Mysterious Files PH

While the original name of what much of the world knows as the NES was the Nintendo Family Computer, or Famicom for short, it was very rarely used as a family computer. Sure, there was a basic cartridge and an add-on keyboard sold in Japan, but it was always a sideshow to the games.

Nintendo recognized that when they brought their Entertainment System overseas. Most of the various famiclones — which date back to the mid-80s — are the same. BIT in Taiwan had a different idea: their Bit 79 would be a full home computer. Picture a C=64 that plays Nintendo games, and you might not be too far off. [Inkbox] tells the full story in his latest YouTube video, and it’s a must-watch for anyone interested in the history of 8-bit machines that are totally unknown in the West.

BIT were both game makers and system cloners; you may even have seen one of their NES or Atari games, as they were exported widely. By 1989 they’d already gone through a surprising number of Famicom clones, but those were pure clones and just played games. The Bit79 is obviously different — for one, it’s got a built-in keyboard in a wedge case. Apparently a pretty good one at that. For another, it starts with a bootloader that lets you choose between BASIC on ROM and loading the cartridge. For a third, it’s got a full 8K of RAM, quadrupling the Famicom’s offering– plus an additional 2K for the PPU, in what you might consider an early example of video RAM. Both CPU and PPU are knockoff chips made in Taiwan by UMC. The system even has what looks like a DB25 connect a printer. There’s also an expansion port, but no evidence that add-ons were ever sold, despite reports of a 64K memory add-on.

Back to the BASIC ROM for a moment– it’s not Famicom BASIC, as was clear in the manuals. [Inkbox] dumped the ROM to find that it is actually AppleSoft BASIC, of all things. That’s not only an odd bit of piracy, it’s also a big miss, since Apple’s BASIC doesn’t have any commands to make use of the PPU the way Famicom’s version does. POKING the registers during the vBlank integer is apparently not an easy thing to do. Perhaps that’s why we’ve never heard of this machine — well, that, and the fact we’re not located in East Asia where it was sold.

While the Bit79 didn’t sell particularly well, apparently it inspired a whole wave of “educational computer” famiclones in 1990s China that are largely unknown to the English-speaking world, making it an important part of computer history.

While BIT Corp is long gone, if you want to play around with their great experiment in turning a famiclone into a home computer, an emulator is available online, and the ROMs are preserved on the Internet Archive thanks to [InkBox].

Thanks, too, to [Stephen Walters] for the tip.

Pity the poor Australians. Isolated on a jagged hunk of land far from everywhere else, these industrious people have to take two-legged flights (or more) to reach a great many destinations in the northern hemisphere. It’s expensive, time consuming, and makes planning a trip a complete headache when wars break out around popular hub airports.

One airline is trying to solve this problem. The nation’s flag carrier, Qantas, has been hard at work on Project Sunrise. The goal is to run some of the longest non-stop commercial passenger flights ever, with great effort going into solving the technical and economic challenges involved.

No Stops

When travelling from Australia’s major capital cities, flights to destinations like London, the rest of Europe, or the US, all involve stopovers in intermediate airports along the way. A great many routes stop in Dubai or Qatar, while others transit through Hong Kong, Singapore, or Thailand. The need for stopovers complicates air travel for the passenger, particularly when delays cause missed connections or baggage gets lost from one flight to another. It can also just be tedious—sometimes a stopover can last 10 hours or more, which is an incredibly uncomfortable amount of time to spend in even the nicest airport. The reason behind stopovers is simple enough—the average commercial airliner just doesn’t have the fuel range to haul many hundreds of passengers from Australia to Europe in a single hop.

Qantas has been trying to improve Australia’s passenger airline links for quite some time by finding ways to eliminate these tedious stopovers entirely. Thus was born Project Sunrise, which hoped to find more direct routes between popular world cities and suitable airliners that could fly those routes without stopping.

An early 2019 test flight probed the practicality of flying from New York to Sydney in a single hop. Due to the limitations of contemporary aircraft, sacrifices were made to get the flight over the line. Where the Boeing 787-9 would normally carry up to 280 passengers, the test flight would only haul 40 to save weight, and thus save fuel. No cargo was on board, and the tanks were brimmed to ensure maximum range was available. Even then, the 16,250 km route was considered to be at 115% of the plane’s normal range, and there was only 90 minutes of contingency when it came to fuel onboard if something went awry. Despite the challenges, the test was a success, and provided useful learnings on how to handle things like crew fatigue on a 19-hour continuous flight.

Qantas was also experimenting with practical revenue services at this time, too. In 2018, the airline had established a direct route from Perth to London, flying the Boeing 787-9 in a 236-seat configuration. Flying the 14,484-kilometer route was just within the practical range of the aircraft. It was a useful route that made travel easier for passengers departing Australia’s west coast, but far from the golden ideal of allowing direct flights to major international destinations from the major capitals of Melbourne and Sydney. The route has also since fell victim to geopolitical strife, as the Iran War shut down large swathes of airspace in early 2026. Qantas was forced to alter its flight paths, which added 30 to 45 minutes to the usual flight time—just enough to tip the route over the practical limitations of the aircraft’s range.

Future Goals

However, the crowing achievement of Project Sunrise is still yet to come. 39% of Australia’s population is concentrated in Sydney and Melbourne alone, with both capitals situated on the country’s east coast. It would be most advantageous from a business perspective for these cities to have direct links to major world destinations, and it would benefit the broadest swathe of Qantas’s customer base. Only, the problem comes back to geography, with these two capitals being over 16,000 kilometers from popular destinations like New York and London.

Qantas has risen to the challenge, regardless. The airline challenged both Boeing and Airbus to develop aircraft intended to fly routes from Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane, to destinations like New York, London, Cape Town, Paris, and Rio de Janeiro. This was later whittled down to a narrower focus on the Sydney to New York and Sydney to London routes. Airbus would come out victorious, with Qantas ordering twelve examples of the Airbus A350-1000ULR. The specially-configured model features an additional rear centre fuel tank and a higher maximum take-off weight in order to fly routes up to 22 hours non-stop, along with a reduced seat configuration serving just 238 passengers. The extra range makes for a huge difference compared to more conventional routes out of Australia, which often pair two flights up to 14 hours each. The extra range of the new aircraft saves passengers both hours of flight time, along with the hours normally spent sitting around on layover in a hub airport along the way.

A typical flight from Sydney to New York or Sydney to London is expected to take 19 to 22 hours. The no-stop nature of the route will enable 99% of Australians to access either destination either direct, or with one-stop—such as by flying in from another major capital on a domestic flight. The flights are expected to run with a higher-than-usual ratio of premium seats, based on the expected demand for these services.

The main thing holding back the new service is aircraft delivery. Production is underway in earnest, with the first A350-1000ULR to be delivered in April 2027. Daily non-stop flights between Sydney and London will begin from October 2027, with tickets to be on sale from February.

Aircraft cabins will be optimized to have more space and amenity to keep passengers comfortable on ultra-long-range routes. Key to this is a “Wellbeing Zone” for passengers to stretch their legs and move around more than is practical on a more typical 10- to 14- hour international flight. 

The new Project Sunrise services will be a gamechanger for many people travelling to and from Sydney, and other Australian capitals. It will relieve a major pain point—layovers—that have become a dreaded fact of life for Australians headed far abroad. It will still perhaps be some time before Australians get more direct services to a wider range of destinations, because these new services will have to prove themselves. If the passenger numbers aren’t there, the services won’t make money, and it may not prove worth the hassle to operate these ultra-long-range routes. If, however, convenience truly is king, then there may be much greater investment in this area to link Sydney and Melbourne with more cities directly. The only losers in this case will be the hub airports across the world, which will grow just a little quieter for the loss of Aussie accents in the terminal.

Cheap vehicles are thin on the ground in 2026, but [Andy Didorosi] thinks he has the answer for low-speed applications with an open source kei truck.

Still in the early design phase, [Didorosi] has an old factory in Detroit that has been home to his bus transportation business for the last several years, as well as the Sendpai kei truck project to make the world’s fastest kei truck. His vision is to make an affordable kit car truck that anyone can build in the comfort of their own garage. The current plan includes hub motors, which have so far not made it into any production EVs in the US, likely due to the problem with high unsprung weight.

While making a new vehicle from scratch is difficult, the project is targeting a modest set of capabilities at the beginning. The truck will be eschewing safety for low cost, which is probably fine for low-speed off-road use as a utility vehicle. Safety will of course get more important as speed increases. Once the design is sufficiently nailed down, [Didorosi] hopes to sell fully assembled trucks that are compliant with US Low Speed Vehicle (LSV) requirements. This would allow it on roads with posted speed limits below 35 mph.

Will Mutiny succeed where efforts like OScar, CarBEN, or Wikispeed could not prevail? Only time will tell. We hope they’ll keep the Minimal Motoring Manifesto in mind, and in the meantime, you should check out this kei camper or an EV-swapped kei truck that looks like it runs on a giant drill battery.

People in hotter parts of the world may permit themselves a grin at this, but Europeans have recently been suffering under an unseasonal June heatwave. Most of us have been cowering inside with our air conditioners, but not [Making Stuff With Mike]. He’s adapting a safety helmet with a Noctua fan for only slightly uncool on-the-go cooling.

On the face of it, the hat is a straightforward hack. [Mike] mounted a 3D-printed chimney to the top of a hard hat and placed a fan in the top of it. But as always, there’s a little more to it than meets the eye, and in this case it’s because he’s modeled the hat/chimney interface by 3D scanning the hat and using the scan to create his CAD model. The two are attached with four small bolts, and a set of large holes are made in the hat for airflow. Taking it out for a spin, he finds it does the job, but has a few ideas for improvements.

So Mike’s ready for the upcoming BornHack hacker camp, which Hackaday has been to a few times. We’re not so lucky with headgear, but at least if there’s a heatwave, they have plenty of hammocks in the trees.

Happy belated July 4th to all the readers from the United States — hopefully you aren’t reading this from a hospital bed after losing a hand or burning off your eyebrows. While we suspect amateur firework shows and their related injuries will be around for many years to come, we did note that many major cities switched over to drone shows this year.

At least on paper, the appeal is obvious. Beyond the fact that drones are safer and quieter than pyrotechnics, they’re also capable of far more complex displays. Good luck trying to draw George Washington’s face in the sky with exploding rockets. But even if it’s a little more than nostalgia, there’s still something about the sights and sounds of fireworks that enthrall audiences. For many, the whole “rockets’ red glare” thing is a bit more meaningful than the “drones’ red LEDs.”

Earlier this week, we brought you news that Sony would stop producing physical PlayStation discs in January 2028. Many gamers are understandably concerned about the long-term implications such a move will have for software ownership, and while the negative reactions online haven’t bothered Sony enough to get them to amend their plans, they have clarified the situation with developers by explaining that games published before the cutoff date aren’t impacted. So if a developer has a hit title that drops in the summer of 2027 and they want to keep cranking out discs, additional orders can still be placed. Not much of a reprieve, but it will give the community a little more time to figure out what comes next.

While plenty would argue that the death of physical media has been exaggerated, the same can’t be said about 3D TV. Engadget has a piece that goes over what went wrong with 3D home media, and not all of it is on the technical side. Of course, a big part of the problem was the glasses — they were goofy and added per-viewer expenses that consumers weren’t thrilled with. But some of the blame also has to be put on Hollywood and the content they were producing. There were a few big-name movies like Avatar that were filmed in 3D, and computer-generated films could be rendered to take advantage of the third dimension, but the rest were lazy at best. Getting folks to spend thousands on a 3D-capable home theater was tricky enough, but asking them to do it if there were only a handful of movies worth watching on the thing was simply asking too much.

Speaking of tech heading off into the sunset, it looks like the end may be near for Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service, as they’ve announced they’ll no longer be taking new customers after this month. For those unaware, Mechanical Turk connected bored humans with customers that had repetitive tasks they needed completed. Think of somebody spending an afternoon sorting images and making a few cents a pop.

When the service launched 20 years ago, tasks like this were difficult to automate, and it made sense to pay humans to do it. But in the age of AI, it comes as no surprise to hear Amazon is looking to wind things down. Existing Mechanical Turk users will be able to continue using the service after July, but with no new jobs coming in, the writing is clearly on the wall.

Finally, things seem to be going well so far for the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory rescue mission. On July 3rd, the robotic LINK spacecraft that will eventually link up with the Observatory and push it into a higher orbit was successfully air-launched aboard a Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket. Teams on the ground have already made contact with the rescue vehicle and are performing health checks on it before committing to a rendezvous with the ailing Swift.

Once it has attached itself to Swift, LINK will push it up to an altitude of around 640 km (400 miles), which should keep it from burning up in the Earth’s atmosphere for another decade or so. We’ve had our eye on this ambitious mission for some time now, and will keep you updated as it progresses.

See something interesting that you think would be a good fit for our weekly Links column? Drop us a line; we’d love to hear about it.

Unlike almost every other kind of microscope, atomic-force microscopes (AFMs) don’t use any kind of optical beam to image their subjects. Instead, they physically detect the subject’s surface with a tiny probe, repeating this thousands of times to build up a height map of the subject, sometimes with a resolution below a single nanometer. [Ben Krasnow] got to use an AFM in an investigation of one of his projects, and shared some unusual uses of it in his latest video.

For his first demonstration, [Ben] took a video of the probe head in action. Since the probe oscillates at nine kilohertz, this was less straightforward than it sounds, but a stroboscopic welding camera filming near that frequency could visualize its motion. The next project was to image some biological samples, particularly bacteria. First, [Ben] let the bacteria from nattō (fermented soybeans) multiply in a sterile growth medium, then centrifuged and washed them.

He spin-coated a thin layer of gelatine onto part of a silicon wafer, which provided a very flat substrate. The gelatine is electrostatically attracted to the bacteria, adhering them to the slide and letting [Ben] wash away other contaminants. This let the AFM image the bacteria clearly, even revealing how a spin-coating step had oriented them all in the same direction.

[Ben] also imaged a few other samples, including silver nanoprisms and track-etched membranes. Track-etched membranes use high-energy radiation and an etchant to cut very consistent, fine holes into a plastic filtration membrane. Finally, [Ben] used it to image his laser-etched diffraction gratings; to find out how the laser had created these diffraction patterns, he tried to selectively etch away the laser-exposed metal, using the AFM to verify that this metal had been stripped away. Neither an acidic nor a basic etch worked, but electrochemical etching seemed promising.

If after seeing this you want your own atomic force microscope, we’ve seen a few DIY AFMs, including one which can resolve individual atoms.

Thanks to [H Hack] for the tip!

Generally, LiFePO₄ (LFP) batteries are quite safe and stable, but it’s still possible for something to go wrong, even something catastrophic, like the battery management system (BMS) developing a direct short. This is one of the tests required to be certified for the UL 2054 standard that targets household and portable battery safety. In a recent series of videos, [Will Prowse] demonstrates how a series of commercial batteries pass these tests, and how some still fail.

This particular short-circuit test is quite demanding, as it requires that this failure condition is immediately detected and some kind of fail-safe mechanism – like a fuse – kicks in. The first two batteries easily pass this test by blowing their fuse, just as you expect. Interestingly, the second unit here isn’t even UL-listed but comes with multiple layers of safety.

The third unit shown is a ‘Li Time’ LFP battery akin to what you’d purchase off a random online retailer’s website. This battery features the typical basic BMS and battery configuration, but is missing a chunky, prominently placed fuse. ‘LiTime’ also claims to be UL 2054 certified. The problem with this claim is that there is no fuse to prevent a thermal runaway event if the BMS were to short.

The final battery tested is made by Battle Born, and it also had issues.  [Will’s] testing shows the battery catches fire as its purported thermal safety does extremely little to interrupt the current.

The takeaway from this demonstration is that you should look for safety features such as internal fuses. It’s also worth it to add terminal fuses to batteries to potentially interrupt dangerous currents at those points. Better to replace a blown fuse than to deal with an out-of-control inferno and/or violent hydrogen detonation.