Vulcan-74 Is a Hardware Retro Game Computer

What is technically possible and what is practically feasible are often vastly different things. The hardware that existed in the late ’70s and early ’80s was technically capable of producing very nice graphics in home computers and video game consoles. But what consumers actually got was crude at a best, because the expense of producing high-quality, full-color graphics would have been astronomical. However, that same hardware is affordable today, which is why Brad Graham is using it to build his dream computer circa 1980.

When Graham was 12 years old, he had a Commodore VIC-20 and wondered what it would be like to build a version of it without cost as a limitation. Of course, cost was a limitation for that hardware in 1980, and 12-year-old Graham didn’t have the technical expertise to accomplish his goal at the time anyway. But he never forgot his dream. Fast forward to the present day, and that hardware is trivially inexpensive and Graham has the electronics skill to take advantage of it.

Vulcan-74 is, or at least will be, the result of that. Graham’s goal for Vulcan-74 is to build the best home computer and video game console that would have been technically possible in late ’70s if money hadn’t been a constraint. That means he’ll be using only components that were available at the time — the legendary MOS Technology 6502 CPU in particular. But the difference will be that Graham can throw as many ICs as he wants into his computer, which will end up being somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 individual ICs.

That’s more than 15 times as many as was in the VIC-20, and will result in dramatically better graphics than were ever available in that era. Graham is still in the early stages of this project, and it’s a massive undertaking that will likely take years to complete. Already, he has started hand-wiring the ICs and laying them out on breadboards. He’s even got a basic proof of concept working for the video output. So be sure to following along with the Vulcan-74 project to see where it goes.