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As a die-hard retrocomputing enthusiast, you probably belong to one of two camps. Either you like to use retro machines - mainly for a little time travel to the beloved 70s and 80s - or you like to build hardware or software, and are more interested in how these early machines really worked.

Both absolutely valid. Besides the NULL 2 project above, the following is interesting for members of both faiths. You may already know it, bare metal emulators have been a thing since 2019. But after having Retro Shack's video in issue #22, we didn't want to just sink the topic.

BMC64 is kind of genius. Take a Raspberry PI, forget the operating system, build a minimal bootloader, and combine the VICE emulator with a set of low level libraries for hardware access. And voila, you have one of the fastest retro emulations you can build based on a general purpose CPU.

Even more ingenious: The whole thing is also available for the C128, the VIC20, the PLUS4, the PET and in another project at least for the ZX Spectrum.

Randy Rossi - maintainer of the project - makes the whole package available as open source since 2019. And author Gareth Halfacree goes into detail about the build process in the hackster.io article. So should you look for a way to emulate your beloved 8bit computer of the 80s, here you go.

The perfect tinkering destination for rainy November weekends.