Eleven stories, zero doom. This time: a 47-year-old grudge finally ends, the first arcade game ever built goes under the hammer, and a company hands its customers their money back simply because it was the right thing to do. Atari and Activision are on the same shelf again. Activision was founded in 1979 by four Atari programmers who walked out over working conditions and accidentally invented third-party publishing in the process. Now, 47 years later, 39 Atari 2600 classics — Pitfall!, River Raid, Kaboom! — are returning on real cartridges that run on original 2600 and 7800 hardware as well as the 2600+ and 7800+. Standard carts land in November, with four themed Deluxe box sets rolling out through 2027. Stick around for Guess the Price, because there are three numbers in play and one is genuinely startling. A working 1973 Computer Space also went to auction: the rare green sparkle two-player cabinet, sold out of Earthworm Jim developer David Perry's personal collection because he ran out of room at home. Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney built the original under the name Syzygy Engineering, the company that became Atari, and the cabinet turns up as a prop in Soylent Green and again in the arcade scene in Jaws. No, we are not spoiling the hammer price here. And Panic, maker of the Playdate, got refunded for the tariffs it had passed on to customers as a clearly labelled line item at checkout. Rather than pocketing the windfall, it built an entire system to hand every dollar back. Cabel Sasser's explanation is the best quote of the episode, and worth sitting with next to how the largest companies handled the same situation. RETRO BLOCK Commodore is putting the TAC-2 joystick back into production after 40 years. The original was built around an automobile tire valve, and because those use thinner copper today, Commodore fabricated its own one-piece steel shaft instead. It keeps the direct metal-contact mechanism, and it is still a plain 9-pin plug. No USB, no app, no pairing.THEA1200 is now an officially licensed Amiga product with the real logo on the box, following the settlement of the long-running Amiga lawsuit. A name originally chosen to dodge a trademark problem no longer has to.Two Atari 5200 games nobody had ever seen — Mail Boy and Topsy Turvee — were compiled from source code found in a disk case marked simply "5200." Mail Boy turned out to be an early ancestor of Cohen's Towers. The original programmer is alive, involved and credited, and both games were released free.A storage unit auction winner turned up a Y2K-era Pentium 4 tower with a see-through, UV-reactive power supply, sitting among 100 laptops and hundreds of loose RAM sticks. Acrylic panels, colour-coded internals, blue LEDs. Transparent hardware is quietly coming back after two decades of matte black.TECH AND HARDWARE Texas becomes the ninth US state with right-to-repair in force: parts, tools and manuals, for up to seven years on anything over $100. The state throws out 621,000 tons of electronics a year, much of it fixable.Modders had DLSS 5 running on RTX 4000 cards roughly a day after the DLL leaked, patching out the instructions Ada could not handle. The same thing happened with Frame Generation on the 20 and 30-series. Fair warning that the frame rate cost is steep.A PhD student in Edinburgh built an offline skin cancer screener on a £35 Raspberry Pi, deliberately choosing a Pi over a smartphone because phones and connectivity are not a given everywhere. She is in talks with NHS Scotland and hopes it reaches patients before 2030.We close on the 2026 Hackaday Retrocomputing Challenge — Old Iron versus Modern Retro, with entries open until October 27. Tell us what you would build and we will read the best ones out.
