BlizzCon is back, PS3 emulation got physical, and a UK tinkerer built a working 8-bit computer from 460 Soviet-era vacuum tubes. In Episode 10, Stacy and Dan cover everything Blizzard announced (WoW: Forever, Diablo 5, an open-world StarCraft shooter and more), RPCS3 playing PS3 games straight off the disc, a rapid-fire round of retro wins, Guess the Price with rare original Xbox special editions, and Show and Tell. Plus: we're having a tech garage sale!

HAPPY TECH GARAGE SALE

Saturday, [DATE] at our studio (the former Mike's General Store location), Winnipeg. Cables, keyboards (so many keyboards), routers, cases, monitors and more, all cheap.

CHAPTERS

0:00 Cold open

0:35 Welcome to the Happy Tech Podcast

1:16 BlizzCon 2026 is back

2:32 World of Warcraft: Forever

6:49 Diablo 5 goes dark

13:49 StarCraft returns as an open-world shooter

16:16 New Warcraft III campaign + remastering the classics

19:02 Heroes of the Storm and Overwatch updates

21:14 Diablo animated series on Netflix

22:37 RPCS3 now plays PS3 games straight from the disc

26:34 Should you grab a PS5 before GTA 6?

28:28 A working computer built from 460 vacuum tubes

30:37 Announcement: Happy Tech garage sale

32:36 How was your week?

35:34 Rapid fire: Nintendo's back-to-back Directs

40:49 Commodore and Amiga are (sort of) back together

41:44 Lenovo fixes bricked Legion Gos for free

43:13 Sierra adventures come to the Commodore 64

45:33 Doom running inside MS Paint

46:06 A full 386 PC on a cheap dev board

47:10 Minecraft rebuilt in C++ on the PS2

49:20 A 16-bit CPU built out of relays

50:36 Guess the Price: original Xbox special editions

57:19 Show and Tell: a signed StarCraft pro-scene case panel

1:01:00 Show and Tell: a vintage Apple poster

1:03:37 Garage sale reminder + outro

SOURCES

BlizzCon: Blizzard News, GamesRadar, Game Informer. RPCS3: TechSpot, Tom's Hardware. Tube computer: Hackaday. Nintendo Directs: Nintendo Life. Commodore/Amiga: GamesRadar, Hackaday. Legion Go: PC Gamer. AGI-64: Mean Hamster Software. DoomPaint, Minecraft on PS2: Tom's Hardware. tiny386, relay computer: Hackaday. Full links are in the YouTube description.

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Apple's September 9th Worldwide Developer Conference included a TON of exciting news we can't wait to talk about. This WWDC was packed with cool new products and features, and in today's episode of the Happy Tech Podcast, we will be going over everything together, focusing on the positive items that make us optimistic about the future! Did you watch this WWDC? What stood out most to you? Last week's episode: https://youtu.be/0sMCAoVl66Q Become a Patron for only $1 a month and support the show! https://www.patreon.com/canadiancomputercollector Subscribe for weekly positive tech and gaming news.

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.

Steve from Mac84 joins us for the latest episode of the Happy Tech Podcast - a podcast where we focus on the good news in tech, because there's enough coverage for all the doom and gloom.

ek the Happy Tech crew is joined by guest host Rory, holding down the fort while regular host Stacy is off in beautiful British Columbia (with a Magic card show stop in Calgary along the way!). Still, it's all the same feel-good tech and gaming news you come here for Epic Games' trek to Linux, a haunted patch in World of Warcraft, a $750 million battery made of rust, Dell's return of an iconic ad campaign, GTA V's absurd sales numbers, and a hydrogen car that just broke 400 mph. Plus a round of "Guess the Price" with some legendary graphics cards and a show-and-tell full of retro console nostalgia. HEADLINES: Epic Games Store Will Support Linux: https://steamdeckhq.com/news/epic-games-store-will-support-linux-soon/ WoW's Haunted: Disconnected Players' Characters Are Playing Themselves: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/world-of-warcraft/wows-haunted-players-report-that-their-disconnected-friends-characters-are-starting-to-play-the-game-on-their-own/ Windows 11's August Patch: https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/biggest-changes-microsoft-is-rolling-out-in-august-for-windows-11 Energy Startup Raises $750 Million for Rust-Powered Batteries: https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/energy-startup-raises-750-million-for-rust-powered-batteries-e2354154 Dell Revives "Dude, You're Getting a Dell": https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/dude-youre-getting-a-dell-ai-server-rack-dell-recycles-famous-ad-campaign-to-appeal-to-its-new-ai-overlords GTA V Has Now Sold Over 230 Million Copies: https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/grand-theft-auto-5-averages-more-copies-sold-per-year-than-most-megahits-manage-in-their-entire-lifetime-with-a-total-of-230-million-since-2013/ JCB's Hydrogen Car Hits 406 MPH at Bonneville: https://www.techspot.com/news/113471-jcb-hydrogen-powered-hydromax-hits-record-406-mph.html

Welcome to Happy Tech, the tech podcast that only features positive headlines! We aim to talk about all of the fun, exciting, and uplifting news in tech - because it's easy to forget, with all the doom and gloom out there, that there is still some cool stuff happening in the tech world!

Welcome to Happy Tech, the tech podcast that only features positive headlines! We aim to talk about all of the fun, exciting, and uplifting news in tech - because it's easy to forget, with all the doom and gloom out there, that there is still some cool stuff happening in the tech world! Stories this week: 1. Arma: Cold War Assault Remastered Goes Fully Open Source https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/07/arma-cold-war-assault-remastered-is-now-out-in-full-and-open-source/ 2. Symphony of the Night Now Runs Natively on Windows, Linux and macOS https://www.generationamiga.com/2026/08/03/symphony-of-the-night-beta-release-now-available-for-windows-linux-and-macos/ 3. GOG Galaxy Is Officially Coming to Linux https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/07/gog-confirm-they-are-working-towards-gog-galaxy-on-linux/ 4. Linux Just Crossed 4% of Steam Users Again https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/08/linux-back-over-4-percent-in-the-july-2026-steam-survey/ 5. A $5 Microcontroller Now Runs NES Games at Full Speed https://hackaday.com/2026/07/22/60-fps-nes-emulator-on-esp32/ 6 A Homebrew Game Console, Built the Hard Way https://hackaday.com/2026/08/02/ 7. Norton Commander, But for the Commodore 64 https://hackaday.com/blog/ 8. Microrobots Find Their Own Way Through the Bloodstream (submitted by a viewer) https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2025/11/microrobots-finding-their-way.html

Welcome to Happy Tech, the tech podcast that only features positive headlines! We aim to talk about all of the fun, exciting, and uplifting news in tech - because it's easy to forget, with all the doom and gloom out there, that there is still some cool stuff happening in the tech world! Stories this week: A New Game Compressor Can Save You Tons of Space -https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/storage/game-compressor-can-save-you-hundreds-of-gigs-across-your-game-library-usd6-utility-leverages-windows-built-in-lzx-compression-for-substantial-space-savings Amazon Bringing Games to Prime Video -https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/23/amazon-is-bringing-games-to-prime-video/ -iOS & MacOS Patches Hundreds of Security Vulnerabilities https://www.macrumors.com/2026/07/27/ios-26-6-security-fixes/ -Everything We Know About the MacBook Ultra’s All-New Design https://www.macrumors.com/2026/07/27/macbook-ultra-all-new-design/ -Xbox Backwards Compatible on PC now https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2026/07/22/xbox-backward-compatibility-on-pc/ -Looks Like an Official 360 Emulator is on the Way https://wccftech.com/microsofts-pc-xbox-backward-compatibility-hides-360-emulator/

In Episode 2 of the Happy Tech Podcast, we aim to talk about all of the fun, exciting, and uplifting news in tech - because it's easy to forget, with all the doom and gloom out there, that there is still some cool stuff happening in the tech world!

We also guess the prices of old IBM computers and keyboards, and try out a really unique new game! (Denshattack)

For Show and Tell Stac brought a Solar Power science experiment kit from the 1970s, and Dan brought a vintage Hot Wheels Radar!

A Lego iMac, iPhone Time Capsule, improvements to Windows... there's some stuff to be happy about in today's tech news!

For Show and Tell: Stac brought some items from a weird kickstarter he supported, and Dan shows off something that will get you jungle green with envy...