About

Rebound Retro Lab

Rebound Retro Lab is a one-person workshop for the machines that refused to stay in the past — the Commodore 64, the Amiga and the MEGA65. Videos, articles, tools, and the occasional 6502 rabbit hole.

Why "Rebound"?

Because that's what I do. For the last ten or fifteen years, I came back to retro tinkering about once a year: bought the newest Amiga Forever pack, installed VICE, played some old games — and drifted off again.

This time is the last rebound, and I'm staying. This whole project is the proof that I'm not joking around this time.

The tools in the workshop

I build things I want to use — one person, a few machines, and a workshop with the door left open. The tools are software I make because I wanted it to exist: some deeply retro, some a Mac utility that fixes something I complain about once a week.

The workshop rule is simple: a thing gets built because I want to use it, not because I found a market. Every tool's state is written down as it is, including the development candidates and the ones without a public download.

How I work with AI

At my day job, AI now writes most of the code. That changed the part of the work I loved most, and I needed a while to digest it. In the end I decided to make friends with it — if you can't beat it, join it — and use it to dive fully into retro coding.

So here is how it works: I decide what gets built, I design it, I test it, and I use it every day. AI writes the code for this website and my modern tools, and carries the buckets — all the tedious stuff I'm too lazy for. It is also my teacher: hardware, registers, techniques, whatever I'm stuck on.

The one thing it never does is write my retro code. It reviews it and points out where I forgot to free some memory again, but the 6502 and Amiga code here is mine, typed by hand. That's the whole point of the project.

Why be open about it? Because with AI I can build things I'd never have time for next to a job and a life. And honestly — we all watched Star Trek and wanted to just say "Computer, analyse…". Now we have it, and we complain?

About this site

The site is built on Flask + MySQL and self-hosted. It has no accounts and sets no site cookies; comments and pseudonymous visitor analytics are part of RRL. Embedded YouTube playback is a separate third-party interaction.

Say hi in the comments, or find the channel on YouTube.