The nice trick here is that nothing gets opened up: the GBA's old multiboot feature, built so friends could share one cartridge, now ships a synthesizer straight into RAM. No soldering iron, no sacrificed consoles, just a link cable and some very period-correct bleeps.

The RepRap dream of machines that build things, scaled down to the micron. The new head is mostly off-the-shelf fibre and UV LEDs, which is exactly the build-it-in-your-shed spirit; the resulting Benchy is small enough that photographing it is the hard part.

New hardware for a 1983 home computer standard, released because someone wanted it to exist, is exactly the spirit this category is for. The Yamaha FM chip at its heart will sound instantly familiar to anyone who heard late-80s Japanese game music.

The 'does it run DOOM' question gets a new answer, and this one is impressive on memory alone: 32 KB is a fraction of the 4 MB the original wanted in 1993. The whole first Freedoom episode is there, saves and all. The drone-controller gamepad is the cherry on top.

The Soviet ES EVM line cloned IBM's System/360 and 370, yet the hardware ended up quite unlike the originals, and only a few hundred of these machines were built. This team nursed a battered front panel back into working order and explains the switches along the way. Lamps-and-toggles restoration in its purest form.

There is a whole generation of perfectly good internet radios going deaf because stations moved to newer streaming formats. Clifford Farrugia's answer is pleasingly small: a Raspberry Pi in the corner that translates the new streams back into plain old MP3. This is the late-90s spirit in miniature, one person keeping a gadget out of the landfill and sharing the fix.

The trick inside every cheap digital caliper, pulled out, explained and given away. It is a nice example of the old spirit: one person works out how something clever works, builds their own and publishes the boards for anyone to copy. Rev B is in progress.

Two decades of LTTng, and its maintainer still cannot upstream it piece by piece because the kernel will not export symbols with no in-tree user. Jake Edge's write-up is a fair, detailed look at a real engineering knot rather than a flame war. Anyone who has carried an out-of-tree module will nod along.

Pure late-90s energy: no unlocked bootloader, so a Symbian app loads a kernel, switches off the MMU and jumps. The display works by replaying messages sniffed from Nokia's own driver. The open puzzle, a mystery reset a few minutes after boot that may be the baseband watching over things, is the kind of bug kernel people lose weekends to.