https://schlarp.com/Recent content on schlarp.comHugoen-usFri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://schlarp.com/posts/surface-hydra/Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://schlarp.com/posts/surface-hydra/<p>I brought the 18-year-old Microsoft Surface / PixelSense table into the modern age over the course of four weeknights, using Claude to reverse engineer the original 32-bit drivers and reimplement them in Rust for modern 64-bit Windows. While this is just about making my coffee table work better, I think there&rsquo;s something interesting here about how LLMs enable interoperability where it wasn&rsquo;t worth the effort before.</p> <!-- TODO: embed video of driver running on win 11 x64 with original surface software. --> <h2 id="background">Background</h2> <p>The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_PixelSense">Microsoft Surface (or PixelSense)</a> is a multitouch tabletop computer released in 2008, intended for multi-user interaction with up to 52 touch points and equipped with the ability to detect objects placed on it. For a little while, it was the showpiece for any venue that wanted to flaunt that it was part of the future - my university library had a couple, for example. They didn&rsquo;t actually solve a problem that most people had and were quite expensive, so the product line died and the name was recycled for a line of Windows tablets and laptops.</p>