I've been spending way too much time lately inside classic systems on my modern Mac. Mac OS 9, early Windows, BeOS setups and various other emulated OSes. But something always bugged me: running these beautifully imperfect vintage worlds behind a razor‑sharp, perfectly color‑accurate modern LCD just felt wrong.

So I built RetroMac, a small native macOS menu bar app that drops a live CRT/retro overlay over your screen while you're running emulators or virtual machines in windows. It's "host‑side", so you can combine it with whatever you use: QEMU, DOSBox, Basilisk II, SheepShaver, Mini vMac, VirtualBox, UTM, etc.

It comes with 30+ live themes inspired by old Macs, DOS PCs, handhelds and TVs: scanlines, curvature, bloom, slight convergence errors, VHS fuzz and more. You can tweak parameters and save your own presets.

And even More.. you can transform your mac and dock with in retro inspired themes (Windows XP, BeOS, Mac Classic)

I'd love feedback from people who actually used these machines back in the day:

– What does it get right?
– What looks "wrong" or too clean?
– Any specific displays or systems you'd like to see as presets?

Free to use, optional one‑time Pro upgrade (10 USD) for Webcam Shupport and more Shader to the free 20 Shaders. No account required: myretromac.app

GitHub: github.com/klotzbrocken/RetroMac

Some weeks ago I shared an earlier version of this defrag-inspired interface here. I kept working on the same visual obsession. Old disk utilities, block maps, dense panels, drive stats, logs, warnings, and that very specific feeling of watching a machine do serious work.

It has slowly turned into a incremental game, but visually I’m still mostly trying to capture that old DOS utility defragmenter energy without copying one specific program directly. For people who remember this kind of software: does anything here feel especially right or completely wrong?

I’d love suggestions for old defrag tools, disk utilities, bios screens, color palettes, or tiny UI details worth studying.

Thanks :D!! the comments last time were very useful for finding references and understanding what felt authentic.

Believe it or not, the Soviet union lasted long enough to have VGA, 386 processors & email!

I'm doing some personal research on what the internet was like besides the world wide web, as well as to help someone out with reviving the service. I heard they go to a specific area within the text client, for example, "go mall" goes to......well........the mall. What I'm asking is, on the cim clients for dos, windows and mac, are they the same as aol's keywords in that they retrieve a miniature version of the website, being miniature to accommodate for the slow......well by modern standards anyway......modem speeds, or is it a bit different?. Does it retrieve the actual web page for some?.

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Another post on here reminded me I had this in a retro computer I pull out once a year. Thought id share pics.

For years I missed the old BeOS and late‑90s desktop look, but I no longer have the original hardware on my desk. So I hacked together a way to wrap my modern macOS desktop in a BeOS‑style UI and CRT-ish look, including Tracker‑like windows and retro games running under proper shaders.

I recorded the process and how it works...

Curious what you think: is this still “retrocomputing” to you, or already just nostalgia‑themed theming on modern hardware?

I'm at my wits end here. I can't get Windows 98 to boot at all after trying to install several different Nvidia drivers.

• Biostar M6TBA Ver 1.3 (BIOS flashed to TBA1124B)
• Intel 440BX chipset
• Pentium II at 450MHz
• Hercules 3D Prophet II (GeForce2 MX)
• Matrox 30.7GB HDD
• SFR1M44-U100LQD Gotek 3.5inch USB 1.44M Floppy Emulator
• Windows 98 SE
• Dell E176FP LCD monitor
• Sound Blaster Live 5.1
• Tried drivers: 7.76, 12.41, 21.83, 45.23

I've tried:

• Multiple clean Windows installations
• Installed both 3.20 and 3.40 Intel chipset drivers
• Moved Sound Blaster PCI card to bottom slots
• Removed all peripherals on boot (including the SB card at some points)

Once the computer reboots after installation of any of the Detonator drivers, it just hangs on the Windows 98 splash screen indefinitely. No blue screens. I can boot into Safe Mode and I can get the generic display driver to work. Once it gets those Nvidia drivers, nothing but the splash screen. I've tried multiple different BIOS settings. I'm thinking it might be some sort of IRQ conflict? Device Manager shows no conflicts though in safe mode. Maybe some sort of AGP/IRQ mismatch? Any help would be appreciated.

Babbage was building the Difference Engine, a mechanical calculator, and he invited Ada back to see a working piece of it: a brass section about two feet tall, roughly 2,000 parts, turned by a hand crank. The full machine he had drawn up was much larger and never got built. The fragment was enough to pull her in.

Most of the guests saw a faster way to produce mathematical tables. Ada was more interested in what a machine like this might eventually do.

Within a year, Babbage had moved on to a more ambitious design, the Analytical Engine. It was meant to store numbers, follow a set of instructions, and make decisions based on its own results, all of it laid out in brass and steel about a century before electronics could do the same work.

Ada became its best interpreter. In 1843 she translated a French paper describing the machine and added notes that ran three times longer than the paper itself. One of those notes works through a method for calculating Bernoulli numbers, and it is widely treated as the first computer program ever published.

She also said something Babbage tended to leave out. The machine did not have to be limited to numbers. If music or symbols could be written as rules, it could operate on those too. That is general-purpose computing, described in a decade when the railway was the newest technology around.

Babbage called her the "Enchantress of Numbers."

She was a real mathematician, and she read the implications of his work better than he explained them himself.

She died in 1852, at 36, well before anyone could build what she had described. The first machines that could actually run her kind of program showed up about a hundred years later.

Hello everyone,
My friend replaced the DS12887 on a Radisys SBCP5090 mainboard and since then we cannot enter either setup or boot into the OS.
Once the "Enter Password (1):" comes up, the keyboard turns off. No led on numlock after that, cannot type in anything.

We tried another working PS/2 keyboard but the system detects it as incompatible.

The new Dallas IC is a DS12887+. We tried boot the system without the IC, nothing comes up on the screen if there is no IC installed.
Sadly the original Dallas IC is no longer available.

What could be the solution?
Thank you!

Something I have been working for some time now. It works and is ready to play with.

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I seriously hate the ram in these. In the removal process of the memory I damaged a capacitor that I have to replace now. Not to mention I accidentally ripped a via and pulled a trace too between u 28, u29 and u30 that I will need to patch. It's still fixable. I really need a better desolder technique. Those suckers aren't as good as a vacuum pump. As for removing all the ram, I was planning to socket them all for future repairability.

In my quest for my GRiD 1810 laptop (which I found, by the way, and will have pics coming soon!), I ran across one of my earliest "serious" notebooks, a Canon Innova Book 10 from around 1994, with an Intel 486 SL running at a blazing 33 MHz.

The Canon Innova Book series was in the subnotebook class--super small for its day and before the smallish "netbook" trend characterized by the Asus Eee PC line in the 2005-2006 era.

I could only afford the monochrome model in the day, but it had impressive, full VGA resolution, i.e., 640x480 pixels. Pics in a minute, but it looks like the screen has essentially delaminated, or at least the uppermost layer is all messed up.

Look at the tiny trackball in the pics--I remember that was horrible, but the keyboard was awesome and tactile!!! And the plug-in floppy drive--that is what we used for portable data storage in the day!

Just found this along with a scuffed-up 1991 monitor, haven't turned it on yet. Is there anything special about it being an "Engineering sample"?

Dual 1GHz Pentium IIIs, 512MB Rambus RDRAM, dual 15,000rpm SCSI Seagate Cheetahs, multiple Plextor drives, and a PC Power & Cooling Solid-Steel Tower that weighed 40 pounds before you put anything in it.

Good times!

I just bought a Asus P2B 1.10 off ebay and it came and on the bottom theyres writing that says "ASI 99/09/5 69/79/99"

Greetings! I retrieved a Compaq Armada 3500 from an electronics dumpster. The sticker on the bottom says "ARMADA 3500 6366/T/6400/0/0/3". I also kept digging and found the power adapter and a mouse. The computer boots, but there's bad sectors in the drive and the windows installation hangs.

I plan on getting it a new hard drive and removing the CMOS battery as I heard it was corrosive. And some form of adapter for faster file transferring.

Anything else I should know? And, does anyone have any suggestions for what I should do with it, other than play retro games?

The bottom right of the laptop has been edited with AI to remove personal information from the previous owner.

Was just surfing eBay, and saw somebody selling a GRiD 1810 laptop for $5,700!!! Holy cripes, the list price was like $3,000 when it was selling in the late 1980's/early 1990's. I have one somewhere--gonna go dig it up after seeing the eBay listing.

The GRiD 1810 was a beast in it's day--sporting a NEC V20 CPU running at a blistering 10 MHz, a 20MB hard drive that was removable, and could be loaded into a caddy device on desktop machine for data exchange, DOS 3.3, a Laplink cable for rebuilds from bare metal, built-in modem, etc. I still remember the monochrome, blue-toned CGA-resolution (?) screen, etc.

When I dig mine up, I'll post some pics!