Its always fun to see these retro hacks. Imagine if we could transport some of this stuff back in time to the 80's, how the hackers of that era would respond to

Its always fun to see these retro hacks. Imagine if we could transport some of this stuff back in time to the 80's, how the hackers of that era would respond to all the wonderful things current retro- nerds are achieving .. In the Oric Atmos (another awesome 8-bit retro machine - [1] ) world, we discovered all kinds of new techniques for using the machines weird and quirky graphics architecture [2] - and someone even realized that the mostly-unused tape stop/start lines on the DIN connector can be repurposed as scan-line signal generators, meaning we can 'race the beam' to get faster/better graphics performance. This requires a simple cable be made - of course, only a few of us have done it - but every time I think about this particular hack I really wonder how things could have been if the Oric Atmos had this level of hacking back in 1983, before the viability window closed and the machine became obscure, it seems, in history. The other thing that is happening in this scene is that dedicated hackers are putting resources into reproducing the hardware, and even creating 'next generation' versions - its pretty obvious in the case of the ZX Spectrum Next (which is just awesome, I love mine), and of course C64 world, but its also happening with the Oric Atmos as well, albeit with a smaller magnitude of effort involved. Truly seems we could be on the cusp of an "anachronistic computing" movement taking hold .. I could definitely see myself moving basic social networking functionality off the mainstream platforms, and using a ZX Spectrum Next or Oric Atmos++ for basic things like email, calendar scheduling, messaging, etc. It will be so fun to have access to those mainstream communications systems, on a non-mainstream platform, some day .. [1] - https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oric_Atmos https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oric_Atmos [2] - https://oric.org/ https://oric.org/