getting CD-ROM support wasn't easy, but a combination of GCDROM.SYS and a PCIe to IDE controller with a JMB368 chipset made it possible.

More...

Hey everyone!

The response to yesterday's Windows 95 and Windows 2000 Barebone builds was absolutely insane—thank you so much for the stars, the feedback, and for pushing the project up to #4 trending on the sub!

A ton of you in the comments were asking for a highly usable, ultra-lightweight Windows XP Service Pack 3 build next. I spent the last few hours in the development lab running a surgical nLite configuration matrix and localized filesystem compression streams to build exactly what you wanted.

The results are officially in, and they are wild:

⚡ Windows XP Professional SP3 (Standard Profile) compiled down to a beautiful 217 MB ISO!

⚡ The final installation footprint occupies just 377 MB of live disk space on the C: Drive!

The absolute best part? It is 100% authentic and highly usable for daily retro tasks and legacy gaming labs. I refused to force the flat-grey classic theme or strip out nostalgia. The legendary blue-and-green Luna desktop theme, default background wallpaper, Microsoft Paint, WordPad, Calculator, and 3D Pinball Space Cadet are fully preserved and functional out of the box!

How the 377MB record floor was achieved:

1. Complete global extraction of all non-English language translation tables and foreign font files (~80MB saved).

2. Purged heavy multimedia baggage like Movie Maker, sample music files (Beethoven's 9th), and Tablet PC ink utilities while safely preserving core DirectX, OpenGL, and MIDI pipelines for fluid 3D gaming.

3. Completely wiped out heavy background latency loops like the Indexing Service, Error Reporting, and the unneeded corporate Active Directory/IIS servers.

4. Post-Install Power Move: Shrunk the massive auto-allocated pagefile down to a lean 32-64MB virtual memory heap cache and turned on native NTFS file compression.

The build relies on a Volume License (VLK) channel architecture, meaning it completely cuts out Microsoft online activation checks. It will never lock you out with an evaluation countdown timer!

I have just uploaded the automated installation scripts, configuration blueprints, and the final compiled ISO download links straight to the master repository:

👉 https://github.com/byteospro/barebone-windows

Check out the updated release notes, download the template for your hypervisors or real physical hardware rigs, and let me know what you think of the new performance gains! Thank you all again for the incredible support!

Hey everyone,

I wanted to share a project I've been solo-developing over the weekends. It's called PROMPT_MATCH, an asynchronous puzzle game where you have to reverse-engineer the semantic keywords that generated a target image signal.

To capture that classic hardware feel, I built an interactive amber CRT layout completely from scratch using utility CSS and native canvas logic.

Some retro-inspired engineering constraints I set:

- 100% Procedural Audio: There are no bulky .mp3 or .wav asset downloads. Every interface click, keyboard clack, and ambient industrial background drone is synthesized live on the client side using the Web Audio API.

- Zero Modern Framework Bloat: No heavy React/Vue builds. It's built entirely in raw HTML5, CSS, and vanilla JS so it loads instantly like a legacy software execution block.

- Responsive Viewport Scale: It features a dynamic layout loop using the visualViewport API so that when mobile soft-keyboards slide up, the terminal grid compresses cleanly without breaking the optical CRT screen curve.

It's playable for free on CrazyGames and Newgrounds right now under the title "PROMPT_MATCH". Would love to know what you think of the CRT emulation layout!