Radio Shack asked $3,495 in 1983 for a 12-megabyte external Winchester meant to sit beside a TRS-80 Model II, Model 12, or Model 16. That price lands near $11,754 in 2026 money. Clint Basinger of LGR pulled one of those units from long-term storage, cracked the case, and gave it a brief power-on test before packing the vintage hard drive off to a museum.
Kosmic spent another long session mapping leftover oddities in Versus Super Mario Bros., the 1986 arcade cabinet that copies most of the original NES game while changing a few rules, timers, and memory habits. Growing a vine in the wrong place after a death still queues an extra plant for the next screen. Near the top of any vine Mario loses control and auto-climbs; that state leaves a flag set so the next transition (death works best) sprouts a second vine wherever the surviving player happens to stand.
Texas A&M’s Advanced Vertical Flight Laboratory has spent years turning a century-old flying idea into something that can actually hold still in the air. Latest result is a 55-pound uncrewed aircraft whose four rotors spin like sideways paddle wheels instead of overhead discs. A recent flight-test video from lab director Moble Benedict shows the machine in controlled hover, using RPM and pitch-phase control on all four cycloidal rotors.
Inkbox spent two years writing every instruction of Zero Star by hand in 65c816 assembly so a Super Nintendo from 1990 could run a dungeon crawler of his own design. The result sits on itch.io as a 129-kilobyte ROM you load in Mesen or bsnes, pay what you want, and play tonight. Mountains of an imagined far east rise in shifting mazes. You climb them, throw talismans, and cut through flocks of jungle fowl until the counters on screen run out of room.
