Hackaday opened its 2026 Retrocomputing Challenge this week, and it’s worth flagging for how wide the door is left open. Submissions close Tuesday, October 27, 2026, giving anyone considering a project more than two months of runway — genuinely useful lead time for a hardware build, not the kind of one-week scramble open calls sometimes turn out to be.
Four categories, deliberately not just “restoration”
The contest is framed around a simple observation from its own announcement: “What is it about retrocomputing? For some people, it’s nostalgia. For others, it’s the appeal of simplicity.” That framing shows up directly in how broadly the categories are drawn:
- Old Iron — straightforward hardware restoration: Commodore 64s, PDP-8s, and other genuine period machines brought back to working order.
- Modern Retro — new builds designed to look and feel like vintage hardware while running modern electronics underneath, described as “TRS-80 on the outside, but modern electronics on the inside.”
- Retro-Modern — the inverse pairing: connecting real classic machines to contemporary internet connectivity.
- Coding Like It’s 1999 — pure software category, new programs written for legacy platforms, explicitly including demoscene work.
That last category is the one worth underlining for a creative-tech audience specifically — it’s a genuine invitation for algorithmic/procedural coding on constrained, decades-old hardware, judged alongside physical restoration rather than treated as a side note.
How to enter, and what’s on offer
Entry is a Hackaday.io project page documenting the build — no separate application, no fee, and the project itself doubles as public documentation regardless of contest outcome. DigiKey is sponsoring the prize: three selected favorites each receive a $150 gift certificate. It’s a modest prize by open-call standards, and that’s arguably the point — the real payoff for entering is a public, well-documented project page and inclusion in a community-wide showcase of retrocomputing work, not a life-changing purse.