If you’re big into retrocomputing, you probably spend a lot of time chasing parts and machines on online classifieds or through local swap meets. But what if there was a different way to build a classic retro PC? What if you could put one together from bare chips, from the ground up?

[Jeroen Domburg] is no stranger to the pages of Hackaday. You might know him by his alias, [sprite_tm], under which he’s shared many projects, from miniaturizing old hardware to unearthing the secrets of undocumented commercial hardware. Now, he’s turning his considerable skills to figuring out how to build a retro PC in today’s world, and came to Hackaday Europe 2026 to show us all how it’s done.

Game On

[Jeroen’s] goal was simple—to build a powerful retro gaming PC from the ground up. The first thing to decide was which era to target, with [Jeroen] deciding that 1995 seemed the most personally relevant to his interests. This was the peak of the MS-DOS gaming era, before things like DirectX came in and the culture shifted to Windows gaming and the domination of 3D over all else.

What does a good 1995 machine look like? It was probably rocking a 486, or maybe a Pentium, with somewhere between 8-16 MB of RAM. You had a simple video card primarily built for 2D graphics, and a sound card that was probably some variant of Sound Blaster or other. [Jeroen] wanted to build such a machine with as much real silicon as possible, rather than just emulating hardware from this era, and he wanted to do this himself at the component level, rather than just plugging in bits and pieces from eBay. Building a vintage-style PC motherboard from scratch and getting it up and running is a bit of a job, but luckily [Jeroen] has the skills to make it possible.

While [Jeroen] was looking to the past, he also wanted to take advantage of modern quality of life improvements, mainly by eliminating mechanical parts. Old hard drives and floppy drives from this era are seriously showing their age by now, and becoming particularly unreliable. There are better storage solutions available today that are faster and easier to use. The choice was also made to use modern peripherals, rather than relying on 30-year-old keyboards and mice.

The core of the build was an AMD Elan SC520, running at 133 MHz. This was one of the so-called “586” chips that were spawned following the 486 era, in [Jeroen’s] words, being a “486 but a bit souped up.” This chip came out in 2000, a full six years after Intel curtailed 486 production, a time when the Pentium III was already hitting 1 GHz clock speeds. It’s an anachronistic choice for a 1995 machine, but [Jeroen] picked it for good reason. The Elan SC520 was more of a system-on-chip, integrating lots of supporting low-level hardware onto the CPU itself, like the real-time clock and programmable interval timer (PIT), which would make his build easier. [Jeroen] threw this on a board with an FPGA and an ESP32 and a smattering of support components, and got a general purpose machine up together in a tiny form factor. If you’re thinking of a Raspberry Pi built with a knockoff 486, you’re not far off the money.

This first build had some issues that caused a lot of stress. Namely, the Elan SC520 was a large BGA, and it was difficult to verify if it was perfectly soldered or not. This meant that as [Jeroen] worked on the board and spun up the supporting FPGA and such, it was very difficult to know if things weren’t working because of his own code or because of a missing solder ball or a short. This led him to return to the drawing board.

The second attempt involved a regular CPU rather than the difficult-to-wrangle AMD system-on-chip. Namely, a classic i486 DX4-100 and AM486DX5-133 were sourced as potential CPU options. A C&T F65545 VGA chip was enlisted to handle graphical duties, being a laptop chipset that integrated lots of necessary support hardware into the one package. The plan was to throw just about everything else into an ECP5 LFE5UM-45 FPGA chipset, plus an ESP32-S3 to act as a peripheral interface. [Jeroen] decided to use SDRAM, which was much newer than that typically used with a 486, but this was chosen for being easy to integrate with the FPGA. With a goal to just get to a DOS prompt, [Jeroen] eliminated as much extraneous hardware as possible to get the project moving forward quickly. After spinning up a PCB, learning all about what it takes to bring up a 486-based machine, and working up the FPGA-based chipset, things all came together. A bit of cribbing from MiSTer projects helped, too. [Jeroen] eventually had his new old machine displaying a basic BIOS, then running some benchmarks, and then even running games like Commander Keen. The talk goes on to explain all the other little bits and pieces that come together, like storage, MIDI support, sound, and networking. Seeing it then turned into a portable game station named the Vapourdeck is just the icing on the cake.

If you just want to play some retro games, your quickest route will still be emulation or just purchasing components to build a 90s spec machine. If you want to really learn what makes a classic 486-era machine work, though, it’s hard to beat this approach. [Jeroen] even notes that taking a similar approach to his could let you build something up to the 500 MHz range or so, based on the chipsets and CPUs available from way back when. If you want to learn more or pursue this yourself, it’s well worth poring over the talk and checking out the project files online. Happy hacking.