Things To Do On Vacation: The Technical Playlist

Week Three: Things To Do On Someone Else's WiFi

If you need a nerdy binge to keep you occupied, tonight is the playlist for you. Also helpful for chasing away non-nerd relatives -- just explain to them that you're watching a 45-minute video of someone taking an expensive video games console apart, and they will immediately glaze over and cease listening to a single thing you say.

For sheer volume, element 14 presents, née the Ben Heck Show, is tough to beat. Ben Heckendorn is a(n-ex) graphic designer with technical inclinations who, once upon a time, decided that his Game Boy was way too technically advanced and he should be building a portable Atari 2600 instead. I can't put a date on this right off the top of my head, but inasmuch as he refers to people in their 20s and 30s remembering the 2600 in the original write-up, it was probably nearly two decades ago. The project went viral before going viral was really a thing, and it snowballed until someone said, 'hey, dude, you wanna build stuff and make terrible dad jokes on some internet video?' He, and later a bunch of co-hosts, have been doing that ever since.

Some of Ben Heck's projects have migrated over to other YouTube channels over the years. One of them, a synthesizer keyboard cobbled together out of the guts of yet more Atari 2600s, made it over to a channel called 8-bit Keys, run by the 8-bit Guy. The first channel covers his collection of 80s keyboards, and the second his collection of old 8-bit computers, sensibly enough. He does a fair amount of restoration and mod work.

For more interesting modifications and restorations, you can always hit up Perifractic's Retro Recipes. I'm not 100% sure what this dude does for an actual living; he's originally English by the accent but lives now in Los Angeles, and seems to know a strangely large number of voice actors. Given that he is insanely good-looking I suspect he's in the film or TV industry somewhere, but also given how passionately nerdy he is and how much he appears to not be starving, he might not be on-screen talent. Also, the dogs are adorable.

If, on the other hand, you have a burning desire to know how some of those elderly game consoles actually thought, I recommend Retro Game Mechanics Explained. The host does a killer dissection of everything SNES, with clear explanations of things like sprites and memory access. You might also try GameHut's Coding Secrets, which breaks down everything from 16-bit PUBG ports to dealing with the notoriously bizarre architecture of the Sega Saturn.

For some super old-school tech toys, try Fran Blanche over at FranLab. She deals in things that involve vacuum tubes and nixie displays and at one point was allowed to go poke around old moon shot gear. No lie. If supporting LGBT+ peeps is an important thing to you, she is also a transwoman, which I didn't realize until I went and binged her whole channel, mainly because it's not terribly relevant to repairing old heterodyne radios.

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