Back to the Future...

What a surprise it was when, upon returning from a few days of vacation, I found signs in front of every newsstand displaying the year 1976 in large print. All over the city where I live—1976, everywhere!

It was a call for testimonies about THE 1976 heatwave :

Indeed, at the age I was back then, I was a good five years too young to realize that the major event wasn’t that fleeting wave of high temperatures, but the tsunami that had just begun in the U.S. with the release of the Apple II.

So, out of curiosity, I stepped into one of those newsstands and absentmindedly glanced at the electronics section—which, by the way, hasn’t existed for years now—and the computer section, still as dull as ever, rehashing the same stories for over two decades. I was about to leave the shop, as disheartened as usual, when my eye caught a rather unusual cover: Retro Bit!

So?

Well, I immediately remembered that I’d been interested in this Italian publication and had tried to order the first issue. But when I saw the exorbitant shipping costs, I gave up. The magazine itself is still very expensive—too expensive for what it offers, really. But does a dream have a price?

Reading this issue of RetroBit (number 6, currently) is enjoyable and effectively immerses the reader in the era it covers—though with some digressions about today’s happenings.

Despite the magazine being written in French, it’s clearly a translation, likely done by AI, as some phrases are downright absurd. But hey, that’s part of its charm…

I remember with deep sadness the early ’90s, when the microcomputing magazines I’d discovered and read for nearly a decade began gradually disappearing.

So it’s with great pleasure that I discovered this new magazine on newsstands. Because let’s face it, things have been heating up lately in the world of retro computing. I already mentioned Commodore’s ‘rebirth’ in my previous post, but we should also highlight the incredible success of the Kickstarter campaign for the ZX Spectrum Next Issue 3!

 And the new version of the Commodore 64 : 

 

Will there be a new 8-bit war?

That would be a grave mistake. Everyone knows what would happen to this budding 'true' revival of the 8-bit micro era.

As my industrial computing professor told me back in 1993: 'You're an 80s guy at heart.' I arrived too late to fully enjoy that golden age - and I certainly don't intend to miss out on the new one coming!

Other sugject :  

I’ve decided to dust off my old FPGA card to experiment with video interface design. As mentioned in a previous post, I developed a small add-on board providing a few megabytes of static RAM. I’d attempted similar projects before but never achieved the desired results. This time, I redesigned the board with more modern components.

Admittedly, I won’t reach blazing speeds due to signal path length, parasitic capacitance, and other inherent challenges—but it should still handle basic 1024×768 resolution just fine.