Retro-Active
A community ecosystem for hobbyists building new computers in the spirit of the 8-, 16-, or even 32-bit era. Discrete logic, PAL/GAL, or FPGA — whatever you build with, shared bus standards and portable drivers let your work plug into everyone else’s.
Pillars
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Build
Shared hardware standards — a common bus, cards, and peripherals you can mix and match from across the community.
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Share
Portable drivers in C and C++ via GCC. Write a driver once, run it on many retro systems.
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Run
Boot real retro operating systems like FreeDOS and EmuTOS on new hardware, and recompile vintage applications.
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Connect
74-series logic, PAL/GAL, FPGAs, or real vintage silicon — build however you want. Every card speaks the same bus.
Latest Posts
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The Retro-Active Roadmap
The bus is the start, not the finish. Here's the full landscape — main boards, peripheral cards, bootloaders, kernels, drivers — and the order they need to land in to make a working ecosystem.
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Why Retro Computing Needs a Common Bus
Every retro builder reinvents the wheel. Here's how a shared bus standard turns isolated projects into a leverage-able ecosystem.
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FPGAs as Co-Processors: The Missing Piece for Retro Computing
A $15 FPGA gives any vintage system modern peripherals: HDMI, PS/2, audio, SD cards. Here's why that pattern changes the retro computing calculus.