A RetroTINK HD15 dongle, a monitor with a rare 15kHz-capable VGA input, and a hunch that shouldn’t have paid off — but did.

A “PAL” SNES that wouldn’t power on turned into a teardown revealing a Japanese Super Famicom motherboard hiding under a European shell, a reverse-polarity power supply, and a stealth region-free mod wired into the RESET button.

Choosing a macOS version, a GPU, and an upgrade path for the classic Mac Pro 5,1 — there’s no single perfect configuration, just tradeoffs.

Turning a CompactFlash card into hard drive storage for an Amstrad PC1640 — the failed attempts, the Serial Drive detour, and the recipe that finally worked.

A cheap used Radeon X800 XL turned up with a seized, screaming fan. Quieting it took three goes — new bearings, then a new fan, then a whole aftermarket cooler.

I don’t have PCI slots on my Z97 motherboard anymore — so I used a cheap PCIe-to-PCI adapter to bring a 3dfx Voodoo 2 back to life inside a modern Windows 10 PC. It took a full-height mounting workaround, an unsigned x64 driver from the 3dfxzone forums, disabling Windows 10 driver signing, and a very unlikely Windows XP fix for a “trying to map memory” error — but native Glide, on real 3dfx hardware, on a 2020s PC, is real.

Namco built an arcade cabinet that stitches three screens into one race. Nobody had properly emulated the chip that makes it possible. This is the full story — two other people’s abandoned attempts, a ROM dump that can’t be released, a canonical chip emulation built from scratch, and a discovery near the end that changed everything.

A case-study post on why the Dell Dimension E520 looked promising for Windows 98, but turned into a more mixed DOS, Win98, and XP experiment.

A case study on why the Dell OptiPlex 760 looked promising for Windows 98, but turned out to be much happier as an XP and DOS machine.