When you run into old hardware you cannot restore, what do you do? Toss it? Sell it for parts? If you’re [TME Retro], you hide a high-end mini PC inside an Amstrad-shaped sleeper build.
The donor laptop is an Amstrad ALT-286 with glorious 80s styling that [TME Retro] tried to save in a previous video. Even with help from the community there was no saving this unit, so we can put away the pitchforks and torches. This restomod is perhaps the best afterlife the old Amstrad could have hoped for.
At first [TME Retro] was going to try and fit an iPad Pro screen, but it turned out those don’t have the driver-board ecosystem the smaller iPads do, so he went with a non-retina LCD panel from Amazon instead. Shoving an LCD where an LCD used to live and sticking an expensive mini-PC inside a bulky 80s case is not the most inspiring of hacks, but that’s not all [TME Retro] did.
First, they were able to save the original keyboard, thanks to the longevity of the PC/AT standard and a PS/2 dongle — after all, PS/2 is essentially AT with a different connector. Then they produced what has to be the world’s highest-bandwidth parallel-port dongle by routing the two gigabit network ports through the original 25-pin connector. USB is a serial bus, so breaking out two USB ports via the pins one of the old serial ports makes thematic sense. The second serial port is set up to take a PS/2 mouse instead of the serial mouse you might have used in the 80s. USB-C is still available via an adapter that went into the original expansion slot.
We’ve seen this sort of modding before, of course, on everything from 1980s vintage Mac Classics and LCD-386 portable PCs to 1990s Jellybean iMac G3s, to the internet-famous Hotwheels PC. It’s always sad to see old hardware fail, but arguably these casemods are a lot more usable to their owners than the original hardware could ever be in 2025.
Gigabit network ports |= Gigabyte network ports
Typo fixed, thanks.
hahah i do not respect gutting a laptop and putting a modern ‘mini PC’ in it. but someone must like to click on that, or they wouldn’t put it in so many clickbaits.
but i am hopping mad about doing that to the ports. db-25 parallel port is supposed to be the world’s worse gpio. de-9 serial port is supposed to be the most frustrating serial interface (i think i still have a 1488/1489 pair sitting around), maybe you harvest power off of rts/cts. i believe in ports, man. this thing is against my beliefs.
Wait, do I understand you correctly that you oppose the port repurposing because the modern counterparts are not frustrating enough?
I mean, not a stance I would take, but I respect the conviction.
getting ethernet over some d-sub port is even more frustrating and doesn’t have the function of the old connector. it’s entirely the wrong interface for the function, and the wrong function for the interface
Yeah i’m inclined to agree, the older ports are easier to use as they were.
When I did what “TME Retro” (what’s retro about a NUC?) did with my ALT-286, I kept it pretty much stock in terms of peripherals, but bumped it up to 2x 80C286@25MHz, with an FPGA northbridge that provides 32MB of SDRAM for application use, derived from the fpga286r2 project. So it’s more like a supped up 286 workstation running MINIX and DOS simultaneously.
when the display dies out, i’m going to replace the Palette DAC IC that generates the VGA signal with one capable of LVDS output suitable for driving a modern LCD/OLED.
Good thing your respect doesn’t fund my channel :)