A lot of retrocomputer enthusiasts have a favourite system, to the point of keeping up 40 year old flame wars over which system was “best”. In spite of the serious, boring nature of the PC/AT and its descendants, those early IBMs have a certain style that Compaq and the Clones never quite matched. Somehow, we live in a world where there are people nostalgic for Big Blue. That’s why [AnneBarela] built a miniature IBM PC using an Adafruit Fruit Jam board.
If you haven’t seen it before, the Fruit Jam board is an RP2350 dev board created specifically to make minicomputers, with its two USB host sockets, DVI-out and 3.5mm jack. [Anne] loaded a PC emulator by [Daft-Freak] called PACE-32 that can emulate an IBM compatible PC with an 80386 and up-to 8 MB of RAM on this particular board. The video is VGA, 640×480 — as god intended– piped to a 5″ LCD [Anne] picked up from AliExpress.
That display is mounted inside a replica monitor designed by [giobbino], and is sitting on top of a replica case. Both are available on Thingiverse, though some modification was required to provide proper mounting for the Fruit Jam board. [giobbino] designed it to house a FabGL ESP32 module– which has us wondering, if an RP2350 can be a 386, what level of PC might the ESP32-P4 be capable of? We’ve seen it pretend to be a Quadra, so a 486 should be possible. It wasn’t that long ago that mini builds of this nature required a Raspberry Pi, after all.
Speculation aside, this diminutive IBM build leaves us but with but one question: if you played Links386 on it, would it count as miniature golf?
Fairy sure, than can should be that can.
First I’m fairly sure fairy sure should be fairly sure and then that than should be that.
:-)
Thanks, that was a hard typo to catch– it took me the re-reads to find it even after you pointed it out.
I like! I have a couple of fruit jams to play with. This is a neat application!
Perfect, if it’s with POST-beep sound & mechanical HDD access SFX…
But dues it make a “meep meep” sound when the hard drive is seeking??
Hi, I’m not sure. But I know there are some fine people who do record sounds of old “Fixed-Disk Drives” for preservation purposes (oldschool term for HDDs).
So it’s not too unlikely that such a feature will be added, eventually.
The Amiga people might be interested, too, after all.
Their emulators do simulate the squeaky floppy drive sounds for ages, already.
And there had been HDD support since late 80s on Amiga platform.
HDD drivers can be used since at least TOS 1.04, err, I mean KickStart 1.3! 😅
For a start, the “HDD Clicker” could be wired to drive activity LED.
It’s not exactly same sound, though.
Spin-up, spin-down and actuator movement just can’t be simulated with a relay.
That channel has a fine collection of sounds for comparison, I think.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPKbhl3GPYnZ2dQ9gn_NLCQ
if they can implement an ISA interface that would be greeeeeeeat
I wonder if there is a way to exploit the recent trend of flexible displays by using one to simulate a curved crt…
That’s something to try for sure!
This feels like something that Jim “Trixter” Leonard would either really love or really hate.
“A lot of retrocomputer enthusiasts have a favourite system, to the point of keeping up 40 year old flame wars ”
What a stupid thing to “flame war” about. There are two best retrocomputer systems. There’s the one that takes you back because it’s what you used in your youth. And there is the one that you wished you could be using in your youth. And for different people those will be different systems.
There. Done. “Flame war” settled.
Now let’s talk about why your favorite text editor is all wrong.
And then there is the Third One.
The one you wished you could be using in your youth, and the one you finally, decades later, got hold of, and quickly realized just how clunky and high-maintenance it really is/was, when compared with pretty much anything else. The one that you let go after some hesitation.
Wow, might still have one, that looks like a modified XT with a hard drive, original pc was 2-360 k floppies, and was an 8088 or 8086 processor with 128 then 256 then 512k ram, then the AT came out with a hard drive and a 1.2 floppy and when we would replace any of those (many people were using a twin 10 mb Bernoulli Box as hard drive storage) with a 20 mb hard drive, would say oh, I will NEVER fill that.. I may still have one in our closet in our spare bedroom and it wasn’t that long ago that I threw out alot of 360&1.2 floppy discs as well as 3.5 disks. Recall paying $800 each for my first used one as well as $800 for first 386 machine.