If you've been following along here or on Twitter or Google+ you've no doubt seen the experimenting I've been doing with interfacing a Raspberry Pi in various ways with several retro computers like the Atari 800 and Commodore 64. My first project was using the Raspberry Pi to act as a converter for a USB gamepad to turn it into an Atari 2600 style joystick. After discovering Eric Nelson  on Twitter and seeing all the games he was playing on the Commodore 64, I really wanted to...

Got the kernel module for the Raspberry Pi that does the Commodore 64 IEC protocol working quite well. Managed to get rid of pretty much all the timing issues, and cobbled together a simple user space program to handle the file I/O. I can now read & write PRG files, even very large ones. It was interesting sending a file (by accident) larger than the C64's RAM, the poor C64 freaked out and overran even the screen and crashed. It was very cool to load a Demo without having to mess...

One of the things bugging me while tinkering with old computers has been the joysticks. Several of the computers I'm playing with can use the Atari 2600 joysticks, but those joysticks are awful. I've never liked them, even back when the Atari 2600 was new. I kept thinking about getting some other 2600 compatible joystick, or maybe making a box and sticking some of my arcade buttons and joysticks in it and wiring it up with the 9 pin Atari pinout. Neither of those ideas seemed...

I've been on a quest to get a working NES emulator on my Raspberry Pi. By working I mean that it can run full screen and has audio that works both on the analog jack and the HDMI out. I tried out a few and while some can at least display the video, none have working audio. There have been reports of people getting MAME and MESS to work on the Raspberry Pi, but in digging into it I found out that it's AdvanceMAME and AdvanceMESS, which are over seven years old. If you're much into...

I was getting ready to do an experiment with the Raspberry Pi and see if I could get it to work with a USB device. I expected that the USB device would probably want a lot of power so I dug out a powered USB 2.0 hub. As I was hooking up the USB hub I was suddenly startled to see the Pi power up! I checked to make sure I hadn't accidentally bumped my power supply and turned it on. The power supply was still off, the power was coming from the USB hub! This seemed really strange to me...