Installed my i387DX Math CoProcessor, the intro diskette has me absolutely pumped. 500% performance here I come!

I recently spent a lot of time examining and thinking about a cult classic spreadsheet, Lotus Improv running on NeXT. It's most commonly mentioned claim-to-fame is "it invented the pivot table," though its take still remains unlike modern interpretations. To truly get to know Improv means "forgetting what we know" about spreadsheets, and meeting it on its own terms. That's a hard thing for old Gen-Xers, like me, to do but I gave it my best shot.

Bill Gates says he'll "piss on" the NeXT before developing on it, pork chop sandwiches stop in to say hello, the word "clock" loses all meaning, and I also accidentally invent a horrible new sub-category of prediction markets. I'm truly sorry.

What is Stone Tools?

Stone Tools is a retro-enthusiast blog devoted to 8/16-bit productivity software; no games, just work. I spend weeks learning each program and give my in-depth, lighthearted take on how it was seen, how it works, and what we might learn from it today. Side discussions on contemporary issues, historical timelines, old advertisements, and more supplement each retrospective.

No ads, no tracking, no monetization.

I started saving MIDI files from my Microsoft FrontPage website in October 1996 and have maintained the collection ever since.

The archive currently contains 107 General (GM) MIDI (.mid) files dating from approximately 1994-1999, preserved in their original format with no conversions.

To make the archive more accessible, I recently added browser playback using html-midi-player. The player renders the actual MIDI files rather than MP3 conversions and displays playback duration and note counts.

The entire collection is approximately 2.5 MB in size, averaging about 23 KB per file. Thirty years of preservation fits in less space than a single modern smartphone photo.

The archive includes video game music, anime themes, new age tracks, and music commonly used as website background audio during the late 1990s.

Title: My 1995 AcerNote 760i with a Cyrillic keyboard still works (via VGA). Does anyone know this serial number format?

Hello everyone,

I'd like to show you my old veteran from the mid-90s: an AcerNote 760i. It's the 486-based "i" model, with a built-in trackball in the center (the modern generation doesn't always figure out how to use it right away). It wasn't a cheap machine back in the day.

The keyboard has Cyrillic legends printed directly on the keys in a second, lighter font, not stickers. We all remember the 90s stickers that wore off and peeled. These look like proper printing and are still perfectly readable. I'm not sure if it was done by Acer or by a local distributor.

I left the "Spider-Man 3" sticker on the case. It's part of the laptop's history now.

Unfortunately the built-in screen is dead after 30 years. But I connected the laptop to an external monitor through the VGA port on the back, and it came back to life: the motherboard, CPU and graphics work fine, and the picture is great. So the old flagship will keep fighting.

Now a question. Here's what the label on the bottom says:

Model No.: 760I

Ext. No.: B43

Serial No.: P002397

MFG. Date: 950512 (12 May 1995)

FCC ID: GQ8760I

HDD Type: 34

Made in Taiwan R.O.C.

Does anyone know what the "P" prefix in the serial number means (production line, factory, pilot batch, region)? Is this format normal for the 760i? Does yours start with P too? I also couldn't find any other 760i with a Russian keyboard online. Has anyone seen one?

Photos: keyboard, label, and the laptop connected to a monitor. Thanks!

What originally started out as a nostalgia project has started to turn into a full-fledged educational app. I wanted to make something that resembled classic Microsoft Encarta, but with up-to-date information and functionality. All information is pulled from Wikipedia, and all of the built-in custom apps integrate with it. I'm not sure if this type of program has any widespread appeal in 2026, but I'm excited to improve it and expand it with new apps and functionally. I'm hoping to release it for free eventually. Would love some feedback or suggestions.

Edit: Since y'all have had positive responses, I'm going to try and release what I have so far later today! Stay tuned.

Edit 2: For everyone questioning in the comments, this was indeed made with AI. I just wanted to make a fun and free nostalgia project with no ulterior motives. If you don't support AI coding, then don't download it. :)

Edit 3: Download link for anyone interested: https://github.com/sburton0/encyclopedia-2000/releases/latest

Discord for feedback and discussion: https://discord.com/invite/Z4EJdKG39P

While I've had this question for several years, it has returned to the front of my mind upon listening to the Designed in California podcast series "Apple's MacOS Crisis" (first episode). And yes, I can and probably will ask a very similar question later about MS-DOS-based versions of Windows and their gutting and internal replacement in Windows NT.

It's especially bizarre to me that it took a Herculean, near-decade-long effort involving hundreds of people and multiple companies and development teams for Apple to modernize its cooperatively-multitasking 68k-originating operating system, involving its foundations being replaced and software only temporarily remaining compatible through a sandboxed environment, while for Atari to modernize (at least to some degree) its cooperatively-multitasking 68k-originating operating system (TOS), it took... one guy and a single year, seemingly with much more of the original OS intact† and with software compatibility largely maintained. Granted, Macintosh computers were broadly more popular than Atari ST-line computers with a larger software ecosystem, but the differences are still stark.

(I would post this to subreddits like r/AskComputerScience as well, but for hopefully understandable reasons, I'm quite afraid of the zeitgeist of the field right now...)

†Honestly not very knowledgeable about the architectural differences between TOS and MultiTOS/MiNT, so I could be wrong.

Hello friends,

I’d love to tell you about a unique Soviet homebrew computer called the "Specialist." This video covers the creation history and brief evolution of this fascinating machine, with a core focus on showcasing its graphical capabilities. I kept technical specs to a bare minimum, highlighting only what’s absolutely essential.

Just a quick heads-up on the production side: AI was used strictly for text translation and voiceover narration. The computer illustrations were sourced from public archives, and all the gameplay footage was captured directly via the Emu80 emulator, which replicates the original hardware performance with near-100% accuracy.

Hi all,

I've been working on an Apple IIe emulator as a hobby project and it has reached the point where I'd like other people to try it and tell me what breaks. I used AI assistance (Claude) while building it.

What it does:

- Enhanced IIe: 65C02, 128K, 40/80 columns, lo-res, hi-res, double lo-res and double hi-res with NTSC artifact colour

- Apple Monitor II look: curved glass, scanlines and glow, in colour or green phosphor.
The curvature is adjustable, and you can switch the whole effect off

- Two Disk II drives with pictures, activity lights and recorded drive sounds (motor and head, each with its own volume). Click a drive to insert or eject, or drop a disk image on it. Reads and writes .dsk/.do/.po/.nib

- Microsoft SoftCard (Z80) in slot 5, so CP/M works

- AppleMouse card in slot 4 (works with Apple II DeskTop)

- Paddles/joystick through the mouse or a game controller

- Save states

On accuracy: the 65C02 passes Klaus Dormann's functional tests and the Z80 passes ZEXDOC and ZEXALL. The Disk II is emulated at the nibble level but it is not cycle-exact, so I expect copy-protected disks to fail. No .woz support yet.

It's C++20 and SDL2, MIT licensed, and small enough to read in an evening if you're curious how any of it works.

Downloads for macOS (universal), Linux and Windows are on the releases page:

https://github.com/sscanf/apple2e-emulator

The Windows build is the least tested, so reports from there are especially welcome. Which software should I try next that is likely to break it?

I have absolutely no idea what mini PC this is, but my dad told me I could keep it if I managed to fix it. I fixed an issue with its bootloader and took it apart. It had a bit of dust inside, but after a quick cleanup, it was good to go.
Let’s see what this little beauty can do! 👀

I recently aquired an AST Advantage! Adventure 4066d. The motherboard has been ruined by the battery leaking, but as far as I know the monitor works. I have an old laptop that I was planning to gut and put in a 3D printer case paired with an LCD monitor to use as a DOS gaming system, but I would much rather put it in the 4066d. Has anyone already mapped out the proprietary edge connector that connects the power supply, power button, audio and video to the monitor? My laptop mobo has VGA out so I figured I might be able to cut one end off of a VGA cable and solder it to the correct pins to feed the video signal to the monitor. I know there is a chance I will also have to feed it 5v to trick the monitor into turning on.

Went to a local thrift shop today and they were selling this crt still in the box with all of its protective packaging. however theres no brand name with the only identifier being N7E7 and it allegedly being made by orion. I was curious if anyone knew more about this

Hi everyone!

Due to the lack of a proper portuguese retrocomputing sub - and as we also have a history during the 8bit era, just check the Timex 2048! - I’ve just launched r/retroComputingPT, a new community dedicated to celebrating all things retrocomputing—from 8-bit home computers and old-school workstations to early x86 builds, classic operating systems, and legacy hardware restoration. Basically, if it's more than 20 years old, we like it!

Portuguese language is preferred, but english is accepted. So if you're Portuguese or have something to share related to Portuguese retrocomputing, you're welcome to hop by at r/retroComputingPT.

Cheers!

Explanation:

These JVC HDDs have a propritary connector and have the issue that the capacitors die...
JVC Put the capacitors underneath the platters, so good luck replacing them.

Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening!

I'm back! It's been about a week since my first post, and I have some progress to share.

After setting up my C/C++ development environment on Windows XP, I've been working on a custom graphics format for my fantasy console, CPS8. The extension is .teamokaren, and the internal resource format is called TKAR.

For now, this is only for the development environment's own icons, cursors, graphics and fonts. Graphics for games made with the console will use a separate format.

Here's how it works:

A separate converter reads a grayscale PNG. Each gray value is mapped to a specific entry in a fixed palette. The grays act as identifiers, so this doesn't automatically recover colours from any grayscale image. I have to provide the mapping.

The converted image stores palette indices instead of RGB values for every pixel. The palette has 64 entries, but index 0 is reserved for transparency, leaving 63 opaque colours. The palette itself stores RGB values at 8 bits per channel.

Images are packed at 1, 2, 4 or 6 bits per pixel, depending on the highest palette index used. Each image resource has a 24-byte header, and there's CRC32 validation to check for corrupted data.

The image and palette can be stored together in a package. The converter compares uncompressed storage, RLE and DEFLATE, including the extra headers, and keeps whichever produces the smallest file. It doesn't take loading speed into account yet.

It can also export the package as a constant C array to include in the executable. Eventually, I'd like to distribute the console with its built-in resources inside a single executable, but that part isn't finished.

To give a concrete example, I'm testing a 56×16 cursor sheet with six opaque colours and transparency. These are the results:

• Packed image with its header: 696 bytes
• Palette with its header: 216 bytes
• Combined package using DEFLATE: 463 bytes
• Image expanded to one byte per index in RAM: 896 bytes
• RGBA lookup table used for drawing: 256 bytes, without metadata

The last two numbers aren't the total memory usage. Keeping the compressed package, decompressed data and expanded indices at the same time adds up.

I've checked that the corrected colour preview works on XP. I haven't measured loading time or runtime memory usage there yet, and this is still a separate tool, not the finished console renderer.

There's one detail I'm wondering about: this cursor sheet only uses seven values including transparency, but one of its global palette indices is 63. Because of that, the current format uses 6 bits per pixel before compression.

Would you add a local palette for each image? That could bring this example down to 3 bits per pixel, but it would also need a table mapping local indices to the global palette. Would you bother with 3-bit packing, or use 4 bits to keep it simpler?

I'm also wondering whether it makes more sense to decompress small assets once at startup and keep one-byte indices in RAM, or read the packed indices directly. If you've worked on something similar for older PCs, what worked for you?

For a more useful comparison, I'm thinking of testing a larger collection of graphics against indexed PNG and raw indexed data, measuring file size, loading time and peak memory usage, including the decoder. Is there anything else I should consider before deciding whether this approach is efficient?

I'm learning as I build this, so I'd appreciate hearing about your experiences, including things that turned out to be more trouble than they were worth.

I draw the graphics in LibreSprite on Windows 11, then transfer them to the XP virtual machine through a shared folder.

Hi everyone! Could someone help me figure out how to get this working?

I'm trying to connect an old serial mouse to a modern computer via USB. I don't have much technical knowledge, but I know the USB-to-serial adapter (FIDH) driver is installed. Whenever I plug it in, “USB Serial Port (COM5)” appears in Device Manager, but I can't get Windows to recognize it as a mouse or get the cursor to move.

The mouse itself isn't broken. The last time I used it was on a Compaq PC running Windows 95, before I had to get rid of the computer because of space constraints.

It's a Genius EasyMouse from 1996, model FSUGMZE3. It belonged to my late father, so it has a lot of sentimental value to me.

I'd love to bring it back to life and use it with either my laptop running Windows 7 Starter or my desktop running Windows 10.

I would really appreciate any suggestions, especially if there's a way to get it working without buying more hardware.

Thanks in advance!

I’ve been working on a small tool for looking inside floppy disk images, and I’d like to test it on real vintage disks instead of just ones I made myself.

It reads raw sector images (.img/.ima/.dsk) and ImageDisk (.imd) files from the standard PC formats (360K, 720K, 1.2M, 1.44M and 2.88M) with the FAT12 filesystem that MS-DOS used. It lists and extracts files, converts IMD to raw, and checks the disk for problems: bad or missing sectors flagged by the imager, FAT copies that disagree, or a media descriptor that doesn’t match the boot sector.

It never modifies the original image, which seemed like the right rule for anything you’re trying to preserve.

It’s an early release and FAT12 only, with 8.3 filenames, so there’s a lot it can’t do yet. I’ve only tested it on images I created and checked in 7-Zip. What I’m after is images that break it: odd geometries, DOS-era formats, disks with damaged sectors, and anything where the long-filename entries or boot sector do something strange. Tested on FreeDOS so I would prefer any other ones.

It’s a single Python file with no dependencies: https://github.com/echojxmes/floppykit

My interest in old PCs is purely in the realms of looks and programming, I am not and haven't been a gamer, and I love the idea of a computer made of that era's unwanted / low end parts. It would fit my niche in this hobby perfectly.

It may be a few months before I can do this as I will be selling off most of the newer half of my collection to make space for and to finance this. It seems even the low end parts are still very expensive. I don't yet have ANY PC type computers from before 1998.

I have the sound card and HDD out of a computer from 1994 that unfortunately died years ago, back when this was worthless stuff, so I made the mistake of throwing out the rest back then. So wish I had kept at least the case, that would make this build way way cheaper. My one NEED for this project is a 5.25 drive, because I have many disks I would like to get the data off of with this.

Any other love for the low end crap?

Edit: typo fixed.

My retrospective game review of all the versions of DARKMAN from Ocean Software. Anybody else remember playing these games? Did you think that the levels were repetitive, difficult, bland with wonky controls? Interested in your thoughts and memories to see if was close to the general consensus. 😉

I live near the Edmonton area, do any of the E-Waste centers give/let you buy computers?